We can insist all we want that Donald Trump won due to voter suppression and because he opened the floodgates of racism and misogyny. But the obsessive focus on those arguments puts us in danger of missing the real lesson to Democrats from the election.
Elizabeth Warren nailed it yesterday. The Democrats have offered no substantive alternatives to the Republicans on issue after issue, from globalization to health care. Even Obamacare was not “transformative.” We bailed out the banks, not homeowners in the financial crisis, and no one pushed to prosecute the Wall Street brokers who caused the crisis.
Most importantly, the Dems did nothing to save the vanishing middle class and offered little to induce minority voters to oppose Trump and vote for Clinton. IMHO, contempt for the average citizen has become a hallmark of governance in both political parties, and it exists just as much in state government here in Massachusetts as it does in Washington.
I hope Warren keeps hammering this message home. It’s time to stop whining about Trump and start rethinking the role and purpose of government in America.
Government is not there to protect those with the most power and wealth, but to help those who are on the outside. It’s not there to enrich the professional classes who live off taxpayer money and then take it upon themselves to decide what is in everybody else’s best interest. (Btw, interesting article in the Harvard Business Revew of all places about the professional class hatred among Trump supporters.)
Whether it is a global trade deal that ships American jobs overseas, or a decision by a state legislator not to stand up for a constituent who has a grievance with the executive branch, government has lost sight of its real purpose.
she feels our pain and is not afraid to speak truth to power.
Speaking only for myself, after 56 years of Democratic volunteer activist organizing — until we adopt the Senator’s remedy for re-connecting to marginalized working class families — we will never win back the majority of the economic dispossessed.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
But if you get a chance, look at the US gross domestic product in trillions of chained 2009 dollars (inflation-adjusted) and the Real Median Household Income in the United States That should be all you need to know. Regardless of which party is in the White House or in control of congress, the overall projections since the 1970’s has been more and more wealth generated by a public that receives a lower and lower share.
Republican voters have come to their breaking point on this. Had they not, Jeb Bush would have been their choice. After all, he is a skilled politician who was highly qualified, possibly our most qualified candidate (sound familiar?) but he did not even make it to the Carolina primary.
Democrats have yet to reach their breaking point, time will tell. If this shellacking has not broken our faith in third way “globalization” Wall Street (hey, the money has to come from somewhere) Democrats, we’re in for an awfully long time in the weeds.
Trump won WI, MI, PA by a combined 107K votes. That’s 46 EV’s. Had she won those she would have breached 270. Trump won, but a shellacking it was not.
306 to 232 when the talking heads all told is that Hillary had this one in the bag and that Donald has a few small outside chances to win is a shellacking.
The Patriots are playing the Jets on the 27th. If the Jets beat the Patriots 42-30, but that’s because Brady had a head cold and the bus had a flat tire on the way to the game, it’s still a shellacking.
There are no sports analogies that can fit here and yours was terrible.
Roughly 1/4 of the countries eligible voters voted for Trump.
Of all that voted in the 2016 election, they favored Hillary Clinton by what will likely 1.5 million votes.
To fill your desire for a sports analogy, the number of votes that separated Trump and Clinton in MI, WI, PA would fit in The Big House or Beaver Stadium.
I would say the expectations were shellacked, though.
Those are just some sports analogies that make sense here. She was projected by mainstream outlets like the NY Times to have a 95% chance of winning. Silver had the most conservative chance for her at 70%. Blown out of the water. This was the largest upset in American political history. Dewey/Truman was less of an upset since Truman’s voters weren’t polled. Trump’s voters were polled and simply lied to the pollsters in large numbers.
There was a huge upset, and we lost states that went for Democrats consistently in every election since Dukakis. And it was avoidable, and it was predictable. I had been warning about these 64 electoral votes for months here.
All the more pathetic that she lost them, and the recriminations are deserved. He’s the fucking President and she isn’t. That’s all that matters. There are no silver linings, she Coakleyed this on scale even Martha was incapable of.
The comparison to Martha Coakley is not helpful, nor is the continued demonization of Hillary Clinton. She lost. It’s over. It will be another thirty years before we’ll have an opportunity to nominate a candidate with thirty years of right-wing venom spread about her.
I think the debate about voterID laws is far more important. I think a debate about partisan behavior of federal officials such as the director of the FBI is important.
I’m tired of arguing about Hillary Clinton.
So is Sen. Warren, who brilliantly didn’t hold back her criticisms this week not just of Clinton but the entire Democratic establishment.
It’s the folks here who are blaming voter restrictions, the FBI, racism, and everything but the failure of Democrats to resonate with their former core constituency that are keeping this argument alive. If you want it to stop agree that the message has to change and we should follow Sen. Warren.
We need to be very careful here.
I am old enough that when you speak of “the failure of Democrats to resonate with their former core constituency”, you bring to mind a dark chapter in our history that we must not repeat. I remind you that Spiro Agnew won the governor’s office in MD in 1966 because the Democratic nominee was a virulent racist who ran a campaign against equal housing laws and whose slogan was “your home is your castle”.
The voterID restrictions that we are talking about are a thinly-veiled echo of that Jim Crow past. I am a sixty-plus year old lifelong Democrat who grew up in MD. I have spent far too much of life arguing with well-meaning whites who demanded that we “move past” annoying issues like our pervasive bias against blacks and women.
I reject your claim that we must ignore the reality of racism and sexism in the last campaign and in our society in order to move forward. Yes, we must move forward. Yes, we must appeal to working-class voters. That appeal MUST BE to working-class women, blacks, immigrants, Hispanics, and members of the LGBTQ community. The fact that white working-class males now feel the pain of long-standing GOP class warfare is great to the extent that it motivates that demographic to help us.
We must not allow that demographic to push aside the rest of our Democratic core constituency.
