Can't keep doing the same thing

As we prepare to welcome the time of the dark lord (pictured*) this weekend, it's time for the highly compensated political professionals who run the Democratic Party... and who failed miserably in 2016... to start figuring out how to do better.  There isn't a whole lot of cause for optimism.

The DNC apparatus runs on money.  Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.  But the people who have been in charge of raising that money only know how to get it by cozying up to banks, and tech billionaires and multinational corporations which in turn become the source of the corruption which most people see as Exhibit A in the case of "Why Dems Lose Elections."  The problem is that the people in charge would very much like to remain in charge. But the party can't make the kind of transformation it needs to make unless they are relieved of duty. 

Okay so you've got your pitchfork and your torch and you are ready to go round up some #HillaryMen. The problem, then, is what next? Unless you replace the Democratic Party establishment, you can't repeal the Democratic Party establishment. The object is to find new ways of doing stuff or else the default machinery just keeps chugging right along. As with most things, this is easier said than done.

American Poli Sci 101 theory holds that the parties go through cycles of emphasis; that they can either choose to be the Presidential Party or the Congressional Party. It often works out this way... our constitutional structure all but invites it to, actually.. but I don't think it necessarily has to be like this. In any case, I would argue that the GOP has been the "stronger" party in terms of raw policy influence in recent decades even during the years when Democrats have held the White House.

This week, PBS Frontline ran a pretty okay four hour retrospective of the Obama years. I have quibbles with some of the points of emphasis and interpretations of events.  But it does a fair job of documenting the political (ugh) narrative of this Presidency. The film doesn't set out to make this point as explicitly as it should but the Obama years should serve as an object lesson in how to run an effective opposition. The pattern worked as follows:  1) Republicans stake out an unreasonable, obstructionist position. 2) Obama rushes to meet them halfway 3) This not only fails to satisfy them but they go on shouting and screaming that he won't meet them all the way because socialist/Muslim/Kenya.. yargle bargle and so on.  4) The press shakes its head at all the "polarization" because both sides. The Republicans more or less control the agenda in this fashion. This was all obvious and many of us identified it at the very beginning.

While that went on unchecked, Republicans used the perception of powerlessness as a rallying cry at election time to build strength in the Congress and in state houses across the country. Meanwhile the Democrats' sole focus on the Presidency only exacerbated their failures everywhere else. The party was built to raise money from big donors to run big Presidential campaigns every four years with money trickled out strategically to select "winnable" districts elsewhere. Over time such districts became fewer and fewer.

So it takes more than just winning Presidential elections in order to make a real difference.   Keith Ellison, currently bidding to chair the DNC, understands that. Or, at least, he says he does.

I think the reason that we've had those losses is because the DNC is viewed more as a presidential campaign apparatus rather than a program or an agency designed to get Democrats elected up and down the ballot all the time. The DNC really should be the instrument for the rank-and-file Democrat all over the country — in Idaho, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Florida. But we treat it like it's not the Democratic National Committee; we treat it like it's the Democratic Presidential National Committee. Because of that, we have not really had the outreach and the door knocking and the engagement year-round that we need to have. That's too bad. 

The thing is that before 2008, we had the 50-state strategy, and that is in fact still pretty popular among DNC members. As you notice, we did pretty well in 2006; we did pretty well in 2008. I think that's because we still had enough connectivity in place from that 50-state strategy, but as time wore on, the tremendous popularity of Barack Obama, his amazing rhetorical skills, his just unparalleled ability to explain things and to inspire people really is the fuel that we lived on. Because of that, we lost a lot.

Good luck to him. The so-called Hillary Wing is already circling the wagons. 

Third Way is joining a crowded field of Democratic organizations which are redefining themselves in reaction to the upending results of the November election and trying to map out a path forward. Many outside groups that backed Hillary Clinton during the campaign are now vying to become the nerve center of the anti-Trump opposition in Washington, D.C., ready to fight him on everything from Cabinet nominations to key legislative battles like the upcoming showdown over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

The liberal, non-profit Center for American Progress, led by Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden, has reorganized itself with the mission of resisting Trump’s legislative efforts. Clinton defender David Brock is also relaunching his super PAC, American Bridge, to act as a watchdog group monitoring Trump. And the super PAC that spent close to $200 million to support Clinton’s presidential bid, Priorities USA, is also rebranding itself as an opposition group to the president-elect, with the longer term goal of bringing voters back to the party.

Naturally, their "rebranding" strategy involves moving the party even further to the right. 

Part of the economic message the group is driving -- which is in line with its centrist ideology -- is to steer the Democratic Party away from being led into a populist lurch to the left by leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“Populism is inherently anti-government,” Cowan said. “That works if you’re a right-wing conservative, like Donald Trump. That doesn’t work if you’re the party of government." He added: "You can’t meet right-wing populism effectively as a matter of politics or governing with big government liberal populism, or 1990s centrism. You have to do something entirely new for a new era.”

Did any of that make sense to you?  No, me neither. "Populism" = "anti-government" so you can't do "big government populism." This is what marketing ghouls who care nothing about people's actual problems sound like. They're definitely going to "do something entirely new for a new era," though, these same people who have been running things forever.

So far the "something new" is an amazingly new level of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand these wealthy bundlers are branding themselves as a #Resistance to an administration they have labeled illegitimate and traitorous. (I'm open to that rhetoric, by the way. But not on the unsubstantiated conspiracy grounds they are currently pushing.) On the other hand they are fighting tooth and nail to defend the very ideology the incoming right wing government is animated by. In other words, they are allowing their own cynical ambition to snuff out whatever meaningful "resistance" their slogan purports to offer.

