This headline on a recent Vanity Fair hit the Democratic panic button:
TIME TO PANIC? NEW POLLS SHOW HILLARY CLINTON’S HUGE LEAD HAS MOSTLY EVAPORATED.
But don’t fall for the despair and cynicism. It’s never an acceptible response to someone like Trump. This isn’t about just this election. Our multi-ethnic democracy — a hard-won achievement that took generations — is at stake.
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Google “democratic panic over clinton” and you get 695,000 results. Many of these hits are from right-wing sources taking gleeful delight in liberal panic, such as this item from Breitbart:
While host Jimmy Kimmel and several other TV stars skewered Donald Trump during the 68th annual Emmy Awards on Sunday night, Hollywood Democrats were quietly panicking over the Republican presidential candidate’s election chances while mingling during pre- and post-Emmy parties, according to a report.
The polls are undoubtedly worrisome for Clinton — and all of us who care about our country. Clinton has only a 2.1 % advantage according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. That is down significantly from August, but still up about a point from earlier in the week. She has only a 57.6% chance of winning according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, has a 4.2% advantage according to the friendlier HuffPost Pollster, and according to the Princeton Election Consortium has a win probability of 69% according to their random drift calculation.
Her polling seems to have stabilized from last week and she still clearly has the lead, but its too damn close, given that the alternative — Donald Trump — praises dictators around the world and implicitly threatens his opponent; attacks freedom of the press; and says global warming is a hoax designed by the Chinese to weaken our economy. That’s a short list but it should be enough to make it clear that it’s not an overstatement to say the future of the country — and the planet — is at stake.
The solution?
Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post has some good advice:
If Democrats want to beat Donald Trump, they need to get past the freakout stage and get to work.
Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post has a riff on the same theme in this column entitled: Democrats, get your damned big-boy pants on.
That means work to register voters — organize locally to get them to the polls — and vote.
I did a poster with my contribution to the message:
It’s an homage to the fighting spirit of WWII — Keep Calm & Carry On, as the old British slogan about fighting fascism goes. And we are in a fight against fascism here. What else to call a white supremacist/nationalist campaign based on a repudiation of core democratic principles and a contempt for opponents? Not to mention a blizzard of lies?
The original Keep Calm poster that inspired this was printed in the millions in the early part of the war, but ironically rarely used. Still, it captures the WWII British anti-fascist zeitgeist, hence it ubiquity as a historical artifact. And it demonstrates the same calm resolve we need now.
Remember, this battle doesn’t end on November 8, because Trumpism will be a force into the future, whether Trump wins or loses November 8.
But our immediate task is to make sure he loses and loses by the widest margin possible.
Organize. Register voters. Talk to friends and family. And vote.