It's pretty clear that Trump was lost out there yesterday. He had no idea how to answer any of the questions he was asked, rambled on about his campaigning, nuclear war, Hillary Clinton, Jews, and other things that clearly have been renting space in his brain for the last 18 months. About the only coherent message he delivered was that he was going to war against the media. Of course not everyone saw the shitstorm for what it was:
Thank you for all of the nice statements on the Press Conference yesterday. Rush Limbaugh said one of greatest ever. Fake media not happy!
Your Kellyanne Conway impression is really cute and funny, but I just wanted to remind you that she's not cute nor funny, she's calculating and evil:
In case you lost count, that was six times that Conway said “by anyone” instead of acknowledging what 17 intelligence agencies have said on the record, and in Senate testimony.
And despite Conway’s insistence that Trump’s incoming administration has “great respect for the intelligence communities,” it was Conway herself who revealed that Trump plans to replace intelligence officials with “his own people.”
This is not an administration that respects the intelligence community, but one that is seeking to discredit it. And it is further an administration whose loyalties are in question, as Trump and Conway behave more like Vladimir Putin’s defense attorneys than they do American leaders seriously concerned with the subversion of our democracy.
Might be time to change course on the character... I think the same goes for Alec Baldwin. At some point, making light of treason is no longer helpful. Or have I just lost my sense of humor since November 8th?
In 2009 President Obama inherited the worst economic conditions this country had seen since at least 1981, if not 1929. Investors had lost faith in financial markets. Uncertainty in goods and services markets locked up the labor market. And newly indebted home owners lost the means to consume. There was no bottom in sight. Gallup recorded an economic confidence (ECI) score of -65 when Obama took office. And that number never got back to black until this month when it magically shot up 31 points after Trump's election.
Obviously we can speculate that Republicans are only now accepting Obama's economy as good because a Republican is about to take office. But then shouldn't we expect Democrats to shift the opposite way? In that "both siderist" scenario, the ECI should look fairly flat. As any liberal blogger can tell you, both siderists don't deal in reality.
So what is the reality here? It's quite simple actually. Liberals view economic conditions the way they are supposed to look at them. If the economy is doing well they have a favorable view (even when a Republican is sitting on the Iron Throne). If the economy is doing poorly, they have an unfavorable view (even when a Democrat is in charge). But it's pretty clear that Conservatives don't operate the same way. With the economy collapsing in 2008, Conservatives were saying things like "the fundamentals of the economy are strong." They pointed to Bush's housing-led growth from 2003 to 2007 as "52 months of ... uninterrupted job creation, longest in the history of the country."
Which brings me to my main question, who is to blame for this divide? As it turns out, in the 1990s, Republicans actually thought the Clinton economy was great... at least until 1998. In 1998 even as we were experiencing the best economic growth in the post-war period, a new channel was starting to become available on TV sets nationwide. In 1996, 17 million households had access to Fox News. Over the next four years that number was up 440%. And with that greater reach came the first steps toward the idiocracy.
I think it's great that it's happening; people are hungry for techniques to fight back, and Indivisible is basically a codification of a lot of the best practices that activists have been using for years, kind of a drier Rules for Radicalsfor our time.
I'm not going to chisel at the substance of the document, because it's generally solid and useful, but I want to take a sledgehammer to one of the basic premises. Quoting the mighty Driftglass:
You see, back in 2009, millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done foe the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat on 1,000 suns. In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.
But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.
But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.
No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax. In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth, In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were. Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?
I don't want to patronize the team of writers who put this document together too much (they're in their 20s and early 30s, from what I understand), but I happened to be watching CNBC on that fateful day in 2009 when the "Tea Party" equivalent of the Franz Ferdinand shot was fired:
We knew way back then that this was nothing more than astroturf. From the Atlantic, on April 13, 2009:
Here is the organizational landscape of the April 15 tea party movement, in a nutshell: three national-level conservative groups, all with slightly different agendas, are guiding it. All are quick to tell you that the movement is a bottom-up affair and that its grassroots cred is real.
They are: FreedomWorks, the conservative action group led by Dick Armey; dontGO, a tech savvy free-market action group that sprung out of last August's oil-drilling debate in the House of Representatives; and Americans for Prosperity, an issue advocacy/activist group based on free market principles. Conservative bloggers, talk show hosts, and other media figures have attached themselves to the movement in peripheral capacities. Armey will appear at a major rally in Atlanta, FreedomWorks said.
In 2002, CSE launched the website USTeaParty.com, with a video game that encouraged users to toss crates of tea off a ship in Boston Harbor while then-Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle stood on the dock, wearing a British redcoat and taunting: “Just pay me and shut up.”
Armey joined CSE as co-chairman the next year, providing political star power that the organization lacked. He made $430,000 a year, on top of the $750,000 salary he earned as a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.
But shortly after his arrival at CSE, a boardroom dispute split CSE in two. The Kochs broke off and founded Americans for Prosperity while Kibbe partnered with Armey to form FreedomWorks in 2004. Kibbe wanted to make sure FreedomWorks couldn’t disband the way CSE had, Armey says, so he structured the nonprofit with an unusual three-person board of trustees that had the final say in all organizational matters. Kibbe and Armey took two of the three seats.
Together they organized activists to support small-government initiatives throughout the country. But without the Kochs’ financial backing, FreedomWorks struggled to make payroll. Kibbe and Armey organized anti-tax protests each April 15 at post offices around the country—rarely drawing more than two dozen people.
They penned an op-ed submission in 2007 advocating the Boston Tea Party approach to citizen revolt. “[Samuel] Adams was the first American to recognize that ‘it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather, an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds,’ ” they wrote, according to Kate Zernike’s book Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America.
Editors yawned; the op-ed was never published. No matter what they tried, Kibbe and Armey couldn’t seem to ignite their modern-day Tea Party movement.
The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. Bill Clinton had just stormed into the White House. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. Even undersecretaries of powerful cabinet departments from the Bush administration discovered that they were unloved, unwanted, and unemployed in the nation’s capital.
.
.
.
So I did what many others did in that spring of 1993 in the nation’s capital: I began consulting. My first client was a think tank that I’d never heard of—a small outfit with big dreams and a curious checkbook.
At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). When I’d asked about funding for CSE, it had taken a while to get a clear answer. But, eventually, it became obvious when Rich Fink showed up at critical strategy sessions and spoke with unblinking certainty about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted done without question. Though few have heard of Rich Fink, he’s been in the inner circle of the Koch brothers’ movement-building efforts for decades, influencing the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups.
CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.
But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know.
Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington. And it has nearly succeeded, as America saw in the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011, prompted by the Republican Party’s demand that the president negotiate over deficit reduction in exchange for an increase in the maximum amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to borrow. There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.
Some on the left are dismayed at Fox News for its unabashed support of the "tea party" protest movement, wherein citizens protest the government's use of taxpayer money in its response to the economic crisis--primarily in the TARP bailout, and also the $787 economic stimulus package.
Frustration culminated this week with Glenn Beck, who promoted the tea parties on his show Monday, encouraging viewers to "celebrate with Fox News" and join the protests April 15. Some of Fox's more popular personalities--Greta Van Susteren, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity, and Beck himself--will broadcast live from tea parties in DC, Sacramento, San Antonio, and Atlanta on tax day.
What's our real equivalent to Fox News? It really doesn't exist (no, MSNBC doesn't count).
Anyway, this is not to say that there was no grassroots conservative activity during the time of the "Tea Party." There was some. But unlike Occupy Wall Street, and most of what pissed off and scared liberals doing right now, it was building on a foundation and frame that already had existed for years and just needed walls and some paint. Kibbe and Armey, among others, were making salaries well into the six figures to provide leadership, and the Fox talking heads were making millions. I don't think any member of OWS ever took a salary.
Conservatives are great at taking the long view -- Rick Perlstein's series on the rise of the modern conservative movement is required reading.
(An aside: we need a word that combines "pissed off" and "scared" to pithily describe what we're all feeling right now.)
So what's my point? It's really to address this disclaimer that was only in the original Indivisible Google document and colored the way I read the rest: "P.S. We’re doing this in our free time without coordination or support from our employers. We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything."
Um, WHY NOT?
As much great energy as we have at the bottom in the progressive movement, we need real, well-funded leadership at the top, as well. It's largely because of the lack of that that despite the fact that we're on the right side of history that we're still relitigating the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1960s, the 1930s, hell, even the 1890s! It's why when they had Brooks Brothers Riots while we have somber press conferences. They've been building a movement for decades with tremendous resources behind them, win or lose, while we appear to dissolve and start anew after each loss because we have nothing to fall back upon.
I don't expect the writers of this document to fix all of our problems alone, but they need to know their enemy. Why? Because their revolution was televised:
As I was driving from Cincinnati back to NYC today, I caught up on my favorite longer-form blogs, including Stonekettle Station, via @Voice text-to-speech software. Jim Wright posted a few days ago about his encounters with insane Twitter users who continue to believe #Pizzagate is a real thing. What he found:
The people who believe this, and there are many, believe it hard.
The very suggestion that their narrative is quite literally insane sends them into fury.
There is simply no proof, none, you can offer that will convince them their narrative is false. When I suggested such on social media I was instantly attacked.
Jim had hundreds of users, not bots, come after him with some insane stuff. He challenged others to try doing the same -- Tweeting about how #Pizzagate is (obviously) a fantasy. I'm going to give it a shot, but I probably don't have enough followers to be noticed.
None of it is that surprising, other than one thing. He discusses the McMartin Preschool Trial, which was a scandal involving a preschool where a woman accused the operators of a preschool of sodomizing her child. The trial ran from 1983-1990 and involved some truly far-out claims:
In addition, Johnson also made several more accusations, including that people at the daycare had sexual encounters with animals, that "Peggy drilled a child under the arms" and "Ray flew in the air."[1][5] Ray Buckey was questioned, but was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The police then sent a form letter to about 200 parents of students at the McMartin school, stating that their children might have been abused, and asking the parents to question their children.
I vaguely remember the story from when I was a kid. I didn't remember the craziest parts, but I do remember that we, as the public, seemed to take most of it as truth. It was news to me today, 26 years later, that all were acquitted and the plaintiff was a paranoid schizophrenic. I guess that proves Jim's overall point -- the media took a ridiculous, untrue story and ran with it. Sound familiar?
An aside: When @Voice reads "#Pizzagate," it pronounces "Pizza" like Brian Butterfield does:
How long until we have a mass shooting over #HoisinCrispyOwl?
Exactly a week before Election Day, The New York Times published a story entitled, "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. sees no clear ties to Russia." (I'm not even going to link directly to it because we now know, and even knew then, it to be most certainly untrue.
Well, not we have evidence that the Times purposely covered up information that contradicted what Comey was telling them. From the Hiil:
A spokesman for Rep. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Saturday blasted the New York Times for publishing a story before the election downplaying Donald Trump's links to Russia without using quotes from Reid that challenged the story.
Adam Jentleson tweeted a link to an Oct. 31 Times article headlined "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia."
"I'll say it: NYT interviewed Reid for this story. He said things contrary to the story. NYT discarded the interview," he added.
"Maybe some want to know why the NYT seemed to cover for Comey's FBI? Maybe even some at the NYT? Maybe not? I'm just asking questions," Jentleson added later.
So, according to Harry Reid's spokesman, the Senate Majority (EDIT: Minority) Leader of the United States made a statement to the Times that contradicted the FBI director, but left that out, thus changing the whole meaning of the story. That should be a shocker, right?
Well, not really, to me. I don't think that six weeks ago is long enough for us to forget how the Times shamelessly perseverated on Hillary Clinton's e-mails... On a Google search of "New York Times Hillary Clinton E-mails" I received about 22,800,000 results, including "Why Clinton's Emails Matter, 10 Questions (and Answers) About New Email Trove, "Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton's Campaign," "Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, and a Test of Loyalty" (don't even get me started on how awful the press was to Huma, who is an incredible person that didn't deserve anything she got), "Hillary Clinton Assails James Comey, Calling Email Decision 'Deeply Troubling," "Justice Department Obtains Warrant to Review Clinton Aide's Emails," "FBI Begins Review of Clinton Aide's Emails, "Donations to Foundation Vexed Hillary Clinton's Aides, Emails Show," and "Chappatte on Hillary Clinton's Emails." Those were all just on the first page of Google, and all were published within ten days before Election Day. And this was, as Matthew Yglesias put it, "The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign," which I had put an entire Saturday into documenting waaaaay back on September 3rd.
But feeling free to make editorial decisions that deliberately damage the Democrat in a Presidential election is one thing; hiding important information to keep the Republican safe is another. And this is not the first time they've done it. They did this in the 2004 election as well, protecting George W. Bush:
The New York Times' revelation yesterday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping raised eyebrows in political and media circles, for both its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication.