That we must defend against all forms of discrimination and hatred. For her, it’s not an either/or. It’s about holding the line against bigotry while reaching out to the salvageable Trump voters who genuinely seek better lives for working people and saying, “let’s hold him to his promises on those issues.” And she said to Wall Street (today), (I paraphrase), “realize that the American people don’t want you running the government–this election was a referendum against business as usual in Washington. People WANT these reforms. They thought Trump might deliver them because he’d shake things up. If their representatives don’t deliver, they won’t be in office in 2 years.”
We live in interesting times.
After talking with so many casual racists, I don’t think that focusing on racism as a main issue is going to win any elections for the Democrats. I think a better approach is to pick at racism along the margins, and to work towards improving the economic future of people – including non-whites.
It is too easy for casual racists to react to the news, to see mug shots of brown face after brown face arrested for some petty crimes, and to justify their positions. I know that people aren’t committing crimes because of their skin (or their “culture”, which is the new form of racist thought) – I know that it is because they are living in dense impoverished neighborhoods with little opportunities, and that, coupled with casual racism which puts them at a disadvantage for many things (jobs, housing) which poor whites do not face, drives these crimes.
Telling people “stop being racist” is not going to work. How about pushing Trump to do exactly what he promised – but force him to do it. I voted for Clinton, but I will say that I only heard Trump speaking about rebuilding our “inner cities”, about how there are no jobs, how there are public safety issues. He acknowledged the problem and acknowledged that someone outside those cities has to help.
So how about Democrats try and focus our energies on rebuilding our cities in Massachusetts? Focus on helping people in those cities get jobs? Please, look outside of Boston. Read this article in the Boston Globe about Springfield:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/11/11/downtown-springfield-city-image-and-casino-success-collide/fJdecArPd5MvY2RQ4FF5WN/story.html
Try and come up with some ideas that will help transform the Springfield economy into something even half as good as the Boston economy – give some ideas that the city itself can do (appreciating the fiscal constraints), and give some ideas as to how the state can help out.
than it is own up to the reality that the Democratic Party abandoned the lower and soon to be lower middle class workers. Most of my better off Democratic contacts are attributing this loss to racism, few of the lower income and soon to be lower income are. The wealthy professional class expects the poor and soon to be poorer middle class to support their social agenda without regard to their own well-being. It’s easier to hold the moral high ground when you’re not worried about your house being repossessed or losing everything you have if you get sick or the plant closes or they find someone younger and cheaper to replace you.
…as way too much tolerance for racism, and yes, some moral high grounds are worth defending come hell or high water.
I think you engage in the reverse binary where the fight for social equality is somehow a lesser or distracting fight from the fight for economic equality.
Both are linked and depend on one another to affect real progress. Downplaying one to appease Wall Street and Silicon Valley would be a mistake. Downplaying the other to appease a caricature of Middle America would be another.
I refuse to let women lose their right to choose, LGBT Americans lose their hard win rights, black lives not matter, or allow Latinos and Muslims to be scapegoated. I also refuse to continue pretending we can negotiate our principles with Wall Street and come away with our credibility with working America intact.
I agree. I especially agree with your words about “casual racism”.
We know from decades of research that one effect of television news is to cause viewers to over-estimate crime rates in their neighborhood. People see story after story about violent crime, and they come to believe that a bad guy is lurking just outside their door.
Michael Moore showed us years (perhaps even a decade) ago that our broadcast media amplify our fears and our racism (casual or otherwise) with their frequent spots showing violent young black men committing crimes on “reality” crime shows. The proportion of blacks to whites is starkly higher in these broadcasts in comparison to actual statistics.
Clips of well-behaved white cops perp-walking badly-behaved black thugs to waiting squad cars make much “better” TV than, for example, white-collar criminals being arraigned after embezzling orders of magnitude more money.
The result is that millions of Americans who claim to not hate blacks nevertheless fear black men out of all proportion to reality.
Just because you didn’t hear Sec. Clinton discuss inner cities, racial inequality, jobs and opportunity doesn’t mean she didn’t.
And Trumps campaign rhetoric about “Inner Cities” were dripping with dog whistle racism. Calling inner cities “ghettos”. Only referring to inner cities in the context of blacks. Scare-mongering (can’t walk to the store for bread without being shot”).
He was not appealing to blacks. He was playing to his base.
I don’t care how he gets people to pay attention to inner cities, as long as he works to make them better, and as long as he doesn’t make them worse.
Hillary Clinton had a plan – and no, the media didn’t cover it – but my perception is that it was not one of the top planks in her platform.
My point is, we could preempt Trump at the state level by using state dollars to help our inner cities. Why isn’t this a priority? We have a Democratic legislature and had a Democratic governor for 8 years. Yes, some things have been done – the Gateway Cities initiative – but not much else.
We run the risk of ceding voters in economically depressed regions to Republicans if we continue to primarily focus on racism, climate change, and the MBTA.
I agree with you on former AG Coakley. I believe that you and I both did not support her for similar reasons– reasons which did not apply to Hillary Clinton.
But it is also clear that AG Coakley’s greatest sin, by far, in the eyes of the existing Democratic Party, was running a poor campaign, and all other sins could be overlooked because she was on the “right” side of certain hot button issues, which tend to be “New Left” civil-rights issues. Like it or not, this is evidence in favor of johntmay’s theory that the Democratic Party as presently constituted is willing to overlook any departure from what should be its pro-poor/working/middle class positions, so long as these certain priorities are properly adhered to.
In other words, there is a grain of truth to the notion that the us/them, left/right, liberal/conservative divide is drawn by the existing Democratic Party largely on culture war grounds. A stand in favor of civil rights should be necessary but not sufficient for a Democratic candidate that upholds the party’s ideals, but it is not.
