Wordslinger wrote:I agree, Bernie would have beaten the Pussy Grabber,
It was most certainly the Democratic Party’s fault, but not because they didn’t select Bernie Sanders.
Because if you think for one minute some aging hippy intellectual, a declared socialist, from one of those liberal New England states would have fared any better in those red areas on the map with his talk of free college and windmills, you haven’t been paying attention. And all those hardcore third party voters who wrote in Bernie or blackened the circle for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson simply gave the Electors that much more margin to throw in with Trump.
Now before you get all pissed off, I’m not blaming Bernie supporters or third party voters for how things turned out and as I have said many times previously, you each have the inalienable right to vote your franchise as your conscience dictates.
And you, like the rest of us now, will now have to live with the consequences of it – though I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that those consequences don’t apply to all equally and some are going to pay horribly more than others.
My point here is this: Third party voters didn’t cost the democrats this election.
No, this race was lost by the political parties.
It was lost by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, both of which looked at that map and saw little squares full of numbers instead of people.
The Republicans ended up with Trump because after 30 years of increasingly strident religion-fueled lunacy, after a full eight years of conspiracy theories and obstructionism and childish histrionics, they were unable to produce anything better. They were hoisted on their own ridiculous petard.
More than anything, Republicans ended up with Trump because they could not compromise, they could not bend their sacred principles.
The Democrats ended up with Trump for the same reason.
Look at that map again.
What do you see?
Walk it back for the last 30 years. The blobs of red and blue move a little bit, growing, shrinking, but the overall values change very little – particularly if you adjust for population growth and migration.
What’s that tell you?
Democrats – liberals and progressives – are just as inflexible and just as lousy at reaching out to the other side as Republicans are.
You and I laugh when the GOP declares with all seriousness that they are reaching out to minorities of color. To women. To the LGBT community. To immigrants. We laugh, and rightly so, because it’s ridiculous.
But if you look at that map, you’ll see Democrats – or third parties – aren’t any better at reaching out to rednecks and evangelicals and all those people who listen to radio stations broadcasting endless sermons of fire and divine wrath, Good Ol’ Country Boys singing about flags and trucks and guns, and endless conspiracy theories of doom and betrayal from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones.
Abortion. Trade. Immigrants. Terrorism. Guns. Jobs. Same sex marriage.
All of these things are aspects of the same division: those who embrace change and those who fear it.
Clinton, as Bernie Sanders supporters are wont to point out, is an establishment candidate. Staid. Pantsuit. Wall Street. More of the same. She should have been able to bridge that divide, to cross over, far far better than some rich billionaire from New York. But for numerous reasons she couldn’t or didn’t – not even to the degree Obama did in 2008 and 2012 (which as it turned out, was just enough). And again, if you think Bernie Sanders, a guy much further left than Clinton, could have done better with the same demographic, you’re just fooling yourself.
Trump shouldn’t have appealed to any of those in the red zones of that map.
I mean, look at that guy. Billionaire. New Yorker real estate developer. Atlantic City and Las Vegas casino owner. Married to a string of super models. Obnoxious. Uncouth. Foulmouthed.
But it was Trump’s bombastic disorganized campaign – and the man himself – which tapped directly into that fear of change at a visceral level.
Make America great again, and to the white people in the red zone, that means churches and deer season and homecoming and fences and Little League games, build a wall and keep America for Americans.
That’s why the pundits and political scientists and the pollsters got it all wrong.
Those people, if you call them up on the phone and ask if they are racists, they’ll say no. Because they don’t think they are. Because to them racism is burning crosses and lynching and they aren’t doing any of that. But they don’t want brown people moving into their neighborhoods, because on TV people with dark skin are thugs and rappers and terrorists and not like them. If you ask if they hate Muslims they’ll say no, but they love Jesus and they hate terrorists and the sons of bitches who blew up the World Trade Center, just like their grandparent hated the Japs and the Krauts. They don’t hate Mexicans, they hate people who take their jobs. They go to a Trump rally and who do they meet? People just like them, people who look just like they do, who own farms and small businesses, who lost their jobs to Mexico and Bangladesh, who are angry that they have to pay taxes to support welfare cheats and moochers, who go to the same kind of church they do and worship the same God. They want America to be great again like it used to be for their grandparents, that golden magical time of the 1950s with jobs and traditional marriages and white picket fences and they don’t want to hear about how that time wasn’t a paradise for everybody.
They don’t want change.
They want it the way it was.
And that’s why Hillary Clinton lost.
http://www.stonekettle.com/2016/11/bug-hunt.html
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