The worst thing about all of this is it's very likely the conservatives are going to win and the Tandens and Brocks of the world will continue to run whatever is left of the Democratic Party machine as long as it pulls in enough money.  As far as they're concerned, that's Mission Accomplished. They're the pros. They can do this forever. The rest of us can't go on doing the same thing, though.  It's costing us too much.

So the outlook isn't good but the best advice I can offer Democrats, if they want any, is this. Protest everything (GOP is about to make that difficult for you), obstruct whatever you can (difficult with no control of any branch of government), and dump your corporate faction as soon as you can. That last bit might actually be the easiest one, all things considered.  Today is a good time to get started.

*Actually the monster in the photo is David Simon encountered on Mardi Gras Day 2016.  Turns out you never know who you're #Standing with at the parade.

World's greatest democracy

Watch it work.

We know the Electoral College is deeply undemocratic. Presidential electors are allocated by adding the two senators to the number of representatives each state gets. Thus the smallest states have proportionally more power in electing the president than the large ones. In 2016 Donald Trump won 66 electoral votes from 14 small states, with a total population of about 26,300,000. Hillary Clinton won 55 electoral votes from California, with a population of 37,254,000. The math is clear. Twenty-six million people substantially outvoted thirty-seven million people. Something is clearly wrong.

How did we get such an insane, undemocratic system for choosing our president? The answer, oddly enough is because of slavery. The system was explicitly designed to protect slavery.

We don't have slavery anymore... unless you count the prison labor.. or the H-2  visas... or the growing "gig economy" phenomenon... or.. .well, okay we don't nominally have slavery anymore. But we do retain certain relics of it which happen to distort our World's Greatest Democracy from time to time.  Still working out the kinks on that.  

On the precipice

Of all the insults inflicted on us by this year in politics, Senator John Neely Kennedy might be the worst.

NEW ORLEANS - Republican John Kennedy is comfortably ahead of Democratic candidate Foster Campbell in the U.S. Senate runoff that will be decided Saturday, according to a poll recently conducted by the University of New Orleans.

The poll, conducted by surveying 776 registered Louisiana voters, showed Kennedy being favored by 62 percent of the respondents, to just 33 percent for Campbell. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.

On the other hand, it's the UNO poll so... 

Maybe Kennedy is really worried

They're sending Trump in to stump.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump plans to head to Louisiana to campaign Friday for Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy, a GOP leader said.

“Donald Trump will be coming to Louisiana the day before the runoff," Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Tuesday. “We’re going to try real hard to win."

Trump’s trip would come on the heels of last Saturday’s visit by Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Wicker. Wicker plans to return again for Saturday's runoff.

That's Pence last week and Trump this week all to win a seat in a state everyone agrees is decidedly red.  What are they so concerned about? You'd think the national Democrats would be trying as hard to salvage this win but we've heard nary a peep.  Must be too busy blaming The Left for 2016. 

Find something new or keep falling for this con

Joke's on us, America.  Because, surely, none among us could have predicted.....

WASHINGTON — Steven Terner Mnuchin, a financier with deep roots on Wall Street and in Hollywood but no government experience, is expected to be named Donald J. Trump’s Treasury secretary as soon as Wednesday, people close to the transition say.

Mr. Mnuchin, 53, was the national finance chairman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. He began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he became a partner, before creating his own hedge fund, moving to the West Coast and entering the first rank of movie financiers by bankrolling hits like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar.”

As Treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin would play an important role in shaping the administration’s economic policies, including a package of promised tax cuts, increased spending on infrastructure and changes in the terms of foreign trade. He could also help lead any effort to roll back President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and opening to Cuba by reimposing sanctions on Tehran and Havana.

His selection fits uneasily with much of Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric attacking the financial industry. Mr. Trump, in a campaign ad intended as a closing argument, portrayed the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as the personification of a global elite that the ad said had “robbed our working class.”

"Fits uneasily" with the rhetoric, but not so much with the parade of billionaires and oligarchs Trump has named to cabinet positions in recent days. But Donald Trump is a con man whose entire campaign was one long... and pretty transparent con.

Nevertheless, it is a con that worked.  Did it work, because Trump was able to stir up a tornado of resentment through a stream of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric?  Absolutely.  Would any of that have been effective, though, if his opponent had not also been certain to install a government of (slightly woke) oligarchs and billionaires?  We never got to find out.  And, unfortunately, the Democratic Party is not going to learn a damn thing from the experience. Here's Tom Frank on that.

And here we are again. Today Democrats are wondering what went wrong, but before too many fundraising dinners have been digested they will have concluded they don’t need to worry, that demographics will bail them out sooner or later, and that the right and noble course of action is to proceed as before.

This will happen because what leading liberals cannot understand – what they are psychologically blocked from understanding – is that the problem isn’t really the white working class. The problem is them.

Let me explain what I mean by reminding you what this form of liberalism looks like. Somewhere in a sunny corner of the country, either right now or very shortly, a group of tech tycoons or well-meaning private equity investors will meet to discuss what went wrong in this election cycle.

They will consider many things: the sexism and racism of Trump voters, the fundamental foreignness of the flyover, the problems one encounters when dealing with evangelicals. They will celebrate some activist they learned about from NPR, they will enjoy some certified artisanal cuisine, they will hand out prizes to the same people that got prizes at the last event they attended, and they will go back to their comfortable rooms at the resort and sleep ever so soundly.

These people think they know what liberalism includes and what it doesn’t include. And in the latter category fall the concerns that made up the heart and soul of liberal politics a few decades ago: labor and work and exploitation and economic equality.

What portion of Hillary Clinton's campaign message addressed economic equality was largely cribbed in watered down fashion from issues that made up the core of Bernie Sanders's message. Instead of free college tuition, she offered loan forgiveness for "entrepreneurs" Instead of a $15 minimum wage, she offered $12... maybe... depending on whether or not individual state governments (largely Republican controlled, btw) got on board. Instead of holding corporate tax evaders accountable she offered them a "repatriation" plan that rewarded bad behavior with huge tax breaks. (More on that in a minute.)