Clinton was seen as part of a political system that had failed to respond to people’s concerns. I don’t think there was anything she could have done during the campaign to change the negative public perceptions of her. Her problem was that she was indeed part of that system, not that she ran a bad campaign. I think Coakley ran a bad campaign.
I think Coakley was also seen as part of a failed political system that didn’t respond to people’s concerns, and apparently Hillary kept a lighter schedule than Trump and disregarded the advice of Bill and others to campaign more in the states that she lost.
I agree I am tired of arguing about her, but we shouldn’t sugarcoat the loss and how preventable it was. We will all be on the same side preventing it in the future after all.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin that will exceed two million voters.
A football team that gained more ground yards, more passing yards, more first downs, and held the ball longer and still lost the game would be harshly criticized. They would not be correctly accused of playing a bad game or of lacking necessary football skills.
Hillary Clinton ran a fine campaign, a much better campaign than Martha Coakley. Even Martha Coakley outperformed her initial polling results, so one can argue that it was only her campaign that made her as competitive as she was.
I think that the Hillary Clinton v Martha Coakley comparison produces much more smoke than light.
I’m batting .500 for campaigns managed which isn’t bad but I would be the first to admit it doesn’t indicate anything. The Keri Thompson campaign had great volunteers, resources, and staff and not enough time. We ended up widely underestimating our voters showing up and the ground game for our opponents. Badly. But I still feel I gave it my all and the first time campaigners who volunteered worked hard. It’s not their fault.
Similarly, I won’t take too much credit for the 67-33% win for the CPA in Chelsea. We had identified 45% YES votes going in, and I felt win or lose, my team had put in it’s best effort with the time and resources it had. And then we had a huge victory that was a bright light for a community reeling from the Trump victory. So who knows? My friend who worked the Clinton campaign is sincere in saying they ticked all the boxes and still lost.
No one here is saying let’s move to the middle and bring back Robert Rubin. I do think there is a broad consensus that the tools progressives used for the last political era are ill equipped for this one. That we need a more broad based message that’s universal rather than segmented. And I think that is how we recover a majority.
Earth to Somerville, hello Somerville.
News Flash
Trump 302, Clinton 232.
Score a WIN for Trump and a stunning loss for the consummate politician who was touted as the most qualified person to ever run for the presidency.
A fine campaign? Really?
… perhaps if the fineness of the campaign is at odds with the result, the the result was derived independently.
An insane result like “2 + 2 = fish” is not an indictment of either mathematics or mathematicians.
as he explained how the GOP won the MD governorship in 2014, is that even a small chance is still a chance. Unlikely yes, impossible, no.
I heard something on the radio that I hasn’t heard before- that pollsters sometimes suppress results that are outliers to all other polls. Someone could have had this but it wasn’t out there. Note that while most polls (rightly) had Ayotte and Hassan neck and neck, one came out two weeks before with Hassan up 8 points. So mistakes happen and you can see why a poll that goes outside the rest looks bad.
I think there are a number of reasons why she lost. She can be excused for thinking that PA, MI, and WI were safe. Maybe they needed better internal polls. I’m not sure a regular poll would have picked up that variation.
the reason I am harping on this is that this mentality is counter productive. Had she won the presidency by taking MI, WI, and PA by as slim a margin as Trump had the narrative would have changed dramatically.
We’d be talking about how the American People rebuked a campaign of hate. And we wouldn’t be discussing why so many in the working class went for Trump.
did not stop to take a shit, he would have caught the rabbit. That’s a phrase my dear old grandmother used to tell me. Hillary lost because she and her wing of the party abandoned the labor class. End of story.
as my brother used to say.
We can keep Monday-morning quarterbacking until the cows come home but it’s still mental masturbation. It might feel good but it’s still wasted energy.
Not that wasted energy doesn’t have its place. 🙂 lol
I’m getting silly now after 12 months of 10 to 15 hour days on the campaign trail and the battle scars of two loss notches on my belt to prove it.
But being the glutton for punishment that I am. today I signed onto the campaign of my hometown friend and war veteran, Democrat Dan Benjamin, candidate for the Wakefield Board of Selectmen in the upcoming April 25, 2017 town election.
” Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Fred Rich LaRiccia
She did better than most newcomers her age would have done.
If it can’t be flipped this cycle by someone with her money, connections and campaign chops it’ll be a tough one. That said, her future is bright and the young women I know who worked on her campaign will be candidates themselves someday.
That’s what blogs are for. Apparently.
And it excuses her for running a poor campaign and excuses the Democrats for being at the nadir of state level political control. There is now a real danger that Democrats could be the regional party for the next few years, since Trump found an end run around the demographic destiny problem by winning more white voters than anyone could ever have possibly predicted.
And he did it by ditching large swaths of conservative orthodoxy with no consequences from his base, since it turns out they weren’t really conservative. They just wanted a whites only welfare state. We continue to underestimate him at our peril. He will not be the pawn of Ryan or McConnell, the GOP will be remade in his image and will be a rubberstamp for his agenda.
What is needed is to embrace the elements of that agenda that will help Americans (fair trade, public works projects) and oppose vigorously everything else that will radically transform this country into something we don’t want it to be.
We don’t avoid that outcome by running the same tired social liberalism first playbook. It is past it’s sell by date. We need to be a workers party again, or we will see him transform the GOP into a white workers party which will be enough to win more elections than last weeks.
We are in serious fucking trouble, and denying that is counter productive. The era of Clintonism is over. The era of being actual Democrats again has finally arrived.
1. We need to acknowledge that we are now a society where tens of millions of us want to be workers and are denied the opportunity — and are therefore relegated to abject poverty
2. Many of us who are workers are black, Hispanic, and born somewhere else (or from parents who were born somewhere else). Half of us are female. Many of us are part of the LGBTQ community. When we talk about being a workers party, it is CRUCIAL that we not be a white male workers party.