In an unusual note, the Times said in its story that it held off publishing the 3,600-word article for a year after the newspaper's representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."
The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."
The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.
The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.
It's been a busy week, both in my life and in the more immediate volley from the tennis ball machine that is the Trump Presidential transition (TM Bob Cesca). I've been accumulating more columns and data dissecting last month's tragedy. I'm hoping I can pull this many into something coherent. Well, here goes.
Since I just referenced Bob Cesca, let's start with his piece from Wednesday. He asserts that the Dems really didn't experience much of a loss, having won the popular vote by so much, and the loss of white working class voters is overblown:
The shift in white blue-collar voters from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 is much more anecdotal than is being acknowledged among A-list pundits. It’s a fluke that largely reflects a narrow pocket of voters who hate Clinton due to an ongoing geyser of attacks, mostly unfair or based on nonexistent complaints, that has been erupting constantly for 25 years. This was more about a reaction in a small handful of battleground districts rather than a coast-to-coast existential crisis within the Democratic Party.
He believes the Democrats need to ignore the Beltway conventional wisdom that comes up about their party every election, win or lose, that they need to tack to the center. Rather, he feels, going left is the way to go, and he has statistics to back that up:
On health care, 86 percent of Americans with insurance policies purchased via the Affordable Care Act like their coverage. Furthermore, if we take the word “Obamacare” out of the equation, most Americans love the individual parts of the law.
Regarding taxes, 61 percent of voters surveyed think the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share in taxes and 67 percent believe corporations aren’t paying enough.
Concerning Wall Street, 58 percent of those surveyed support breaking up the big banks. Much of the credit here should go to Sen. Bernie Sanders, for setting an example of how Democrats can sell leftist issues without apology.
On income inequality, 66 percent of respondents agree that wealth should be more evenly distributed.
When it comes to college tuition, 62 percent of those polled want debt-free higher education.
Regarding abortion, most Americans surveyed believe abortion should remain legal in some if not all circumstances. Only 19 percent of voters think it should be illegal in all cases.
I'm with him on policy; not sure yet on the "WWC." (though I'm leaning that way, there are stats showing otherwise too)
Just one disagreement, and it's more a matter of degree because I think it's overblown:
The shift in Republican control over state legislatures, governorships and the U.S. Congress is less a consequence of the Democratic platform and more about the rise of conservative media, conservative propaganda and, yes, fake news.
Yes, conservative media and fake news are problems, but the bigger factor, as I've said in the past, appears to be how the mainstream media covers politics. I'm not going to link to anything I've written, because the inimitable Driftglass has written a tour de force(the danged thing, including citations, is about 5000 words) about it (SOMEBODY PAY THE MAN -- DAVID BROCK, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Take it away, Mr. Glass:
This is why I can tell you that this idea that "better messaging" to the white working class is somehow the royal road back to political majorities for the Democratic party is nonsense. Sure, Democrats always need to work on speaking like mortal human beings and progressives in general suffer from an inexplicable inability to kill the fucking bunny even with all the claws and fangs at their disposal:
But messaging itself is not the problem. The media is the problem. And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing.
This is shaping up to be a long post because sometimes I feel the need to drive a point home using a great big hammer, so if you want to scroll on down, be my guest. But before you move along, my premise is fairly easy to summarize:
For a variety if reasons, white working class Americans have been taking a pounding since the late 1970s. And for a different variety of reasons, a disturbingly high number number of white working class Americans keep voting for the people that fuck them over.
Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower. In fact, outside of health care (and turkey pardons), I would wager a penny and a fiddle of gold that in the last eight years the Obama administration put more effort into promoting American manufacturing than into any other domestic policy priority.
If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.
If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels. Email servers and Benghaaaazi. A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party". Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!
So, as the late, great Al Smith used to say, let's take a look at the record...
I have spent a couple of days going over hundreds of White House press releases, public statements, sections of each of President Obama's State of the Union addresses, etc. all on the subject of American manufacturing. This is a small, representative sample from that gargantuan pile, with emphasis added by me as the spirit moves me.
And he presents exactly that. Bottom line, the Obama administration presided over the creation of 800,000 new manufacturing jobs since the end of the Bush recession (note that that's about the likely exaggerated number that Bernie Sanders said NAFTA cost the sector, so at worst the Democrats caused a net gain over time, and that's if you even consider NAFTA a Democratic deal) , but nobody noticed because the media rarely talked about it.
Anyway, read the whole thing, but I want to bring in a little more detail from a couple of the articles Driftglass cites.
Tons of useful stuff (of course), from Rick Perlstein. The meat for me, for the purpose of my post-morteming:
Trump boogied his way to Pennsylvania Avenue to the tune of the extraordinary finding by a Washington Post-ABC News poll that “corruption in government” was listed by 17 percent of voters as the most important issue in the presidential election, second only to the economy, and ahead of terrorism and health care—and that voters trusted Trump over Clinton to be better on the issue by a margin of 48 to 39 percent, her worst deficit on any issue. This is the part of my article where rhetorical conventions demand I provide a thumbnail sketch of all the reasons why it’s factually absurd that anyone would believe that Donald Trump is less corrupt than Hillary Clinton. I have better things to do with my time than belabor the obvious.
Yet somehow, the great mass of Americans believed Clinton was the crook. Might it have something to do with the myriad articles like, say, “Smoke Surrounds the Clinton Foundation,” by The Los Angeles Times’s top pundit Doyle McManus? This piece, all too typically, despite endeavoring to debunk Trump claims of Clinton corruption, repeated charges like “Doug Band, who helped create the Clinton Global Initiative, sought access to State Department officials for Clinton Foundation donors”—even though donors did not get that access). And that donors harbored the “assumption” that they would “move to the head of the line”—even though they never did.
Trump gave absolutely no indication that he was anything but corrupt since the first time he ever seriously considered running for President back in 2000. And it's not even worth linking to how corrupt he's turning out to be as President-Elect because it would take me from now until Inauguration Day just to cover the first week post-election.
And what were pundits like McManus smoking? The vapors from a cunning long-term disinformation campaign run by the man Donald Trump appointed as his chief White House political strategist. Steve Bannon chartered a nonprofit “Government Accountability Institute,” whose president, Peter Schweizer, hacked out an insinuation-laden tome, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, then offered its “findings” on an exclusive pre-publication basis to the Times, which shamefully accepted the deal—with, predictably, the public’s perceptions of Clinton’s trustworthiness cratering in tandem with our national Newspaper of Record’s serial laundering of Steve Bannon’s filth.
