We’re 50 days away. After the election all the pundits will tell you the “big” stories about what drove the voters. Did Hilary recover her health? Did Donald become presidential?
There will be books and analysis for years to come. So I decided to jump the line a little.
No, I’m not writing a book or attempting an article (this month) with insightful predictions. I’m just talking about a little incident that I was a small part of which might have something to do with the larger results.
We’re going to talk about the night Donald met the Haitians. Those of us in the Palm Beach County Republican Party have built wonderful relationships with the Haitian community, for all the right reasons. The Haitians are an immigrant community, not a welfare community. They want upward mobility, jobs, strong families, and better schools.
It’s easy to be their friends. They’re gentle, polite, and asking for no more than the equal opportunities our country and our party profess to stand for. They openly welcome guests and helpers. As I tell my friends: “I have a Chabad rabbi and a Haitian pastor and I can’t understand either service.”
We thought it was important that Donald meet the Haitians. Donald’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, is no more than a ten minute drive to my Pastor’s little church. So working with a very helpful group of Trump staffers we arranged a Trump-Haitian forum in Miami, where they have a neighborhood named “Little Haiti.” The event was scheduled for Friday night Sept. 16. Our party chairman, Michael Barnett was going. I was not.
I saw Michael on Wednesday, Sept. 14 and gave him a present, a lapel pin with both the American and Haitian flags. I said, “Michael, this will be one of the defining moments of your political career. Your mission is to get this pin on Donald Trump’s lapel.”
On the back side I had informed my Trump contact in Washington about this mission and enlisted her support.
Talk about high drama. Political staffers live on stress. That’s why so many of them are so young. You can imagine the tension among them as the moment arrived.
Will Donald accept the pin? Will he put it in his pocket? Will the optics be good or bad?
For staffers this was high risk and a Tums moment.
For volunteers like Michael and myself it was a Nike moment: "Just Do It!"
Michael gave the pin to the Trump staffers who, with a stroke of genius, gave it to a young Haitian boy who presented it to Donald Trump. Donald never missed a beat. He took it and immediately put it on, right below his larger American flag pin. Whew!
The forum was fabulous. Bernard, a former Haitian Senate President who I put in touch with the Trump campaign, detailed the horrible treatment of the Haitians at the hands of the Clintons. Most importantly, Michael took a picture of Donald wearing the pin. He sent it to me and I passed it on to my pastor.
As you read this know that Donald and the pin have been seen by 400 Haitian churches, potentially 200,000 thousand voters.
That brings us to Nov. 8, election night. The count goes into the night as Florida is another nail biter and the country (and maybe all of Western civilization) is on the razor’s edge.
Finally, Florida goes to Trump by about two percent. The pundits are in warp speed explaining how it all happened. And you sit there with this smug look on your face. As Spike Lee might have said: “It had to be the pin.”
Sid Dinerstein is a former chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. He founded JBS Associates, a 600-person financial service company, and currently combines politics and business with Niger Innis in Inclusive Elections LLC, a firm that brings urban electorate voters to the GOP. He is the author of "Adults Only: For Those Who Love Their Country More Than Their Party." For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.