But I actually think if we reframe all the social justice issues underneath economic inequality we will be more successful.
There are two facts we have to boldly state at every opportunity:
1) The wealthy have all the power
2) Democrats want to restore power to the people
That’s it. It’s a universal message. One Trump won with, but will fail at delivering on for two reasons.
1) He has staffed his White House with Wall Street hacks and will fail at draining the swamp since he wants to be the king of the swamp.
2) Prioritizing the white nationalists in his coalition makes him a one term President
Not just because America is diverse, but because it forces the half of his supporters who wanted the swamp drained to realize that they did vote for a racist who had no interest in draining the swamp. That double realization is required to make them Democratic voters again. And we get there by focusing like a laser on income inequality and restoring power to the people.
So explain that “Super Delegate” thing?
Superdelegates are people who get untethered votes at the Democratic Convention because THEY’VE GIVEN THEIR LIVES AND SACRIFICED A GREAT DEAL FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
Bernie made a last ditch appeal to super delegates to overturn the will of primary voters and select him instead because Hillary was damaged goods. So both campaigns were ready to use this tool to hijack the primary process from the voters if it meant their side won.
That said, I absolutely agree that they should go. They are a vestige of a more cautious and frankly racist party structure (people forget they were there to stop Jesse Jackson-not McGovern).
I don’t object to people whose prior service and political skills make them assets to the Democratic Party; thus making them eligible for super delegate status.
My uprate was because you pointed out that both sides tried to game the system. For good or ill there is a term for gaming the system: Politics.
We really, really need to stop this. Does the Democratic Party have racism in its history? Sure. But superdelegates have nothing to do with that, in 2016.
In the fight between the Daley regulars and Jesse Jackson’s delegation in 72′. The Daley delegates, white party regulars embarrassed at being out pol’d by Jessse Jackson, were instrumental in creating the super delegate structure. I might add President Johnson first proposed them when the Mississippi Freedom Delegation threatened to derail his unity convention in 64′.
But sure, they are wrong on their own merits as well.
Per my sourcing.
The irony is, Jackson actually had a great way to appeal to working class whites with his two campaigns focusing on simultaneous racial reconciliation and working class empowerment. These are not mutually exclusive concepts folks!
Yup, screw them…..we don’t need them. Last Tuesday was proof of that!
We need to be a Workers Party. Period. No more qualifiers.
I think we tried to be the ‘white professionals, women and people of color and young people party’ and it didn’t work. But Workers Party has to be inclusive of all of those folks and white working class males in order to be vibrant.
Roosevelt was a civil rights champion, be he ran first and foremost as a champion for the common man. I really think that is the roots we have to return to. Champion for the Common Person. Which includes all the people whose rights are threatened by Trump, including the blue collar workers he is already busy fucking over.
“it is CRUCIAL that we not be a white male workers party.”
I’d feel better if he had said it is CRUCIAL that we include white male workers into our party while retaining the other demographics.
…black voters felt equally slighted.
The class bigotry you cite is also applicable to (and used against) the majority of blacks and Latinos. FWIW, a lot of working-class folks of all colors – including working class women – were actively slighted by the Clinton people, particularly in the last weeks of the campaign.
In the case of the women, many of them flipped to Trump as a result.
I am not saying, in any way, that we aren’t in trouble. I am saying the we lost by a slimmer margin than a “shellacking” would indicate. Yes, we should have won and by a landslide.
But I am also saying that HAD we won MI/WI/PA the narrative would have been: “all-is-well-in-the-world. We beat a modern day fascist.” And we wouldn’t be addressing the issue that caused us to almost lose to a modern day fascist.
Which is why we have to take the opportunity to confront those issues now. They would’ve eventually caught up to a President Clinton, but now that the unthinkable is reality we have to confront them now.
But we should be discussing that, so I’m glad we are.
When the GOP holds the senate, house, and an overwhelming majority of state legislative seats and governorships.
I’m not sure of the etymology of “shellacking” in the sense that we use it here. I do know that shellac is a fragile and thin layer spread on some substrate.
We are in dire, dire straits for exactly the reasons you cite. I note that all of the things you mention were true before the 2016 election. We had hoped and worked for an outcome in 2016 that changed this sad fact, and it was not to be.
I fear that you minimize how serious our plight now is by your focus on this election. We Democrats won the popular election, by more than two million votes. We gained seats in the house.
This was not a “shellacking”, this was two-by-four upside the head to get our attention — to remind us of the reality that we need to rebuild our party and our movement from the ground up.
too.
At a gathering of Democrats last night, some insisted this was the fault of the Russian and racists, others said that it’s just Hillary haters, then there were the typical comments that “those people” just need more education (in other words, they are low class, lazy, and not smart enough to know what’s best for them), but there was a spark of interest about the working class, but not nearly enough for my taste.
We lost the white working class vote by ignoring their needs and quite blatantly righting off their votes as relevant. Plenty of people here engaged in the latter, but no one engaged in the former. This is because every progressive already believes in a broad based prosperity agenda.
That said, let’s not sugarcoat the fact that racist Americans are emboldened by the President-elect as is the Russian government. We can oppose racism and foreign interference in our elections while also acknowledging our appeal to working families fell woefully, almost historically short of what it should have been.
n/t
…Stipulated. That happened. But so what? How does that justify the election of the most dishonest, admitted sexual-predator and serial bigot since, at least, before the Civil War, if ever?
There is no line from there to here. None. It doesn’t exist.
AND
it borders upon dishonesty on our part to try to draw such a line where none exists. Trump voters voted irrationally. No amount of being-more-rational is going to change that UNTIL they are confronted with that simple fact.