But mostly she kept these issues in the background. Instead, her campaign emphasized Trump's many personal failings in the hope of perhaps shaming enough suburban well-to-do Republicans away from him. Here's Matt Karp on that.

Faced with a Republican opponent who openly touted his affinity for “the poorly educated,” Team Clinton focused on courting white voters at the opposite end of the class pyramid. Trump’s vulgarity and chauvinism, they hoped, would drive wealthy Republican moderates toward Clinton. Rather than aggressively contest Trump’s bogus populism, Democratic strategists concentrated on “moderate” suburban Republicans — the ideological cousins, and often the literal neighbors, of professional-class Democrats.

“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats [Trump] picks up,” former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell predicted in February, “he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that.”

Electorally, of course, this strategy proved catastrophic. In the Midwestern swing states, Clinton hemorrhaged white “blue-collar Democrats” without winning nearly enough “moderate Republicans” to compensate.

The most embarrassing fact of this election will forever be Hillary Clinton's failure to defeat a candidate as personally repulsive and as obviously full of shit as Donald Trump. If the Democrats had run a candidate capable of attacking the hypocrisy of the billionaire Trump's flimsy claim to status as a working class hero they should have walked all over him.  Instead they ran Hillary Clinton and the con man Trump is selling candlelight dinners to million dollar donors who fund his inaugural.

But before he does that, Trump has a campaign promise to keep to the people Hillary's neglect turned off whether they held their noses and voted for her or not. 

Mr. Presley, the 59-year-old white Crawfordsville steelworker who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and Mr. Trump in 2016, was even more emphatic that racial resentment or ethnic bigotry was not behind his support for Mr. Trump. “I grew up on the West Side of Indianapolis in a racist environment,” he said. “But I went to a high school that was 57 percent black, and I played football with a lot of black guys and we became close friends. I learned not to be racist.”

Instead of bias, what animates these voters, whatever their race or political orientation, is a profound distrust and resentment of wealthier, educated Americans, a group they say lacks a connection to them and does not care about their economic situation. And to them, Mrs. Clinton seemed at least as elite as Mr. Trump, if not more so.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for him, but both candidates are evil,” said Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins, who reluctantly voted for Mrs. Clinton, but has never forgiven her for her remarks about “superpredators” in the 1990s, or the mandatory prison sentencing guidelines Mr. Clinton signed into law as president

“Hillary hasn’t sweated a day in her life, unless it was losing a tough case as a lawyer,” Mr. Maynard said. “We wanted to take America in a different direction. I’m just hoping Trump will do what he says.”

In this case, he said he would stop Carrier from shutting down a manufacturing plant in Indiana and moving its operation to Mexico.  In his campaign speeches he also implied that he would prevent any company from following suit by threatening them with severe (though never elaborately specified) penalties. In the Carrier case, though, Trump promised to get personally involved. And so he has.

INDIANAPOLIS — The long-promised call from Donald J. Trump to the heating and cooling giant Carrier came early one morning about a week after the election, when he unexpectedly won the industrial heartland.

The president-elect warned Gregory Hayes, the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies, that he had to find a way to save a substantial share of the jobs it had vowed to move to Mexico, or he would face the wrath of the incoming administration.

On Thursday, as he toured the factory floor here to take credit for saving roughly half of the 2,000 jobs Indiana stood to lose, Mr. Trump sent a message to other businesses as well that he intended to follow through on his pledges to impose stiff tariffs on imports from companies that move production overseas and ship their products back to the United States.

“This is the way it’s going to be,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times. “Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers also.”

Wow that is some might tough talk.   But, remember, this is the same guy who just appointed Steven Mnuchin to head the Treasury Department. What, exactly, did Trump and Hayes come to an understanding over? It can't really be "that we have to take care of our workers."  A thousand of them are about to be laid off.

Despite the cheers Mr. Trump received as he walked around the factory floor, where the lines continued to run and he had to shout at times to be heard, another 1,000 workers for the company in Indiana will be losing their jobs.

This includes 700 at a United Technologies factory in nearby Huntington, as well as several hundred here. The 800 or so jobs that are being preserved are mostly on the lines that build medium- and high-efficiency gas furnaces.

Not long after Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence departed for the airport and to another rally in Ohio to celebrate his victory, workers coming in for the night shift received a letter titled “Company Update on Indianapolis Operations.”

“While this announcement is good news for many, we recognize it is not good news for everyone,” the letter stated. “We are moving forward with previously announced plans to relocate the fan coil manufacturing lines, with the expected completion by the end of 2017.”

Probably the $7 million in Indiana "incentives" in the form of tax breaks had something to do with it. This plus the promise of future giveaways and lax regulatory oversight from a corporate-friendly Trump Administration... and, of course, the opportunity to be a part of this PR stunt has Carrier and United Technologies feeling pretty good about their decision to threaten to move.  This isn't unlike what NFL franchises do to cities from time to time. Trump should have built Carrier a stadium.


Here's Bernie Sanders on that.

In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

It should. If only they had been offered a better option during the election they might have taken it. But if Hillary Clinton represented something even slightly better than the con being run on them now, she certainly wasn't trying to convince them of it.  In fact, she was selling her own program of corporate giveaways. Remember that tax repatriation plan we mentioned?  Here's what that does.

American multinational corporations are currently stashing a staggering $2.4 trillion in profits — about 14 percent of the size of the entire U.S. economy — overseas. Multinationals are required by U.S. law to pay the statutory 35 percent tax on profits they earn anywhere on earth, but the tax is not assessed until the profits are brought back to the U.S.