So where did it come from? A book published by STEVE BANNON that the New York Times took as gospel for just long enough to not be able to put that cat back in the bag. This is why I tend to fact-check the Times nearly as much as I do PolitiUncutCo or whatever these days. The New York Times has been at the wide end of the anti-Clinton puke funnel since the Whitewater days. Fuck 'em. I'm never subscribing.
But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.
She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.
What’s more, the evidence that Clinton lost because of the nation’s economic disenchantment is extremely mixed. Some economists found that Trump won in counties affected by trade with China. But among the 52 percent of voters who said economics was the most important issue in the election, Clinton beat Trump by double digits. In the vast majority of swing states, voters said they preferred Clinton on the economy. If the 2016 election had come down to economics exclusively, the working class—which, by any reasonable definition, includes the black, Hispanic, and Asian working classes, too—would have elected Hillary Clinton president.
The more frightening possibility for liberals is that Clinton didn’t lose because the white working class failed to hear her message, but precisely because they did hear it.
That message either wasn't heard, or Trump's message of fear, xenophobia, and hate resonated more with whites because they care about keeping others down than improving or even maintaining their own lot in life (which is basically the definition of a conservative).
1. In the Rust Belt 5, the GOP’s pickup of voters making $50,000 or less is overshadowed by the Democrats’ dramatic loss of voters in that category.
2. Republicans in the Rust Belt 5 picked up almost as many wealthy voters making over $100,000 as voters who made less than $50,000.
3. Trump did not flip white voters in the Rust Belt who had supported Obama. Democrats lost them.
4. The real story—the one the pundits missed—is that voters who fled the Democrats in the Rust Belt 5 were twice as likely either to vote for a third party or to stay at home than to embrace Trump.
The work of Martin Longman, whom I've cited a lot on this, plus the fact that Trump appears to have hit the high water mark for Republicans (more on that another time) in terms of total votes while Hillary appears to be approaching the second-highest mark in the popular vote for any candidate, ever. But I'll be digging into their work more because their viewpoint is as valid as any, until it's not.
Ari was just saying to me that in the last week, undecided broke for Trump, and he and many others believe that's due to the Comey letter. Kevin Drum's got a post up about the generally negative coverage of the campaign, but this is the part that stands out to me:
I can see how the Comey letter would dip Clinton's numbers at the end, but why did the media (relatively) fawn all over Trump over the last three weeks? Did they shine a positive light on his sexual assault stories? I honestly don't remember; once I started working heavily with the campaign in October, I mostly only had time to keep my eye on the polls more than the stories.
What post-morteming since 1992 would be complete without talking about conservative evangelical Christians? Digby shares a Washington Post article that tells us that conservative evangelicals sided with Trump because of some Supreme Court decision from last year:
The presidential election was so close that many factors were “but-for” causes of Donald Trump’s victory. One that’s been mostly overlooked is Trump’s surprising success with religious voters. According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith.
To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump.
From the Washington Post to the Washington Monthly:
We’ve heard for months now that Donald Trump is as much a threat to the Republican Party as to the Democrats – and that part of his appeal was being tough on both of the stale/corrupt two parties.
Sure enough, there is evidence that on November 8, voters simultaneously said they liked Trump but disliked Republicans. Because the Democrats fell short of both expectations and winning power, it was barely noticed that:
40% of voters viewed Republicans favorably compared to 47% for the Democrats.
The triumphant, newly-re-elected Republican Congress has a 15% approval rating.
Republicans did lose two Senate seats and six House seats – a horrible disappointment for Democrats but still, you know, an actual loss of seats.
More people voted for Democrats in the Senate races than for Republican.
And yet the Republican Party has more power now than it has in decades, and is acting as if the party received a tidal-wave mandate.
Aaaaand finally, I have to *#%@ing celebrate the return of the Rude Pundit, who comes back just in time to make the cut on this post. And he needed no stretching, or shootaround, or practice swings... he's on fire:
When I first put myself in a self-imposed time out, one of the reasons was that I was really fucking pissed at myself for getting the presidential election so wrong, for thinking that it was a no-brainer that Hillary Clinton would be elected, that the country wasn't so stupid and deluded and hateful that it would elect a fuzzy, bulbous fungus in human form instead.
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But lately, I've come around to another way of thinking. I wasn't wrong. Our election system is so innately fucked that it got it wrong. Right now, Clinton is up by nearly 3 million votes. That's 2 percent more than Donald Trump, with a lead that's growing with every precinct finalized. Yeah, yeah, she didn't win the presidency. But I wasn't wrong about the country. Nearly 54% of voters rejected Trump. And a plurality supported Clinton by far.
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Trump won because the Founders created a fucked-up system to make slave states feel wanted because conservatives have always thrown a fit if you don't just accept their ignorance. We can delude ourselves and say that "in their wisdom" the Founders created the Electoral College as a way to put the brakes on the election of a vile blithering idiot with dictatorial aspirations. But it's that very system that has gotten us to this point.
And the kicker, which is an actual, honest-to-FSM ACTION that addresses the desperate pleas I've made the last two days, which agreeing with me about the reason said action just ain't gonna happen:
(If Clinton truly wanted to fight, she'd take Lawrence Lessig's advice and go after the constitutionality of the apportionment of the electors. Republicans would do it in a heartbeat if the electoral and popular vote were reversed. But Democrats never fight like that. The GOP is throwing sand in our eyes and stomping us while we're wondering why the ref doesn't call a penalty.)
Fuck yes, Mr. Papa. Welcome back to the good fight.
This really should be the death of glib, sublimely confident arguments that changes in MESSAGING could have easily put Clinton over the top. Trump completely dominated press coverage. Some of this was negative, but especially on tv a lot of this was just stuff like unedited coverage of his rallies. Clinton was not, to put it mildly, given the same kind of opportunity to get her message out. Clinton didn’t get significantly more coverage than Trump during the Democratic National Convention. There’s no effective way of getting a message out in that kind of environment; the net effects of advertising just aren’t that powerful. And there were two cases in which Trump didn’t dominate coverage: EMAILS! and HILLARY CLINTON IS ON HER DEATHBED! If you want an explanation for why Trump, an unprecedentedly dishonest and corrupt candidate, was viewed by the public is being more honest than Hillary Clinton (who, if anything, is more honest than the typical politician), there you go. The idea that the media deserves a pass for putting an elephant on the scale because Hillary Clinton is a FLAWED CANDIDATE is beyond absurd.