I can only hope there was more than a spark of interest in championing forgotten working class folks like you and me.
Unless and until we get back to bread and butter issues we will be a minority party.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
We call them “people without a college degree”. We have a disdain for them in our party. We call for “free college” for them to bring them up to our level of sophistication. We explain to them that the reason their employers are able to take so much of the wealth that their labor produces is that they are not worthy of such wealth, without a college degree.
Some personal anecdotes I’d like to share. While still in college, I worked as a waiter in an upscale restaurant. I made damn good money, enough to buy a new car, paid in cash. My friends with college degrees were shocked that I was making more than them. After graduation, with a BA in History and the decision to scrap my plans on going to law school, I went to work selling cars and instantly made more than a someone I knew who objected to my high income because “he has a masters’ and I was not even using my degree.
That mentality is still strong in our party and it hurts us. It helped elect Donald J. Trump.
a great proposal. The astronomical cost of college is one of the things that is killing the middle class. Free college resonated more when Sanders proposed it because he was the one Democrat who was speaking to the middle class.
Yup, he was wrong. A college education is not the answer. If we were all college educated, we still need retail clerks, dishwashers, hotel housekeepers, warehouse workers, and so much more sorts of labor that do not require a college education.
Two of those categories will be largely automated within 15 years. Perhaps we prepare for the future rather than resist it?
Yup, he was wrong. A college education is not the answer. If we were all college educated, we still need retail clerks, dishwashers, hotel housekeepers, warehouse workers, and so much more sorts of labor that do not require a college education.
Hillary Clinton forgot that. Working America has been so fucked over the last 40 years that our civil society itself has been rotting from the core of the vanished middle class. Charles Murray has discussed this from the right, Thomas Frank and Robert Putnam from the left. The old service clubs are dead, churches are dead, and all that is left is me and mine.
Nobody cares about Alice Machado. They care about making sure they can put food on their table, pay for the kids sports equipment and a vacation every now and then, not get buried in health care costs, and make sure their kids get good jobs too. If college provides that great, if not, they will look elsewhere.
Free community college is a great plan that will allow most people to get their gen ed requirements out of the way and pursue specialties like accounting, nursing, and some vocational. Franklin Tech is the kind of vocational institution we should be devoting more funding too.
I have a job. I’m 61 years old and I have a part time job paying $12 an hour, no benefits and I work with dozens of people in the same situation. It’s like my health care coverage that Hillary bragged about so many being “covered” by insurance, only the reality is that the policies were crap.
We demand more than jobs. I’ll just quote FDR:
What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security–security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security–these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. These are the values that this program is intended to gain; these are the values we have failed to achieve by the leadership we now have.
Those were marvelous, inspiring words when they were spoken.
They are largely irrelevant today. This elevation of “work” is, like it or not, obsolete. That obsolescence is only to become more apparent.
People, especially young people, who attempt to build their lives around “work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it”, are destined to be trapped in an ever-descending spiral towards poverty.
Whatever spiritual values are needed to guide us in today’s world, “work” — service for others done in exchange for wages — is not high on the list.
The GDP keeps rising, meaning wealth continues to be created. If wealth is not being created by the man at the drive up window at the doughnut shop and the clerk at the dry cleaners and the cashier at the food market, where is it being created and why is most all of it going to a tiny minority? And WHY do we allow that?
We’ve been over this ground before.
The wealth goes to the tiny minority who control the intellectual property and everything else in the value creation chain. The “man at the drive up window” is a very small part of that, as are the other roles you describe.
Service jobs like these pay as little as the people on top can get away with. The people on top spend boatloads of money to make the skill level of service employees as low as possible.
The inexorable trend is to remove labor from the wealth creation chain, while simultaneously increasing the efficiency of that chain.
I encourage you to listen to the Ballad of John Henry, dating from the last century. The battle between John Henry and “the steam drill” is symbolic of what we’re talking about.
John Henry ALWAYS loses. If not today, then tomorrow. Automation and machines are ALWAYS going to beat the workers they aim to replace. If not today, then tomorrow.
If we care about workers, then we must change this game — workers will ALWAYS lose this one.
This focus on “jobs” is pure self-defeating bullshit.
Nobody claims, today, that a college education is “the answer”. The reality is, instead, that life without a college education is almost certainly going to be many times harder. A college education is, today, “necessary and not sufficient”. One of the genuine tragedies of today’s society is that so few Americans understand that phrase (“necessary and not sufficient”).
The “ante” is what it costs to play the game. Paying the ante most certainly does not guarantee that one will win — most people who play, in fact, lose. So long as we preserve a society where we rely on labor to distribute wealth, than each and every one of us must play the game. A college education is the ante for that game. Most people who pay that ante lose anyway. The suggestion that not paying will somehow help is just as insane as the millennials who conclude that not voting is a constructive answer to candidates that they don’t like.
Those young people who “look elsewhere” and avoid getting a college degree are virtually guaranteeing that their lives will be spent in abject poverty (or as dependents of their parents, in some demographics). The statistics are clear and compelling. It is true that young people WITH a college a degree face often overwhelming challenges (especially if they are also saddled with student debt). It is also true that those who enter life without a college degree are far worse off.
The “jobs” we demand will not come back. Americans can stomp their feet, vote for whatever candidates they choose, kill their scapegoats, destroy the fragile fabric of our society — NONE of that will bring those jobs back. They are GONE.
We all need college. We all need college to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century world we live in. We need that whether or not we have jobs. Life is going to be a bitch for those with a degree. It is going to be many times worse for those without one.
What we need in order to live is to take back the wealth that the top one percent is plundering from us. We need to find ways to distribute that wealth that do NOT demand that we work at jobs that don’t exist.
We need to reshape the fundamental bedrock of our American economy.