This has allowed Corporate America to essentially hold U.S. tax revenue hostage, refusing to pay its taxes until Americans become so desperate that they will cut a deal giving multinationals a special new tax rate.

This strategy has already paid off once, in 2004, when multinationals got Congress to let them bring back $312 billion in profits at a one-time rate of about 5 percent. The legislation required that the cash be used to hire Americans or conduct research and development. Corporations ignored these provisions and instead used the money to enrich their executives and stockholders, while cutting U.S. jobs.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton clearly envision cutting a similar deal during a Hillary Clinton presidency, although presumably they intend for the corporations to keep their part of the bargain this time.

"Their end of the bargain this time," was supposed to have been investment in an infrastructure bank which... assuming the money was ever collected... could eventually... depending on the form such a bank would take.. possibly lead to better roads, bridges, sewers, etc... and very likely some connected finance types getting rich in the process but that's Clintonism for you.

Anyway, if you are running the Hillary Clinton campaign, it is your job to draw the very easy (although maybe not exactly honest) line from this idea to "Jobs for working class people!" But the Clinton people never managed to sell their corporate tax  giveaway the way the Trump people sold and continue to sell theirs. And this is why they lost the rust belt. That and too many voters were turned off completely by the fact that they are ruled by billionaires and oligarchs either way. 

And while it's fine to point out that we're worse off under the gang of billionaires and oligarchs who are about to let Paul Ryan replace Medicare with gym membership coupons, looking down the road, it's important to understand that both are unacceptable and we need to find something new in our politics. Otherwise we're going to see new versions of this same con over and over.

What do we do now?

Matt Taibbi interviews Bernie Sanders in the new Rolling Stone. They talk about a lot of stuff but Bernie's most crucial message here is about doing politics in a way that connects with rather than manipulates people. What that means first and foremost is talking to voters instead of to donors.

President Obama talked after the election about winning Iowa by going into counties even if the demographics didn't "dictate" success there. This seemed to be a criticism that the party had decided to ignore big parts of the country.

I talked about that in the book. That's exactly what we did. We had 101 rallies in that small state. That's grassroots democracy. You speak to three-quarters of the people who end up voting for you. In New Hampshire, we had just a zillion meetings – far more people came out to our meetings. If you had the time to do that around the country, the world becomes different. The assessment has got to be that not only did we lose the White House to the least-popular candidate in perhaps the history of America, certainly in modern history, but we've lost the Senate, we've lost the House, we've lost two-thirds of the governors' chairs in this country. We've lost 900 seats in state legislatures throughout the country in the last eight years. Maybe it might be time to reassess?

Is there any way to read that except as a massive repudiation of Democrats?

No. I can't see how any objective person can. It speaks to what I just mentioned; we cannot spend our entire life – I didn't, but others do – raising money from wealthy people, listening to their needs. We've got to be out in union halls, we've got to be out in veterans' halls, and we've got to be talking to working people, and we've got to stand up and fight for them.

Go outside. Talk to people. Stop relying on corporate media infrastructure and Big Data to deliver a finely tailored message to a neatly carved out set of demographic cohorts. Do something real. Or, if you are Donald Trump, at least appear to do that which is the next best thing.

With Trump, was there a moment during the past year when you went from thinking "This is a joke" to "This is real!" Or did you realize right away that it was serious?

I didn't realize right away. I didn't know much about him. What I believed and he believed is that the central part of your campaign should be rallies. Why is that? Because it's not only the ability to communicate with large numbers of people and get media attention as a result of that, but when 20,000 people sit in an arena or stadium and they look around and they say, "We're all on the same team together," that creates a kind of energy.

He understood that. When I started seeing him bring these large turnouts of working-class people, I knew that that was real, you know? What politics passes for now is somebody goes on Meet the Press and they do well: "Oh, this guy is brilliant, wonderful." No one cares about Meet the Press. But that you can go out and bring out many, many thousands of people who are supporting your campaign – that is real stuff. When I began to see that, I said, "This guy is a real candidate." Who could do it? Jeb Bush couldn't do that. Marco Rubio couldn't do it. [Trump] was clearly striking a nerve and a chord that other candidates weren't.

So did you, though.

That is absolutely right. Surely did.

What is going on in your neighborhood?  What is going on in your city?  Are your concerns being met?  Are your problems being addressed?  If the answer is no, then what can you do about it?

Sharika Evans grew up working in fast food. But, she said, the minimum wages she's received — at $7.25 an hour — are not enough to support a family, her health care, utilities and her bills, Evans said she was fired from the McDonald's on Canal Street following a Fight For $15 protest at the restaurant earlier this year. She held the doors open to protesters.

Around 5 p.m. Nov. 29, more than 100 service workers and supporters marched, with a brass band, from Armstrong Park on Rampart Street to Canal Street near the McDonald's between Royal and Bourbon streets. Protesters blocked car and streetcar traffic in all directions for nearly an hour and linked arms, demanding $15 an hour and the ability to unionize. Six people sitting at the intersection were arrested but released with citations for obstructing street traffic.

"The pay we get doesn't reflect the work we put into it," Evans told Gambit.

Wanda, a Walmart employee, told a growing crowd at Armstrong Park that "people shouldn't have to be poor so other people can be rich."

Co-organized by Service Employees International Union, a national Fight For $15 movement launched in 2012 as dozens of fast food workers staged walk outs across New York City, and actions have spread throughout the U.S., with large protests and rallies (and arrests) on Nov. 29. The movement made significant strides helping service workers in hospitals and schools earn higher wages through collective bargaining. But in 2016, following the election of president-elect Donald Trump, the Fight For $15 prepares for the undoing of labor agreements that would likely prevent fast food workers from organizing.