That's basically what I've been trying to argue ever since it became evident that Hillary's results were going to come very close to eclipsing Obama's 2012 final tally. There's more to it, and I plan to get into that in my post-mortem in a few weeks, but the media behaving remotely responsibly would've easily bridged a sub-80K three-state gap. Instead, it was complicit in putting a fascist in the White House and empowering others who are sharpening the knives they're planning to begin using to tear apart the safety net and protections for anyone who isn't white, male, and conservative in about seven weeks.
Atrios has more (sorry for posting it in full, Atrios, but it's short):
As we shift our gears back from "the way the press treats Democratic administrations" to "the way the press treats Republican administrations," remember that the former involves treating every fake scandal that percolates up through the fever swamps as "news" while for the latter they mock Dems for pointing out scandals that are in plain sight.
Gonna be fun!
Assholes had one job.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Republicans have spent nearly five decades cowing the media into looking at politics through, well, sepia-tinted glasses, and it's going to be an uphill climb forever if we can't at least get them to switch them out for some technicolor lenses.
There's pretty much no discussion on the rise of conservatism and how the media has aided and abetted it that Rick Perlstein can't add to, so we're all lucky he published an article in In These Times this week:
The week before, a reporter from USA Today called to ask for historical examples that could inform our quest to heal and unite the country after a divisive campaign. When I responded that adults understand that true healing only happens when a problem is forthrightly acknowledged, that working through our divisions means we should confront our trauma before coming out the other side. His response suggested a sci-fi robot: That does not compute! He asked me to re-explain my answer, as if he had never heard such a strange thing.
For this is not how mainstream media professionals are trained to think. They think like those museologists in Oklahoma City. Americans “come together.” Consensus is in our DNA. Here, ugly things, racist things, violent things, sexist things, are epiphenomenal.
We’ve always been this way: Even in 1836, when America’s crisis over slavery was bringing the country closer and closer to civil war, Congress’s response was to outlaw any debate over slavery in Congress. Southern slaveholders pushed it, but I bet respectable Whigs welcomed it. So much less unpleasantness if you pretend a crisis doesn’t exist.
I'm still working on my own suggestions, but Perlstein cites Russ Feingold as an example of how to frame things:
What about our Democratic politicians? Some get it. Russ Feingold, conceding his loss to Wisconsin incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, began routinely, apologizing for not getting the job done, thanking his wife, his supporters, his staff—and then: “But obviously something is happening in this country tonight. I don’t understand it completely. I don’t think anyone does.”
This was exactly the right tone. If you are not acknowledging a feeling of being at sea following Nov. 8, 2016, you’re simply not being authentic.
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Now comes the test of our institutions: the bulwarks that outlast elections, meant to stand between strongmen, mobs and their awful instincts. How will they fare? Once more, indications are not encouraging. The FBI, for example, put its thumb on the scales for the victor. Police unions chose to endorse a proud and open lawbreaker. And from the evidence of Clinton’s concession speech, those atop the commanding heights of the Democratic Party clearly lack the will for the heroic fight ahead to resist the lawless madman who commands the executive branch.
Who will lead the resistance? More fundamentally: Can a nation that cannot acknowledge genuine trauma even resist?
"Acknowledge genuine trauma." Sounds like a mantra to me.
Yup. I'm again highlighting Booman's series about reaching out to rural and exurban voters in order for the Democrats to regain control of the country. It's one of the most important series of posts post-election that I've read. I'm not totally committed to Booman's conclusion that the change in rural and exurban voting was the factor that tipped the scales to Trump, but it's a factor I will look at very closely once we have the final tallies, and I also see the breakdowns from other states besides Booman's great analysis of Pennsylvania.. Says Booman:
The challenge is not just to sustain and hopefully grow their plurality base of voters, but to change the demographic nature of their supporters. This is why you’ll hear people like me say that the Democrats absolutely cannot ignore that they lost 75%-80% of the white vote in county after county in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest. This is the kind of racial voting we’ve seen in the South for years, and if it becomes the norm in the North it will make it impossible for the Democrats to win control of state legislatures in that region, make it nearly impossible to win back the U.S. House of Representatives, and give the Republicans a narrow opening to win the Electoral College with a minority of the popular vote, again.
A lot of people do not like the sound of that. But I don’t care how it sounds. It isn’t a value statement or an assessment of worth. It’s just a diagnosis of a problem. How you solve it, if it can be solved, is what ought to be controversial. The fact that it needs to be solved should not.
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But, unless the left is content to be a permanent minority in state legislatures and in Congress, and to lose presidential elections it should win, it has to solve this problem.
And part of solving it is in understanding how certain decisions and behaviors from the Democratic base made it easier for Trump to convince the white people in these counties that the Democrats were hostile and not on their side. I mean, this is a big challenge in any case, but the least we can do is not make it more difficult through our own myopic reaction.
If in fact it is the case, he's right. We have to figure out the how to solve the problem. But where I differ from some other liberals is that the solution needs to be at the expense of other groups in the big Democratic tent. We HAVE an economic message, and most people are on our side on most of the important issues. What we need to do is figure out how we get that message to these voters, not just past Alex Jones, Breitbart, etc; we need the mainstream media to talk about things other than e-mails. It took the Republicans a couple of decades of focused effort to gain influence over the media and other institutions. Who's going to write the Democratic equivalent of the Powell Memo? Hey, I might someday...
We should not limit ourselves to letting such groups define themselves, and instead should report their actions, associations, history and positions to reveal their actual beliefs and philosophy, as well as how others see them.
That wasn't so hard, was it? Let's see how many publications follow their lead.
I finally got to reading the full transcript of the interview the NYT did with the (shudder) President-Elect last week, and it made my stomach churn.
The issue I have is less about the content -- there's nothing new in there and it's mostly, unsurprisingly, word salad -- and more about the tone. I don't, at this point, expect the Times to challenge him very hard. It's just not what they do with someone like him. It's the cordiality and feeling of good humor between the Times, and their subject. They really are treating him and his incoming presidency like they're normal, and they're just not.
The opening gives us a good idea of where this is all going:
SULZBERGER: All right, so we’re clear. We had a very nice meeting in the Churchill Room. You’re a Churchill fan, I hear?
TRUMP: I am, I am.
SULZBERGER: There’s a photo of the great man behind you.
TRUMP: There was a big thing about the bust that was removed out of the Oval Office.
SULZBERGER: I heard you’re thinking of putting it back.
TRUMP: I am, indeed. I am.
SULZBERGER: Wonderful. So we’ve got a good collection here from our newsroom and editorial and our columnists. I just want to say we had a good, quiet, but useful and well-meaning conversation in there. So I appreciate that very much.