Sanders had a plank on free college education, but he also had a plank on our disastrous trade agreements, and that has been an issue of his for a long time. He also had a plank about income inequality, noting that the gains are primarily going to the upper class.
n/t
This is just another flavor of false equivalence. The effect is to normalize racism and bigotry and put it up there as a viable alternative as though a piece of shit on a stick is just valid competition to our big shiny lollipop of progressivism. There is nothing that any Democrat, and in particular Hillary Clinton, did to justify the response. The response was simply bullying and childish, immature and mean-spirited.
To be perfectly blunt, nobody nowhere never had to provide a substantive alternative to lynching. The fact of a decent respect for human beings was substantive alternative enough. So you think it’s alright that nobody’s been truly lynched?? It’s just a difference in degree, but not in kind…
The election of Trump is a giant step backwards. People made it knowing the difference between the candidates. They chose the turd on a stick in full knowledge that it was, at best, a middle finger to the entire establishment and at worst a fuck-you to the entire Enlightenment. That kind of attitude is childish and can’t be appeased. Nothing Democrats have done is responsible for it. Nothing the Democrats will do to appease it will fix it.
Here are a few other things I would think that nobody need provide a substantive alternative:
wife-beating
pissing in the street.
public drunkenness
poking yourself in the eye with a stick.
poking yourself in the eye with a stick sharpened for exactly that purpose.
poking yourself in the eye with a stick sharpened for exactly that purpose and swirled in Cobra venom.
That’s a self fulfilling prophecy then that ensures Trump gets re-elected and controls Congress for eight years. FUCK THAT. I want Democrats bold enough to win elections. Hillary Clinton was not. Martha Coakley was not. Cory Booker will not be. But Elizabeth Warren was, Bernie Sanders was, and a host of young diverse leaders coming in the wake of their elections will be bold.
The message is simple:
–The system is rigged against working people and we will seize back the power taken from us and restore it to the people.
Period. Nothing else matters. Choice, defending civil rights, all of that important stuff falls under that umbrella. But the power is in the hands of the wealthy and connected, and has to be restored to the people. Trump got this rhetorically, obviously his staff his full of white nationalists and Wall Street hacks so he isn’t this champion. But we attack him on both fronts.
Your voters didn’t vote for white nationalism to be in power, they wanted you to restore power to the people. They didn’t vote for a cabinet of Wall Street hacks, they wanted you to restore power to the people.
Focusing like a laser on his failure to drain the swamp is how we beat Trump Warren gets this.
I reject your use of several homophobic epithets and ask the editors to remove them.
That’s news to me.
I don’t think you are am “aggressively stupid, bottom-feeding, cock-sucking dilettente fuck.”
But the fact that you are willing to flag it, and seek authoritative remedy for the clear breach that it is… all the while making excuses ’bout this that and the ‘tother with regard to Trump voters is my point.
You want to dance around the breach of every norm by Trump and you want to blame Clinton for it. The Trump voters, in response to a dedicated public servant who gives health care to children, decided they’d rather have a lumpy piece of shit on a stick, with a ridiculous toupee and tiny hands.
But “argh coakly anger Idontwannaloseanymore grrr” is the only response you got…
Trump voters thought they were voting to drain the swamp of lobbyists, some of them were racists, and some of them were both.
Looking at Trump’s appointments so far it is pretty obvious he wants a white nationalist in the White House and has no qualms about filling the rest of the positions with Wall Street hacks. So we say that! Say to the Trump voter ‘look at your President, he isn’t draining the swamp but he is hiring racists, how does that make you feel?’
Chances are saddened and duped. Which is good, and then they vote Democrat again. Calling them all racists and stupid is exactly the wrong way to solve this problem. But pointing out that Trump, so far, has done nothing on draining the swamp while elevating white nationalists to power is exactly the right approach.
Follow Sen. Warren’s lead and I will STFU about Coakley or Clinton. They are yesterdays party anyway, time to focus on the future.
… “is this what you wanted?” It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited or triumphant. It just needs to be asked.
The Democratic party is entirely de-legitimized in the eyes of many voters. What de-legitimized them is the constant stream of lies and smear by the Right who cannot possibly win any other way. No amount of anything done by the Democratic party is going to legitimize them in their eyes: that’s exactly and precisely what it means to be de-legitimized.
I will not. You are mistaken. You were wholly mistaken about Coakley and you have wildly misread what happened to Clinton (in part because of your own preciousness regarding your views on Coakley) and so the future you focus on will be a continuing series of mistakes and misreadings on your part.
Like I said, we disagree on whether Clinton or Coakley were good candidates in the past. We also can agree that they aren’t going to be candidates in the future, so I would rather focus on the next generation of progressive leaders.
n/t
… I would.
I did something truly awful writing what I wrote. Hillary Clinton didn’t make me write it. No amount of how unlikeable Hillary Clinton is excuses it. I did it and you are all very much in the right to condemn me for it.
But it’s no different from Trump voters and Trump himself breaking every norm of honesty, decorum and integrity. But you all would all rather dance around that and pretend it was something the Democrats did, or did not, do that derived this outcome.
That’s my point.
So, I repeat my question to you all: Why are you not afraid to say that about me, but are afraid to say that about a Trump voter?
Sorry for that.
… go ahead.
But my point is going to gnaw at you until you face it. Unless you really are feckless.
Clinton ran as a connected insider who can get things done working in Washington in an election demanding a change agent willing to shake up the entire system. Trump won the voters who wanted change according to exit polls. That had nothing to do with racism.
Trump also won the endorsement of extremists and racists who have gone on a hate crime spree since his election. That has everything to do with racism. We can agitate for broad based working class prosperity while also calling out racial injustice at every turn surely as much as we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Your insistence that anyone who wants to emphasize working class prosperity is simultaneously ignoring or enabling racism is the kind of self defeating liberal tunnel vision that got us into this very mess.
