Why a Well Read Woman with an Earned Doctorate Will Vote for Trump

By Janice Shaw Crouse, AMERICAN THINKER

Pundits, increasingly, are saying that both major party candidates are targeting college-educated white women, but Hillary is ahead in that demographic. Some conservative elites are asking how any intelligent person can vote for Trump. I see those responses as emotional, rather than rational, logical decisions. I’m a white woman with a Ph.D. and I’m voting for Trump because of my experience in D.C., my training in logic, and my appreciation for those who can “get the job done.”

When I first came to D.C. more than 25 years ago, I was moving from a successful academic career into a completely different, political one. Admittedly, my learning curve was steep, but it didn’t take long to see through the bluster to realize that some of the most intimidating, articulate people pontificating at meetings and acting so superior and elitist as colleagues were great on paper, but not very productive or accomplished in reality. Some of the so-called experts spouting impressive data and quoting relevant research sounded good and shut down any dissent, but often, I discovered with a bit of research, they were off the mark and sometimes just plain wrong. They, as the saying goes, are “Often wrong, but never in doubt.”

I began to see that a major problem is the dearth of common sense and realistic goals among those who populate the nation’s halls of power. Idealism and utopianism are no substitute for hard work and measurable accomplishments. Every new administration ushers in reams of new plans, new jargon (in recent years it been all about “data-driven policy making”), deputies and assistant secretaries to the assistant secretaries all of whom have to have associate deputies as well, and more task forces than can be imagined. Not much real progress is made from all those meetings and often there’s significant damage to the public’s actual well-being (Solyndra, for example, or a thousand more pages of regulations added to the Federal Register to protect mud puddles).

I very much appreciate good presentations and great public speaking. I like poised speakers, clear-flowing logic, well-documented facts, good delivery, pleasant expression, eye contact, a well-modulated voice and a polished presentation. I like things done professionally with very high standards of quality. I was, after all, an intercollegiate debater, coached a championship university debate team, studied and taught rhetoric (logical development of ideas, analysis and persuasion through public speaking) and I currently give public speeches many places around the world. My doctoral dissertation was on presidential campaign debates and I’ve professionally critiqued hundreds of debates and speeches. But, I’ve had enough of the lawyer-political types who can talk a good-sounding talk, but can’t get the job done. Washington, D.C. has more than enough empty-rhetoric, political types who continue “failing upward.”

President Obama and Secretary of State/Presidential Candidate Clinton have the lawyer’s ability to give good speeches (though not consistently). A close examination, however, reveals the mess Mrs. Clinton left at the State Department and the news is full of the multiple disasters she has left in her wake since her first job of the Watergate Committee in the 1960s. The litany of national crises precipitated by President Obama fills books and continues to make news headlines. His legacy is a nation worse off than it was 8 years ago by almost every measure.

As Mr. Trump said during the first debate, “They’ve had 30 years!” We should not have to endure another 4 to 8 years of such disaster; I’m not sure we’d recognize America after another Clinton presidency. We should not have to live with leaders who “talk” really well, making glib promises right and left, but can’t “do” what needs to be done. As the cliché goes: “I’m much more appalled by what Hillary has done, than by what Trump has said.”

So, in 2016, I’m voting for common sense.

I am voting for change –– change in the status quo, a reverse in cultural disintegration and family breakdown, ending the practices that lead to national debt, rebuilding the military and support for those values that make a nation strong, including a bully pulpit supporting faith, endorsing freedom and encouraging responsibility and reconciliation, addressing the expansion of government and curbing reckless spending.

I am voting to end the ridiculous ways politically-correct language is changing the way we live, disrupting our universities and making people afraid to speak out about deeply held personal views. I’m tired of “safe places” and “trigger warnings” and all the silliness that political correctness has imposed on US citizens.

I am voting to restore a public square where people who disagree can express their views civilly and be expected to listen carefully while someone else disagrees and elaborates on their different perspective in an equally civil way.

I’m voting for a party platform that contains principles that I believe in and consider very important for national strength. The Democrat Platform contains provisions that I cannot accept –– principles, like abortion-on-demand, that are harmful to individuals and the nation.

I’m voting for someone who I believe will surround himself with people that I respect and whose values I share. I’m voting for a return to considering America’s best interest in international decisions. Yes, the world is increasingly a small place when anyone can fly to its farthest reaches in just a few hours, but it’s time our president respected America and Americans and paid attention to what’s beneficial for our citizens. Personnel is policy and we have had 8 years to see the policy disasters that have come from radical personnel appointments.

I’m voting for lawful immigration with secure borders and a legal process for becoming an American citizen with its rights, privileges and responsibilities. We should not admit more immigrants to the country than can be absorbed by the infrastructure; we should not allow immigrants who have no intention of assimilating into American culture and becoming American.

I’m voting for protection of the Bill of Rights and the provisions of the Constitution – especially the rights of freedom of speech and religious liberty. Mrs. Clinton threatens to confiscate guns and obviously is soft on Islamic Terrorism.

I am voting to protect our right to worship freely and also live out that faith authentically in public. It is a sad time in America when people hesitate to state their beliefs and can see their religious liberties being taken away. I’m tired of judicial tyranny and all its ramifications.
Donald Trump was not my primary candidate, but the election has come down to two possible candidates (a vote for a third party is a wasted vote that undermines the election process). Not voting is, in reality, casting a vote that might be as important as one that actually counts in the tally. I choose to be a responsible citizen and make an informed, carefully-considered vote that expresses my logical analysis of the two potential Presidents and the inevitable consequences of their possible Administrations.

Clearly, to me, Donald Trump offers the best possible chance we have to reverse those things that so obviously have this country on what 75% of us agree is a “wrong track.” Donald Trump is our best hope to “Make America Great Again.”

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., was a Bush 41 Presidential Speechwriter, a Bush 43 appointee as an official US delegate to the UN’s Children’s Summit and the Commission on the Status of Women. She headed a DC Think Tank for 15 years and is an internationally-respected speaker, author of Children at Risk and Marriage Matters (published by Transaction Publishers: The Publisher of Record for International Social Science Research).