TRUMP: I appreciate it, too.
First off, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times' Chairman and Publisher, affirms that they had already had a what he termed a "nice" meeting. I think he's giving him a cookie for not walking out on them or threatening to arrest them. Which is not something the Times should even have to acknowledge. But new normal.
Then, Sulzberger pats him on the back for potentially acting on a false right-wing shibboleth that was disproven years ago. If Sulzberger believes that Barack Obama sent back a bust of Winston Churchill to Britain in order to insult them (though they've certainly earned it), that says that the head of the "paper of record" in the United States cannot take the time to discern between truth and a lie made up by, well, liars.
He also acknowledges his own hero-worship for a mythologized character, which does not bode well for the next four years, given that we're going to be governed by a man whose entire career has been built on a myth.
TRUMP: [...] I think that’s the genius of the Electoral College. I was never a fan of the Electoral College until now.
SULZBERGER: Until now.
[laughter]
TRUMP: Until now. I guess now I like it for two reasons. What it does do is it gets you out to see states that you’ll never see otherwise. It’s very interesting. [...{
Rather than challenge their subject on his 180 degree change about one of the (unfortunate) fundamental underpinnings of our democracy, Sulzberger makes a quick joke and lets Trump ramble from there.
Now we move on to the inevitable question of Trump's white supremacist support. That's where they're going to get him, right?
DEAN BAQUET, executive editor of The New York Times: As you describe it, you did do something really remarkable. You energized a lot of people in the country who really wanted change in Washington. But along with that — and this is going to create a tricky thing for you — you also energized presumably a smaller number of people who were evidenced at the alt-right convention in Washington this weekend. Who have a very …
TRUMP: I just saw that today.
BAQUET: So, I’d love to hear you talk about how you’re going to manage that group of people who actually may not be the larger group but who have an expectation for you and are angry about the country and its — along racial lines. My first question is, do you feel like you said things that energized them in particular, and how are you going to manage that?
TRUMP: I don’t think so, Dean. First of all, I don’t want to energize the group. I’m not looking to energize them. I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group. They, again, I don’t know if it’s reporting or whatever. I don’t know where they were four years ago, and where they were for Romney and McCain and all of the other people that ran, so I just don’t know, I had nothing to compare it to.
But it’s not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.
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BAQUET: So I’m going to do that thing that executive editors get to do which is to invite reporters to jump in and ask questions.
I believe this is what they in the journamalism field call a "shit sandwich." At least I hope they do, because I'm otherwise not sure to call a turd between two other turds. Baquet precedes this impossibly-softly-tossed question on FREAKIN' NEO-NAZIS by complimenting Trump and playing into his own legend, he then cracks a cutesy joke and moves on without a followup after not receiving a clear answer about FREAKIN' NEO-NAZIS.
Also, you probably didn't notice because you've already bathed your retinas in bleach, but I replaced the final 217 words of Trump's "answer" with standard lorem ipsum text infused with a "big league" every line or two. Even if you did read it, you emerged no less enlightened than if I'd just kept the original text. Oh, and for the record, he did use "big league" in said "answer."
MAGGIE HABERMAN, political reporter: I’ll start, thank you, Dean. Mr. President, I’d like to thank you for being here. This morning, Kellyanne Conway talked about not prosecuting Hillary Clinton. We were hoping you could talk about exactly what that means — does that mean just the emails, or the emails and the foundation, and how you came to that decision.
I'm not going to go into the Clinton/"lock her up" aspect of this; it's been done to death already. But the level of obsequiousness it takes for someone who Trump referred to by name as a "third-rate reporter" and about whom a friend of hers told me a month or so that she worried for her safety because of the things Trump said regarding her to open with a polite, "I’d like to thank you for being here" is just mind-boggling. Historians will need to coin a special term for that sort of treatment as they conduct a post-mortem on this era.
I'd expect our next player to provide nothing of insight, and he does not disappoint. Tom Friedman, please step into the batter's box and shank the potential game-winning field goal.
FRIEDMAN: I came here thinking you’d be awed and overwhelmed by this job, but I feel like you are getting very comfortable with it.
CLANK!
We're officially through the looking glass. Aside from the fact that Tom Friedman should have deleted the word "awe" from his vocabulary bank by now, holy crud, they can't even confine the normalization process to the subtext only three weeks into this debacle. I think the frog just jumped out of the cooking pot, the shark missed its chance to chow down on the Fonz, and several other water-dwelling creatures committed hackneyed metaphorical acts that the Mustache of Understanding (TM Atrios) will one day butcher as he describes a conversation he had with a rickshaw driver in Nairobi about how more McDonald's franchises in Mosul would have prevented the rise of ISIS.
Now that I've tripped onto an extremely slippery slope of sports, metaphors, and sports metaphors, I'll just say that Skipper Sulzberger puts Mark Thompson to close this one out, and Trump crushes his first pitch with a bat somehow constructed entirely out of 100% pure platitudinum...
MARK THOMPSON: Thank you, and it’s a really short one, but after all the talk about libel and libel laws, are you committed to the First Amendment to the Constitution?
TRUMP: Oh, I was hoping he wasn’t going to say that. I think you’ll be happy. I think you’ll be happy. Actually, somebody said to me on that, they said, ‘You know, it’s a great idea, softening up those laws, but you may get sued a lot more.’ I said, ‘You know, you’re right, I never thought about that.’ I said, ‘You know, I have to start thinking about that.’ So, I, I think you’ll be O.K. I think you’re going to be fine.
SULZBERGER: Well, thank you very much for this. Really appreciate this.
TRUMP: Thank you all, very much, it’s a great honor. I will say, The Times is, it’s a great, great American jewel. A world jewel. And I hope we can all get along. We’re looking for the same thing, and I hope we can all get along well.
Early on in this election season, Newt Gingrich was given an
extended interview by CNN. In it he claimed that facts no longer matter. The
media hoohahed about it for a day and then, as always, they moved on. As Trump
committed disqualifying actions at an accelerated pace over the last few
months, we found Newt’s statement held
up time and again. It didn't matter that Trump admitted to molesting women,
including underaged girls. It mattered more that FBI Director Comey wanted to
look at 3 emails, regardless of whether it meant Secretary Clinton had
committed any wrong doing.
For the media, it is all about ratings. And speculating
about the global catastrophe that those emails nay have unleashed was much more
beneficial to ratings than yet another story about Trump being a horrrible
person.