Keep re-litigating the election and pretty soon you’ll really believe yourself.
In the meantime, my question remains: why would you call me out on bigotry and homophobic slurs, going so far as to ask for their erasure, without confronting either Trump or a Trump voter on similar grounds?
If bigotry, dishonesty and sexism is ever acceptable, which is really the essence of your “Democrats didn’t do enough” argument, why should my bigoted (and dishonest) tirade be sanctioned??
If bigotry, dishonesty and sexism are never ok, what part of “Democrats didn’t do enough” draws any kind of line right to Donald Trump?
I have consistently condemned racism and sexism here and in my personal life. I have never argued Democrats have to support bigotry and sexism to be electable. That is the most backward way to read anything I have posted and is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw regarding this election.
My entire point is opposing bigotry and sexism is not enough Democrats have to do more
Let me turn the table, why do you insist that they shouldn’t do more? Why is reaching out to working class voters beneath you and your station? Why should we continue to nominate cookie cutter corporate candidates who aren’t bold progressives?
I did not ask you if you personally racist and/or sexist.
I asked you: why you are willing to (rightly) confront and condemn me for my awful deed but are unwilling to confront or condemn the actual voters who actually voted for Donald Trump?
But making the clear statement, as you have, that Democrats failed and thereby making the inference that, in a perfectly logical and rational manner, the electorate had no choice but to vote Donald Trump. The very saying of this elevates bigotry, sexism and dishonesty to the playing field. It suggests they are perfectly acceptable and altogether viable alternatives to Democratic shortcomings. Donald Trumps speech and actions are as despicable and deplorable as my statement about you above. Why, then, do you insist that the problem is the Democrats?
Because the most qualified candidate in the history of all candidates just lost to a complete chump. How are you to be more rational and hope to succeed in the face of that? People who voted for the chump — who were deliberately and repeatedly lied to by the chump — are irrational. What about ‘doing more’ on the part of Democrats is going to change that? The fact of the matter is people have to think. And when they don’t think they shouldn’t be surprised when that’s pointed out. We are, or ought to be, all adults here.
Your strawman argument is nonsense, and your “point” gives you no right to throw slurs around.
We are not afraid to call the Trump supporters who are racist/sexist/whatever if they are. The point is simply that not all of them are, and you are flat out wrong to say they are. You should face that fact.
…Not all of them are outright racists but, clearly, that a sizeable portion are outright racist isn’t enough for them to distance themselves condemns them even more. To salve their purported injury they would allow others to be injured? ‘feckless’ is hardly praise in any instance, never mind compared to ‘vicious’.
You should face that fact.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Bernie Sanders lost most of the primary elections by a wide margin, and the few he won were by a razor-thin margin.
When the president-elect is embraced by white nationalism and appoints a white nationalist as his chief advisor, when voters who supported that candidate were well aware of his ties to such people and voted for him anyway, then your claim that “voters didn’t vote for white nationalism to be in power” is sophistry. In fact, that is EXACTLY what 60 million Americans DID vote for.
America voted to elevate, to president, a man who is a sexual predator, a liar, a bankrupt (multiple times), a fraud, a man who stiffs his suppliers at every opportunity, and a man who more than anything else whipped up mobs against whatever his chosen scapegoat of the moment was.
I think we need to change America. I think we need to change America at the grassroots — in our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our places of worship, our schools — all the places we gather and socialize. I think we need to show people, through example and through the lives we model, what we believe and where we place our faith.
I think that as we do that, we will gain allies and make enemies. I think all these political tactics and strategies will unfold in the fullness of time, and I think we’ll need skilled politicians to carry them out as all this happens.
I think we are living in a brave new world. I’m not sure that any bromides we offer right now will make even a tiny bit of difference.
The voters overwhelmingly agreed with the sentiment that he system is rigged and power has to be turned back to the people. This is a golden opportunity to return to the New Deal roots of the party and rebuild the last sustaining governing coalition we had. Make the Democratic Party Democratic again!
Shun the money changers and empower grassroots organizers. This is the model that will win election after election and already has. Corporate cookie cutter campaigns are losers. Time to be bold.
Because it’s not an attack, it’s a form of rhetoric. 😉
Sorry.
Do it. Or don’t do it. But the tacked on ‘Sorry’ suggests a response that is ambiguous at best.
I did it deliberately. I went beyond the pale and said something truly and unambiguously awful as well as being dishonest (since I don’t believe it, but will say so outright if that needs to happen) to make a point. I received multiple downrates, was called a ‘troll’ and was rightly excoriated for it. Here’s the thing: I should have been. I did a bad thing. Nobody who disapproved held back nor should they have. I expected it and would have been disappointed had the response been different. But I’m not going to apologize for it because the point needs to be made: When it comes to the horrible thing this electorate did we’d all rather diddle around, dither about, and offer toothless apologia placing blame where it doesn’t belong. Why? Why can’t we confront the electorate like I was rightly confronted here? Is it because they are ‘angry’? And why should we apologize for that? That’s taking liberalism to an obsequious end.
If it is taken down it should be taken down because it is an awful thing to keep up. But if you are going to apologize for taking it down, you might as well leave it up.
It is disturbing that an entire campaign spent the last year saying things many times worse than this post, and that candidate was just elected president.
While I was uncomfortable with the post, I think petr made his point rather well.
I don’t think he had a point. When have any of us here excused any of the things Trump has said or that many of his openly racist voters are espousing? I am saying this is a reality based community that should be comfortable with nuance and distinctions and not paint with broad brushes.
Much of Trump’s own rhetoric, many in his inner circle, and yes many of his voters espoused racist and misogynist views. All of that has been well documented on this site for the past year. Nobody is hiding from it.