Maybe that's an uphill battle. But it always is. And maybe the eventual result is ultimately as uninspiring as Atrios describes here.  I think it probably is.  But what else is there to do?  

What will your candidate do for us?

We hear so much about "voter apathy" and the need for people to recognize that elections have consequences in their actual lives. But too often we only hear about this in the form of tsk-tsk lecturing after the fact of another disappointing turnout. If your campaign isn't spending its time and energy telling voters what it will do for them, though, you shouldn't be surprised if they don't bother.

MILWAUKEE — Four barbers and a firefighter were pondering their future under a Trump presidency at the Upper Cutz barbershop last week.

“We got to figure this out,” said Cedric Fleming, one of the barbers. “We got a gangster in the chair now,” he said, referring to President-elect Donald J. Trump

They admitted that they could not complain too much: Only two of them had voted. But there were no regrets.

“I don’t feel bad,” Mr. Fleming said, trimming a mustache. “Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”

As Democrats pick through the wreckage of the campaign, one lesson is clear: The election was notable as much for the people who did not show up, as for those who did. Nationally, about half of registered voters did not cast ballots.

Even when you think the choice is or should be obvious. Even when it is obvious to people who think the other guy is "a gangster" or a deplorable or whatever, they aren't necessarily going to come out and vote for you unless you tell them what you are going to do for them.  People have concerns.  Your campaign ought to address them.

Mr. Fleming, 47, who has been trimming hair, beards and mustaches for 30 years, had hoped his small business would get easier to run. But it hasn’t.

“Give us loans, or a 401(k),” he said, trimming the mustache of Steve Stricklin, a firefighter from the neighborhood. His biggest issue was health insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years ago and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally found one, which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.

“Ain’t none of this been working,” he said. He did not vote.

 None of these people expect Donald Trump to solve their problems. But the Clinton campaign's theme was "America Is Already Great."  That probably didn't speak to these voters either. 

Maybe we'll get lucky and Trump will lock up David Brooks

See, the thing is, whether you are for racism or against racism, the important thing to keep in mind is "both sides do it."

But it’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too. To raise money and mobilize people, advocates play up ethnic categories to an extreme degree. 

David Brooks is writing this the very same week that Trump is introducing us to a National Security Adviser who says "fear of Muslims is rational," an Attorney General who once referred to the NAACP and SCLC as "un-Amercian" and a CIA Director who believes every prominent Islamic leader in America is "potentially complicit" in acts of terrorism.   But, whoah, hey, David Brooks finds it unseemly that anyone would "mobilize people" to fight this stuff.

And so we're all set to turn the ratchet one more time. Far be it for me to minimalize the crisis here  with a bit of context. Unlike Brooks, I am horrified by the situation we find ourselves in. But it's worth thinking about how Trump is less an aberration than part of the longer continuum we've seen throughout the last half century.

Reagan was the first postmodern president; it was under his administration that all depth metaphors finally collapsed, and image and reality first became politically indistinguishable. In other words, he was a moron, brainless and bellicose, something barely sentient. He was fond of telling people—Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, for instance, or Simon Weisenthal—that he had personally been among the first group of U.S. soldiers to enter Buchenwald. He had not: he spent the war in Culver City, processing footage from the camps as part of the USAAF’s First motion Picture Unit. It didn’t matter; even the Holocaust couldn’t resist being blanketed in mediation. Giving testimony during the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan read out the stage directions instructing him to lie, picking up his flash cards and announcing that “if the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

When he first entered the White House, Reagan’s advisers presented him with lengthy policy documents. He simply couldn’t understand them, so they started getting him to make decisions (including the decision to procure new intercontinental ballistic missiles) by showing him four-panel cartoons. And it all made perfect sense. In a society where the President is experienced most often as a character on TV, why shouldn’t he be played by a TV personality? There are differences: Reagan was an actor, whose job was to read his lines, while Trump comes out of reality programs—he expects to improvise, and trusts that the editors will snip and splice everything together so that he comes out in the best possible light. The format changes, but the show’s the same.

This is not to say that everything will be fine. That’s another line that liberals are now taking to console themselves: yes, we raised a lot of panic during the election, but there was a similar panic back in 1980, and it wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe Trump will surprise us, maybe he’ll be like Reagan, maybe it’ll be okay. Except that for many people it wasn’t okay, and the world really did end.

You might recall the Democratic Convention this year was littered with Reagan hagiography in a calculated (and we now know failed) attempt by the Clinton campaign to appeal to suburban Republican voters. That's where we were in 2016.  Yesterday's unthinkable monster is today's paragon of nostalgic virtue. It's a familiar script to anyone who has been paying attention.


The pattern is this. A radical authoritarian Republican regime pushes the old "Overton window" rightward. A succeeding Democrat "reaches across the aisle" to adopt what we used to think of as "moderate" positions and that gets redefined as the leftmost boundary. Then the next Republican is even more radically right wing and the cycle continues.


All the while the mainstream political press adopts and "normalizes" the new reality. Which is why David Brooks is here to tell us all that the real problem with white supremacists ascending to the highest offices in the land is that your indignant reaction might upset the fragility of  The Discourse.

Sucks that this finally got as far as actual fascism but what are you gonna do? Reacting, or I guess, caring at all would be "not a good look."

Post-mortems

Naomi Klein: "Trump Defeated Clinton, Not Women" 

Here is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers.

In this version, it’s all about sexism. And that is the surest way to ensure that the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2016 mistakes will be repeated — only next time, with a man at the top of the ticket.

Why is Jed Horne normalizing the fascists?

LOL "middle of the road"

Defying the gutless GOP brass was one thing. To actually govern, Trump seems to realize that he’s going to have to yield to middle-of-the-road advisers (including Mike Pence, Reince Priebus and his own seemingly sensible children). Maybe start talking truth, even to himself. Maybe wean himself from Twitter. Snits and rages could unhinge him and upend the planet.