The fact summit wouldn’t be a censorship body; nor would it actively engage in fact-checking activities. Its goal would be to act as a set of informal gatekeepers, determining which institutions are worthy of citation, linking, reading and supporting, while also calling out the fakers and deceivers. The multi-partisan nature of the panel would add legitimacy to the findings and encourage consumers on the right and left to take the results more seriously. Would it convince everyone? Not a chance in hell. There will always be hotheads who cling to their bogus news and conspiracy theory stories, and those who will continue to blindly retweet unsourced garbage. But it’s an important start, an urgent attempt at forcibly shoving the pendulum in the other direction.
I see why this is an issue, but the fake news we're seeing on social media is just a more advanced version of your crazy uncle's e-mail forwards that we've had for 20 years.
Given that the Clinton campaign was defined throughout this interminable election by its inability to get potential supporters anywhere near as fired up as they had been for candidates like Obama or Bernie Sanders, the torrent of emotions that came pouring out of Clinton voters last Tuesday and Wednesday is, in a vacuum, surprising. I saw adults literally weep. Is it possible that anyone could be that broken up over missing out on four to eight years of centrist, lukewarm New Democrat "I've got it! Civil unions!" horseshit? Are there people in the world at this moment who are legitimately crushed that America will miss out on the Hillary Clinton presidency?
Of course there aren't. OK, maybe a handful.
Count me as one of them.
First off, this was not the Hillary Clinton of 1996 or 2008. The 2016 version was a candidate who was leading a Democratic Party that had shifted to the left, and as the leader of that party, had done so too. I'm sure some wasn't totally genuine (she is a politician, after all), but as we finally learned a few weeks back when Obama finally said that he might have gone for single-payer healthcare if he'd thought it had been politically feasible, sometimes Democrats inside really are more liberal than they show on the outside, and Hillary may have actually been more liberal than we'd given her credit for the whole time. In any case, Hillary did run on what was probably the most progressive platform at least in my lifetime, and quite possibly in the history of the country.
Policy is first and foremost among the things I look for in a candidate, so that made me more excited about Clinton this year than about any past candidate. I'm not going to run off the litany of personal attributes Hillary brought to the table beyond that. Samantha Bee did it much better than I ever could:
Incredible: "Look, if you can't bring yourself to vote for Hillary Clinton, I get it. I'm not voting for Hillary Clinton either. I'm voting for Hillary Goddamn Brilliant Badass Queen Beyonce Rodham."
The narrative has said that the sadness that overwhelmed so many people in the wake of this election had nothing at all to do with Hillary Clinton and everything to do with fear of a Trump presidency.
Note that during the Republican primary season alone, the networks spent 333 minutes focusing on Donald Trump. Yet for all of 2016, they have set aside just one-tenth of that for issue reporting.
And look at this: Combined, the three network newscasts have slotted 100 minutes so far this year for reporting on Hillary Clinton’s emails while she served as secretary of state, but just 32 minutes for all issues coverage.
It's become really, really difficult for a Democrat to drive the media narrative. The best suggestion I've seen for how the campaign could've handled that was from commenter Nick Never Nick on a Lawyers, Guns, & Money thread yesterday:
And then, being Democrats, they have a tendency to explain things. The actual explanation Clinton should have given, right from the get-go, is this: “All this shit gets classified retroactively, and everyone has to work with it before they know what it’s final status is going to be. And 90% of it is classified just for shits and giggles anyway. If State is going to get anything done, we’ve got to guess what level it’s going to be at, and work with all kinds of systems. Now fuck off.”
Clinton eerily paralleled the Kerry / Edwards campaign in the end, making a persuasive case for why the Republican opponent is terrible but offering nothing to recommend themselves beyond "We're really experienced! I've been in Washington forever!"
Now, you wouldn't know it if you only listened to my opponent talk about how terrible everything is. He has such a dark, divisive view of America, but that doesn't tell the story about what's really going on. It's actually pretty exciting. In red states and blue states, local leaders are stepping up. Rural electric co-ops are investing in community solar power and you see that across America – union workers in Michigan, union workers in Michigan are getting ready to build electric Chevys in a plant powered by clean energy. Iowa, Iowa is already getting a third of its electricity from wind. Wind turbines are going up in New England and on Lake Erie. Renewable energy is already the fastest-growing source of new jobs in America. I think that is so exciting – there are nearly 2 million people already working in energy efficiency.
And in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a project called ReGenesis is taking an old landfill and turning it into a solar farm. That landfill was a blight and a health threat, just 250 feet away from a residential neighborhood. Now, that same land will generate enough clean, renewable electricity to power 500 homes.
So this is what we can do. And I think Washington should back up and support doing more of that. As president, I want us to have 500 million solar panels installed across America by the end of my first term. And let's generate enough renewable energy to power every home in America within the decade. Let's make our buildings and factories more energy efficient and cut our oil consumption by one-third.
And we can get there by investing in cutting edge research, to keep developing cheaper and better clean energy technologies, investing in clean energy infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, putting big partnerships together between states, cities, and rural communities.
We can do all of this and create millions of good-paying jobs as we do. So I'm hoping that these good jobs will offer security and dignity while we produce the clean energy that will power the economy of the future. The clean energy solutions are being developed right here in America. We want them manufactured in America, installed in America, and putting people to work in America.
And while we do that, let's make sure our communities are ready for the impacts of climate change that are coming right at us. We need to invest in resilient infrastructure. Now, sometimes that will mean building a seawall; other times, let's be more creative – like in New York Harbor, where we are replanting oyster beds to form natural barriers to storm surge. Sometimes we'll overhaul an outdated sewer system to deal with flooding from heavy downpours. In Philadelphia, they're trying something else: green roofs, porous pavements, curbside gardens to help absorb storm water.
And here's something we don't talk enough about. Let's make sure our hospitals can stay open and operational in any kind of disaster. Because sadly, I saw what happened in New York during Hurricane Sandy, newborns who had been on respirators had to be evacuated down nine flights of stairs in one New York hospital, because the electricity went off. Nurses, I love nurses – heroic, courageous nurses were carrying those babies and manually squeezing bags of air to keep them breathing. Now, here in Miami, you know how important this is. You have retrofitted the Nicklaus Children's Hospital with a hurricane-resistant shell for exactly this reason. And every hospital in the country should follow your lead and build in more resilience.
And then finally, we have got to lead the world to confront the climate challenge. If we don't do it, nobody will do it. We must confront the climate challenge. There's no doubt about that. And so, let's move on with the kind of leadership that the world as well as our country deserves.
