Hilary lost, but maybe out of her loss, she saves the DEM party…..
I have been distraught since Election Day. That night was like a Zombie nightmare. I think I have been physically ill for weeks, with my anxiety level and BP going up every day with some horrific new Trump news. My FaceBooks posts are out of control. My body, my brain just cannot keep up and process it all. But the feckless media, that’s their job. They completely failed us. But they put money into their boss’s pockets. Their jobs are probably secure now. But I was looking at the cover of the latest issue of The Atlantic yesterday, where the remarkable Ta-Nehisi Coates (I am just discovering him) writes about the Obama presidency. But the contents of his article are not the chief reason for my diary today.
It is the cover picture that is startling upon reconsideration. It is a black and white pic of a mob crowd of enthusiastic supporters swamping Obama in glee (maybe some even with ecstasy). Now, I must remind myself that Hilary still got almost 3 million more votes. But she could have gotten another million in California and New York and it would have not changed the outcome. Pouting over the EC is going nowhere. The compact of states to give all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote does have some merit. Once enough states to get to 270 Electoral Votes sign on, this will change the game. But I might be dead by then. With gerrymandering, “cut the heart out of the beast” desecration of the Voting Rights Act, and the preposterous regulation of voters by photography, something the Founding Father never imagined, it is a miracle that any Democrat can wake up any day and be optimistic. I’ll keep the EC, you get rid of the damn discriminatory photo ID.
But under Obama, and with all the incendiary GOP tactics, the Democratic Party has been demolished. Loss of Senate Seats, Loss of House Seats, even more historic Losses in State Houses and political offices across the country. Under Obama, for whatever reason, the Democratic Party has sunk, sunk, sunk. Only in certain geographic pockets do DEMS thrive. California could really leave the Union by boldly refusing to play ball at all with the Feds. They could literally ignore any directive by Trump and his caste of deplorables. Texas et al., has been threatening to do this for years, secede. Why not let California go first and really do it (maybe throwing in Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii for an additional stake in the federal heart)? Iraq may one day be split up (Biden wanted that and he was right), The Soviet Union broke….well no it didn’t, it’s back. But you know what I mean. Borders do change. The unlikely can suddenly be likely. Much of life turns on a dime anyway.
Deplorables. Yes, Hilary said it, probably shouldn’t have, and then had to clean it up afterwards with only “half were deplorable.” Yes, she was being generous then, but Trump said and did far, far worse and rarely ever (no, never) paid any price for it. With all the Monday Morning Quarterbacking going on over the reasons for the Democratic loss, I don’t see enough attention given to the impact of broad misogyny. I hear today that Trump got a majority of the white women’s vote. How can that be? How can the first woman as a major party nominee, forget, White Woman Nominee in our nation’s history, lose the white women’s vote? To Donald J. Trump? How a woman can win the most votes and lose an election in the first place is another story altogether.
But the point of my diary is that the DEMS have sunk so low as a party, maybe the answer to 8 years of Obama, even a loss by a hair, is a period of time when the nation finally might appreciate what Obama did. Or at least a greater percentage would, and that would ensure a win in 2018 and 2020 and so on. Only with the nation suddenly experiencing the ravages and wrath of complete GOP control and governance across the board, will the Jill Stein voters ask for penance, the Gary Johnson (what is Aleppo?) voters hang their heads in shame , and non-voters exposed, pointed out, confronted, and asked “what are you complaining about?”
I am a southerner by birth. I believe in a 50 state strategy. But there are large swaths of the country that are more Alt Right and authoritarian than democratic (small “d”) and we can’t try and convert the clearly unconvertible. Resources can only be spread so thin. The brilliant Hilary Campaign (honestly, I had never even heard of Robby Mook before) put more resources in Arizona than Wisconsin remember. My point is that a percentage of Trump voters actually voted for Obama once or twice. They can be won back. Some others, why bother?
Deep in my soul, my heart is mostly broken at the sudden loss of the Supreme Court for a generation, unless something incredibly unpredictable happens (not impossible, a la Trump). For a moment, I thought my 55 years would finally see a Liberal Court to save us from our misery, inequality, and the ravages of Citizen’s United etc., etc., etc... But Hilary, she never pounded this home. Trump did pound it more. Trump went for the jugular a lot and too often she played “the high road.” But can you imagine John McCain or Obama saying “I will lock you up!” in a debate? Clinton and her campaign were, again, far too cautious. But maybe Trump was so, so preposterous they did not even know how to truly best respond? I voted for her of course, but she did not have the passion, the draw of Obama on the cover of The Atlantic. Yes, I mostly would have liked “more of the same” aka Obama. But there was a side of Obama that played nice with the Republicans for far too long, too long for the sake of the nation, and for the sake of the Party. He may have won twice, but this Party has been eviscerated in that span.
So I propose, possibly after a few years of Trump, maybe two years before DEMS get off their butts and get to the polls in the damn midterms, then maybe we will begin, again, to see the long arc of history Obama often talks about. I have never see the passion of the DEMS as opposition as I see it right now, but it is barely organized, and yes it is only Dec 21. The Tea Partiers never seemed to quit. But I am not sure, until I see more evidence, that the DEMS have the spine and long game to dig deep and expose Trump, his grafter family, and Cabinet of Deplorables, for all they are worth.
Maybe it is too early, the new Senate Women haven’t even been sworn in yet. They are the few, I think, who must have hope. I tell myself that Kamala Harris from California (!), for God’s sake, will be in the Senate. Now what is she thinking? Does she have fire in the belly in the minority party for this Sisyphean, uphill fight? ‘Cause that’s what it now takes, Even if the blow isn’t “in your face” (we don’t need to out-Trump with even more Trump), my bet is with a more subversive (cunning?), strategic approach. There was a diary here the other day that mentioned this. How do we outsmart those bas…..What kind of energy will her new Senate Office Staff have? I bet, lots. Before the Hilary loss, no Dem expected to be in the Presidential game for almost the next decade. I wonder who? We probably barely know their name now, just like Obama.
The media (and the bosses who sent them) that went to the Off-The-Record Trump Cocktail Party at Mar-a-Lago should be fired from their jobs. No one should ever read anything they ever write (or say) for the rest of their lives. TV shows should quietly ban them from guest panels (but they won’t, let’s not kid ourselves). And now we hear THERE WILL BE NO PUBLIC GOP OPPOSITION TO TRUMP FOR FEAR OF A TWEET STORM FROM HIM! Good God, Lindsey Graham and John McCain just got 6 more years in the Senate. Do we have to rely on this duo, or maybe add Susan Collins (a trio), now that NH wonderfully, but barely, got rid of that wretched “pretender” Kelly Ayotte? But that’s really sad, that the only GOPers we can possibly expect to demonstrate any significant opposition to Trump are Senators (NOT House Members), who just got 6 more years.
Under Hilary, let’s be honest about blatant GOP hypocrisy and gridlock, with no Senate or House, nothing would have happened except a filibuster proof Supreme Court nominee or two. I still would have taken that. But now, as my husband says, “they control everything. Whatever happens is completely on them.” Maybe it will be hard to deny that. Maybe this Party will wake the hell up. Elections are not won today (anymore) taking the high road. The Republicans were in pretty much this same situation in 2008 (plus or minus a few factors). They were crushed that night weren’t they?