Also the "seemingly sensible children."  Both sides-ism is a deeply ingrained tic with some of these people. Even when they think they're taking a Very Serious stand against the bad guys, they just can't help themselves. 

Post-mortems

The editors of Jacobin write that Democratic party elites who have spent a week punching down and left in order to soothe their own anxiety are engaging in "the opposite of politics."

There are two ways to respond to this situation. One is to blame the people of the United States. The other is to blame the elite of the country.

In the coming days and weeks, many pundits will be doing the former. Frightened liberals have already written explainers on how to move to Canada; last night, the Canadian immigration website went down after a surge of traffic. The people who brought us to this precipice are now planning their escape.

But blaming the American public for Trump’s victory only deepens the elitism that rallied his voters in the first place. It’s unquestionable that racism and sexism played a crucial role in Trump’s rise. And it’s horrifying to contemplate the ways that his triumph will serve to strengthen the cruelest and most bigoted forces in American society.

Still, a response to Trump that begins and ends with horror is not a political response — it is a form of paralysis, a politics of hiding under the bed. And a response to American bigotry that begins and ends with moral denunciation is not a politics at all — it is the opposite of politics. It is surrender.

To believe that Trump’s appeal was entirely based on ethnic nationalism is to believe that a near majority of Americans are driven only by hate and a shared desire for a white supremacist political program.

We don’t believe that. And the facts don’t bear it out.

Post-mortems: "We don't have time.."

This one is actually more of a sociological case study by Gary Younge. It's the tenth of a ten part series filed for The Guardian from and about Muncie, Indiana.  The entire series is great. Read the whole thing if you get some time.  This one is fine to start with for our purposes because it wraps up the election. Younge notes that what has been described elsewhere as a Trump "surge" implying some decisive expression of the voters' anger/racism/xenophobia whatever, is actually more about their apathy.

The link between economic anxiety and rightwing nationalism can be overdone. The easy narrative of a populist revolt has an appealing simplicity, but Clinton won votes from more than half of the people who earn less than $50,000; the rich voted for Trump. He won the electoral college and lost the popular vote. Thanks to the lowest turnout in 20 years, Trump won a lower percentage of the eligible vote than John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Gerald Ford – and they all lost. He got the same proportion of the white vote as Romney in 2012 and Bush in 2004 and only a little more than McCain in 2008. He may have led the charge to the right but comparatively few marched with him.

Nor is such a link inevitable. In several countries across Europe – from Greece to Britain – a populist left response has emerged to this same crisis. In the US Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who calls himself a democratic socialist, shocked everybody, including himself, by mounting a dynamic insurgent campaign that addressed these very economic issues.

Nonetheless, the link cannot be denied. The case for solidarity requires more effort and empathy than the case for scapegoating. It also flies against the prevailing headwinds of individualism, nationalism and a narrow understanding of self-preservation.

When people are abandoned, hopeless, and disconnected, it's easier for a politician, such as Trump, to use that to his advantage than to lead a movement that seeks to overcome it. Trump's appeal is strictly nihilistic. It expects that voters with no sense of purpose or future will either respond to the little bit of impotent rage you can sell them or (mostly, in fact) disengage from the process altogether.

Younge points out that the Sanders campaign tried the harder approach of motivating people to overcome their isolation and find the solidarity across racial and cultural divisions necessary to work for positive rather than destructive change.

But Trump didn't face Bernie in the runoff. Instead he faced a Clinton campaign whose theme "America is already great" merely reinforced the nihilism that favored Trump.  The campaign's job is to find out what people need help with and then, at least pretend as though, the candidate takes those challenges seriously.  Younge reports that Democrats haven't been selling themselves that way in Muncie.

But the issue was not simply about trade or globalisation: to many voters in Muncie, Clinton looked not only like an integral part of the establishment that had brought them to this place, but like a candidate advocating more of the same. “If you take a step back and look at all America has achieved over the past eight years, it’s remarkable to see how far we’ve come,” Clinton argued. For many of those who already had their backs against the wall, it was hard to see the progress. Trump, on the other hand, offered the near certainty that something would change. “At least he’ll shake things up,” was the phrase that kept coming up. One in five of those who voted for him thought he didn’t have the temperament to be president. For some who had little to lose, he was evidently a risk worth taking.

“The Democrats keep making out like everything is OK,” says Todd Smekens, the publisher of the progressive online magazine Muncie Voice. “And it’s not. Nobody’s buying it.”

I don't like to get too far into the hypothetical "Could Bernie have won?" discussion.  Maybe he could have. It would have been a different race.  But regardless of the candidate, the election certainly called for a different strategy. If Bernie OR Hillary had gone to Muncie, Indiana and other such "Middletowns" telling voters, hello we want to give you guys free health care and send your kids to college tuition-free and tell the banks we bailed out to ease up on your mortgages, that might have reached these people. It might have brought those disconnected non-voters who showed up for Obama back to the polls. It might have even brought some of those "angry white working class" Trump voters we're supposed to hate so much back into the fold. (Not that you'd need very many of them. If the 2008 or 2012 electorate had shown up, that would have been enough to win.)

But Clinton, in keeping with the modern neoliberal tradition, just kept telling people none of their problems were actually problems. Or, when the desperate were acknowledged, they were told to be patient. 

People need something to change. “The [Democratic party says] ‘Let’s just do the things we’ve always done and have incremental change’.” says Dave Ring, who runs the Downtown Farm Stand, an organic food store and deli. “So they’re very, very happy with incremental change. And the rest of the public is out here like: ‘We don’t have time for incremental change.’”