That seems like quite a bit of self-recommendation. And that's in light of the fact that succeeding Obama, she could only talk about remodeling the kitchen, not tearing down the whole house and starting over.
Ed adds:
...and essentially expecting voters to motivate themselves out of sheer terror.
If you're a salesperson at an auto dealership showing a customer a car, and you hear an announcement that Godzilla is headed in your direction, you don't say "We should test drive this one; it's got fine Italian leather seats and a power sunroof." You say, "IT'S F**KING GODZILLA! GET IN THE CAR AND GO!" And the customer doesn't react to that by saying, "I don't know... the wheel base is a bit short, and, um, y'know, the paint could be more glossy. Let me sleep on it."
Indeed, many people (particularly people who don't happen to be white, male, or white and male) did so.
I'm both white and male. I'd say I did so for both reasons; they're not mutually exclusive.
Even the Fear of a Trump Planet narrative doesn't explain the powerful emotions that the election brought out of so many people. I'm as bad at reading minds as the next person, but what I hear when friends, strangers, students, random internet commenters, and media figures talk about this election is a shattering sense of disappointment. Not in Hillary Clinton, who was little more than a cipher...
A "cipher?" We're back to the "uninspiring" point.
Let me just pause here briefly to say that the point of this post is not to try to convince Ed that he should be so upset that Hillary lost and not just that a monster won. Ed has been one of my favorite writers for quite a while (Ari can vouch for that; I probably send him links to half of what appears on Gin and Tacos). However, I'm trying to properly understand the reasons why the 2016 election went the way it did so I can contribute to turning things around in coming years. I believe that is plausible that enthusiasm for Hillary could have been an awful lot higher than Ed thinks (and I wonder if his commenters dissuaded him at all).
Whether Hillary's campaign really did suffer from a lack of inspiration can't be *proven,* but it's at least worth going over some premises. If this were the case, two things we'd expect:
Hillary would not receive anywhere near the number of votes that perhaps the most charismatic presidential candidate since at least RFK did after he saved the country from the brink of destruction
People would not turn out to volunteer for Hillary in great numbers
Looking at the first premise; despite needing to overcome the dual obstacles of running for the third term of an incumbent party and having a media only interested in discussing BS scandals, Hillary received 96% of the number of votes Obama did in 2012, and won the popular vote by more than 1.5 million votes.
There's no final tally of the number of Clinton volunteers yet; the Obama campaign claimed it had 2.2 million of them in 2012. I did hear some massive numbers while I volunteered at Hillary's HQ as far as calls made and doors knocked go; that plus the unexpected overflow crowds of volunteers in that office in the final days of the election would lead me to believe Clinton likely at least came close to that number. We shall see.
I'm not going to address much of the rest of Ed's post because I largely agree with it. Even those of us who supported Hillary first and foremost are disappointed in, if not horrified by:
the people around us. In the people who voted for That Man. It is not too extreme to say that for a lot of voters, particularly younger ones, the outcome on Tuesday seriously shook their faith in…well, mankind.
I'd like to conclude by returning to the point of Hillary's message for a moment. As I said above, when I picked out the excerpt from Clinton's speech, I just clicked on one of her more recent speeches at random, but I had looked at a couple of others and found a lot of the same. I assumed that she probably did go more negative than, say, Obama in 2012, whose campaign was considered particularly positive and inspiring, and who had only been running against Generic Republican White Male #7 and not the Combover Caligula. I'd considered dissecting a number of her speeches, but realized that would be too labor intensive. I tried to conceive of a way to check whether Hillary really did go low, and Obama, listening to Michelle, went high.
What I came up with isn't foolproof, but it's solid. If Clinton had focused on Benito Voldemort excessively, you'd expect that she used his name considerably more often than Obama mentioned Romney at his rallies in 2012. OF COURSE she's going to use Trump's name a bit more that Obama used Romney, no?
I went through UC-Santa Barbara's presidential archive (which is pretty cool), and compared all of Hillary's 2016 September and October appearances with Obama's in the same months in 2012. I think the archive still is missing a few of the most recent ones, but here's what I came up with:
# of
Speeches
Average
Opponent Name Checks Per Speech
Average
Words Per Speech
Average
Words Per Opponent Namecheck
Obama
Clinton
Obama
Clinton
Obama
Clinton
Obama
Clinton
September
22
11
4.36
2.27
3711.36
3071.91
850.52
1351.64
October
21
9
8.86
9.44
2930.67
3649.22
330.88
386.39
(I'm happy to share the calculations behind these if anyone's interested. I excluded a couple of exceptional appearances, like the Al Smith dinner and press conferences.)
When accounting for length of speech, Clinton referred to her opponent significantly less than Obama did, both in September and October. Interestingly, Clinton's November appearances are still mostly absent from the archive, but in the one that does appear, she actually does use "Trump" 27 times, well more than she or Obama used their opponent's name in any other speech. By contrast, in the final days of his campaign (November), Obama name-checked Romney with about two-thirds less frequency than he did in October. Did that mean Clinton may have been less confident than the rest of us at the end, and Obama moreso? I seem to remember most of my liberal friends treating Election Night 2012 as a nailbiter. I'm not sure whether candidates tend to talk about their opponent more when they're up or down. I do have one bit of somewhat-inside information that would contradict this -- what I've heard in my three-or-four-degrees away circles is that the reason John Podesta came out early Wednesday morning and said that Hillary would not be making a concession speech that night is because the campaign was so sure of victory that they hadn't bothered to write one! That could be inaccurate, but it does make sense.
Anyway, the numbers would indicate that, by and large, Hillary did not go unusually negative in 2016. They actually would support another assertion that a friend of mine heavily made last week -- that she didn't go negative enough.
There are two takeaways for me as far as things the Clinton campaign may have done incorrectly with regards to Hillary's appearances. First, even once the UCSB archive is complete, she likely made roughly half of the speeches Obama did. Part of that was due to her bout of pneumonia in September.
Second, her campaign didn't do a great job placing her. Every one of Obama's appearances were in places he expected to be close. Not so with Clinton. In fact, three of her 20-odd appearances were in Washington, DC, which is about as blue as you can get. Additionally, Clinton unexpectedly lost Wisconsin, and never appeared there once in September or October. Obama was there three times in those months, and three more times in November.
It seems like we have to look more at the campaign than the candidate in deciding what lessons we can use moving forward.
UPDATE: For stupid reasons, I'd been addressing Ed as "Steve" (with both SteveInATL from his comments and Steve M from Mister Nice Blog in my head at the time in this post). *FACEPALM*. My utmost apologies!