Telling people who are running out of time they need to sit down and wait is not how you win an election like this one. But that's what the Hillary campaign did and that's why they blew it.

Post-mortems

Said I was going to share these periodically. Here is Thomas Frank.

Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

You can explain this as "corruption" or undue influence of money if you want. And that's part of it. But it's also the inertia of the self-contained system of political pros who operate in a separate bidome from ordinary voters. To these consultants, staffers, sometime lobbyists, and think tankers, the whole business is about them and their career path.   The rest of us, if we exist at all, are an obstacle or a problem to be manipulated. As you can see below, Frank is done with it.  A lot of us are. 

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

Post-mortems

I've got a number of worthy ones bookmarked. I think I'll post them one at a time.  The one I found myself nodding yep at the most at was Atrios and his familiar refrain, "Shit is fucked up and bullshit." Which is a problem when nobody in charge of the the shit seems to care.... except, of course the con-man who pretends he does.

As for Clinton, I know what her policy proposals were. I'm not sure anybody else did. The media is horrible and don't talk about policy, but we knew that. I also know that improving the EITC in a complicated fashion and promising free college, but not for all people because that's crazy Bernie talk, but for some people and "debt free" college for all and can you fill out this form please to determine your eligibility* and oh by the way none of this shit will get through Congress anyway so why aren't we promising the moon if we can't deliver the half a moon we are promising. All the Dems are now on board with "expanding" Social Security. This is great! What does it mean? Probably giving more to the blahs and the immigrants and the gays.

Sure all of this is "pundit's fallacy" stuff. But I'm not gazillionaire Tom Friedman telling you that what the people really want is to invade more countries and have better cell service in the subway. I don't actually think all the country wants from our politicians the same things I want. I do know that things are fucked up and bullshit for much of the country. President Trump is going to make everything a whole lot worse, of course, but candidate Trump said he'd fix things. We'll keep the immigrants out. We'll bring back coal jobs. Show me a problem, and I'll fix it. Not set up a plan to adjust the framework to tweak the incentives to modestly change the market outcomes. Just fix it.

The way to win is tell them why they should vote for you. Tell them about the wonderful things you will do for them. And, then, ideally, do those things.  Hillary told people "America is already great" and that national health care would "never ever happen."

Now is not the time to punch the hippies

If you find yourself talking about the need for "unity," stop.

If you find yourself saying there are any circumstances under which you are ready to "work with" the con man, you are already failing.

If you are going through the motions of delivering empty platitudes about healing "the divisions"  you are not helping.

If you are smugly talking down to the outraged kids in the street, please shut the fuck up.

Basically if you are setting up any sort of narrative that involves the notion that anyone should "give the new President a chance" you are a garbage human.  Or at least you are someone comfortable enough to not to have to worry about, say, the end of Medicare.  See also, this entire list.

Now is not the time for "healing."  Don't punch the hippies. Let them fucking march.  If they topple a few confederate monuments along the way, that's all the better.

Welp

Bernie Sanders, August 2015:

“My friends, the Republican Party did not win the midterm election in November: We lost that election,” Mr. Sanders said. “We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home. That’s a fact.”

As the audience sat largely in silence, Mr. Sanders continued: “In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the U.S. House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout.”

While he did not criticize his leading rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, by name, Mr. Sanders argued that “establishment” politicians like her – and like the very Democrats he was speaking to – were uninspiring to voters.

“With all due respect – and I do not mean to insult anyone here – that turnout, that enthusiasm, will not happen with politics as usual,” Mr. Sanders said. “The people of our country understand that given the collapse of the American middle class, and given the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality we are experiencing, we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics.”

We did try to tell them. Repeatedly. 

What do we do now?

The Internet is full of shock and outrage and vocal intent to turn that shock and outrage into action today. I hope it isn't all just talk. Gotta do something besides despair. I don't know what that is. Let's figure it out.

Here's a suggestion from Jonathan Schwarz

4. We don’t need a third party, we just need a party.

When and where are the next Democratic and Republican Party meetings in your neighborhood? You don’t know, because neither the Democrats nor Republicans are political parties in the historical sense. Mostly they just demand we send them money and then yell at us about voting every few years.

While it has almost passed out of Americans’ living memory, parties used to have regular, local meetings where everyone got together, yammered about politics for a while, and then drank beer. Elections were the culmination of what parties did, not the starting point.

A healthy political party would foster community and provide people with concrete things to do between elections. Mike McCurry, one of Bill Clinton’s press secretaries, once suggested that Democrats should turn themselves into a pool of neighborhood volunteers “so that when people are trying to accomplish something, they would say: Call the Democrats, they always have people.”

Or they could get members involved in a local fight for a $15 minimum wage. Or helping women get a safe abortion. Or restoring funding cuts to local colleges. Or whatever members decide. That’s politics.

In return, political parties need to provide concrete benefits to members. If the Republicans are going to murder the Affordable Care Act, the Democrats should be figuring out if they’re a big enough risk pool to provide health insurance.

I realize this is so far out of Americans’ experience that it sounds bizarre. It’s also the case that both party hierarchies would try to block any worthwhile experiments. But if the new organization based on Bernie Sanders’s campaign succeeds, it will probably look something like this.

In the meantime, check out what's going on at Party HQ.

Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one attendee described as “a rip-roaring speech” to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

“Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?” he asked, according to two people in the room. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.”

Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

“You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

You mean they're not gonna lock her up?

But... the con man said... 

Hot Air and Newsmax noted White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest's refusal on Wednesday to discuss the idea of a presidential pardon, but neither site seems to be clamoring to “lock her up.”

On “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning, Rudy Giuliani — who could be the next attorney general — said, “I don't like to see America become a country in which we prosecute people . . . about politics.”

Giuliani wouldn't rule out the idea of continuing Clinton probes, but his post-election rhetoric was a far cry from his proclamation just a few weeks ago that the former secretary of state “should be in jail.”

What was any of it all about?

This will be fun. Let's see how long we can go calling Trump on the most sensational Greatness he promised during the campaign.  Every day someone should ask him how the wall is coming along.  Did Mexico send the check yet? What day are we going to deport everybody? How?

Whoops. Uh oh. They might be serious about that one.

An immigration lightning rod joins Team Trump.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and an ardent opponent of immigration, has been added to Mr. Trump’s transition team, according to local news reports.

Mr. Kobach, who provided guidance on immigration policy to Mr. Trump during the campaign, will help the president-elect in the weeks before he takes office, according to the Wichita Eagle.

He told the paper he did not expect to get an offer to serve in the Trump administration, but just having him in a formal role in the New Washington could send shudders through the nation’s immigrants. Mr. Kobach has been one of the loudest anti-immigration voices in the Republican Party for years. He added Mr. Trump’s call for a border wall along the southern tier into the Republican Party platform over the summer.

Also it's worth noting Obama has deported more immigrants than any previous U.S. President. So we know how to boot people out of the country. America was already great at that. Maybe we should take some of this seriously.

But okay how about these?  Let's ask Trump every day how soon we're going to see that infrastructure plan.  Or better yet when is he going to get around to renegotiating NAFTA? Didn't every news organization decide that, despite no coherent policy anyone could point to, Trump was an "economic populist"?  How is that working out?

A senior person on President-elect Donald Trump's transition team contacted JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon to see if he would be interested in being U.S. Treasury secretary, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

It is unclear how Dimon responded, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Dimon has said multiple times in the past that he is not interested in the job - most recently in September.

JPMorgan spokesman Andrew Gray declined to comment.

CNBC earlier reported that Trump's advisers had discussed the idea of Dimon, 60, becoming Treasury secretary.

Dimon is viewed as a leader on Wall Street and his name has been floated for government positions in the past. On Wednesday, he sent a memo to staff calling for unity in the aftermath of the contentious election.

America chose a con man this year.  All you need to see that is the difference between what it was America said it wanted and what is about to be delivered. 

Despite lots of focus on Donald Trump’s remarks about women and Hillary Clinton’s emails, it appears that the election might again come down to jobs and GDP. According to early exit polls from Edison Research, the economy was the top issue with voters again in 2016. The economy, well, trumped foreign policy, immigration, and terrorism as the leading issue among voters.

Voters were most worried about the economy. Specifically, according to Reuters, "72 percent agree 'the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.'" So in this context, what is Trump's plan to Make America Great Again? 

Tax cuts for rich people.

The second idea is taxing noncorporate business income at a lower rate than other individual income. Currently, both are taxed the same way on the owners’ individual returns. Mr. Brady said his team is working on a “final design.”

The House plan and Mr. Trump’s plan are similar, in that they both lower individual and business tax rates, repeal the estate tax and rely on assumed economic growth to cover part or all of their budgetary costs.

The kicker is relying on the old Laffer Curve to magically make it all "revenue neutral."

Anyway, 2016 wasn't just a desperate, angry election for no reason. It was a desperate, angry election because people angry and desperate.  The con man won because he at least pretended to be angry too. I would offer the hypothesis that a fair number of voters probably understood he was pretending. Donald Trump is not a difficult con man to see through, after all.  But at least he was offering pretense. The other side was offering exactly nothing.

But the hate doesn’t stop there. One of the puzzles we’ll have to think through in the months ahead is why, faced with a populist revolt, the Democratic Party elite decided on Hillary Clinton, the human equivalent of a straight shot of technocracy, no chasers. No figure in American politics has cut a more awkward figure on the national stage since Nixon, and at least his political instincts were not—in the polite phrasing of Clinton apparatchik Neera Tanden—“suboptimal.”

Clinton’s failings as a candidate fit exquisitely with the central weakness of managerial liberalism. In the run-up to Clinton’s shellacking in the New Hampshire primary, her chief strategist asked, “do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” She never found an answer, because she never wanted to. According to her campaign manager Robby Mook, “politics for her is, first and foremost, not an exercise in communicating to the masses. It’s about finding the right solution and then going after it.”

The issue here is twofold. It's bad enough that Clinton not really feel like "communicating to the masses" during the course of her campaign for President. But that solution she was finding in the meantime would probably have also involved Jamie Dimon.  But, hey, at least nobody is coming to "lock her up" now. Nobody ever was. 

Plenty of blame to go around

Get it all out

Everything we knew about politics turned out to be wrong

The most pessimistic thing I wrote about the Presidential election happened right after Hillary selected Tim Kaine for VP. I spent the rest of the campaign convincing myself it couldn't really be that bad. Anyway here's what I said.

All of this, as we said, is textbook Clinton stuff. And they think their stuff applies to this year's electorate as well as it has to any. The expectation this year is, with two unpopular candidates facing off, and with a disappointed liberal base not turning out in huge numbers, the votes in play are the chronic voters among Independents and Republicans who are looking for excuses not to vote for Trump. They might be right about that and their play might work. But it also might not not.

There are two obvious caveats. First, none of the cynical conventional politics that usually work have worked against Trump during the primary. (Everything we knew about politics turned out to be wrong, there.)  I, somewhat hesitantly, don't think that phenomenon will be quite as evident in the general election. But I am worried about a second caveat which is, it's quite possible white conservatives will never vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. If so, that blows the whole thing out of the water.

Turns out that was what happened. It's difficult to conceive of an actual President Trump but if you're wondering how we got here, that is how. That "everything we knew about politics" link, btw, is to Oyster. He had a good eye on what happened with the primary. He usually does.