What people here are hiding from is the fact that they were wrong and me and the many others who consistently warned against this outcome, predicted exactly how it could happen, and have been brainstorming solutions to this problem before it occurred were right. It is our party now. Clinton and her husband did a good job, but their ideas and methods are now obsolete and new ones have to be embraced. New people too.
He most certainly did have a point, and it was conveyed outside the text of his comment.
His point, to me, is that his comment was properly reviled, rejected, and ultimately removed because it was so offensive.
You ask “When have any of us here excused any of the things Trump has said or that many of his openly racist voters are espousing?”, and to me the answer is in the difference between the reaction of some here to Trumpist rhetoric and the reaction to the now-removed comment.
We draw a bright hard line here against comments like that posted by petr. We have a far more “tolerant” behavior for similar — or worse — comments from Donald Trump, his supporters, and those among us who demand that we be “sensitive” to those supporters.
I think petr’s demonstration was compelling, frankly.
Asking why your precious data based corporate campaign that ignored working class anger out of hand failed is not the same as excusing racism. Repeating this false dichotomy doesn’t make it any easier or the hard work we all have to do any easier.
It wasn’t my campaign. Nobody is ignoring working class anger. That is the point.
It was definitely ignored, downplayed or dismissed by many here and by the Clinton campaign.
… that’s not an attack. That’s an actual question, because your apparent lack of reading comprehension is getting in the way.
When you, and others, elevate them to the level of acceptable alternative. That’s when. You excused the things Trump, and his many supporters, have said when you blamed the Democrats for not offering “anything substantial”. There is no horse trading here. You can’t trade a few racists for a progressive-to-be-named-later. Nothing the Democrats have done requires the electorate to even consider Donald Trump as an acceptable alternative. Just like there is nothing for which my awful statements made previously are acceptable. You didn’t even need to offer a substantive alternative to my vile remarks. You merely said “this is unacceptable. Take it down.”
At the risk of invoking Godwins corollary I’ll point this out: in Germany, by law, you cannot vote for the Nazi party. This is because what they did was unacceptable. You don’t have to offer a substantive alternative to the Nazis. DUH I had thought, apparently erroneously, that an equally strong, if unwritten prohibition, existed in America about the Ku Klux Klan.
Find me quotes where I said we have to target racist voters or excuse then.
You sir are being a persistent idiot ignoring data that working class voters concluded Hillary didn’t stand up to Wall Street enough and we need a more authentic fighter to take them on at every level of government. Like Senator Warren, we can condemn racism and embrace economic populism. I utterly refuse to surrender the mantle of populism to racist demogogues, having done that several elections already the Democrats and the country can’t afford to do that again.
The choice between continuing unfettered global trade and refusing to stand up to corporate greed by taking corporate dollars and rejecting and acknowledging the nasty racism from this campaign are not mutually exclusive.
I come from the white working class and have racist relatives who are relatively affluent that voted for Trump. My Filipina wife and in laws, Latino niece and nephew and black niece and nephew are terrified. Absolutely I acknowledge that and will defend people of color because they are part of my own family. You live in some affluent all white suburb removed from the reality of working class resentment, and I don’t have time to be lectured by you.
I spent the last two months organizing a Latino community and developing a widely successful cross racial coalition. What organizing have you done? What midwestern campaigns have you worked on where losing factory jobs isn’t a slogan but a lived in reality? Have you been to Springfield this year? Holyoke? Communities that hurt need help and dismissing every voter who disagrees with you as a racist fails to actually stop racism and actually elect real populists. Keep it up pal and continue alienating your allies and see how lonely your smug world is.
… no. you can’t really read all that well.
Fair enough. Sorry for wasting your time. I won’t take up any more.
I think that one point you’re making is that we can’t dismiss casual racists from our coalition to build a platform on economic populism. I’m not suggesting we openly court racists the way that Trump did, but I think that being hostile towards anyone who has held a racist belief drove voters to Trump. We have to watch those lines of division in the future, not falling for setups.
Yes, Trump is surrounding himself with active racists. That doesn’t matter to a casual racist as long as Trump is catering to their economic needs. That person will not choose our economic plan even though it may be identical to Trump if a condition is “you have to admit that you’re racist and renounce it”. Be happy to have them as an ally in a fight that will help non-white people, and work along the edges to guide them away from their racist beliefs, especially by exposing them to more non-white people – because most of the casual racists actually have black friends or even relatives.
And I am going to repeat this often.
DEMOCRATS need to ABANDON IDENTITY POLITICS and embrace CLASS POLITICS
They don’t need to abandon identity politics, certainly since the emboldened alt right won’t be. But making class the focus is the umbrella all progress flows from.
That means the lower classes, people who work for a living, people who own small businesses as opposed to large, the proverbial average joe, and of course the downtrodden.
We don’t have to call that class, or identity, but those will follow.
But it was an attack, in the guise of rhetoric.
See my response, above.
A demonstration of a desire to attack.
It looks more and more, to me, as though it was demonstration that very effectively reveals who each of us is. If all you see was attack, that in itself shows the effectiveness of the demonstration.
Well done, petr. Well done.
I give up trying to reason with you. I absolutely give up.
And why should I and the gay readers here be subjected to homophobic attacks because Petr is too stupid to realize that populism and racism are different interconnected things? And apparently you’re too stupid to realize that too? That there is such a thing as left wing populism and it won 48% of the vote in the last primary and likely would’ve won the last general election. That it’s our best foot forward as Sen Warren and Sen Sanders have eloquently showed us. Petrs trolling is counter productive and is not contributing to the discussions we need to have.
Of course it was. That’s exactly what made it unacceptable. I set out to do something unacceptable and I succeeded. Duh. So you refused to accept it. If you think I really believe it, you’re mistaken
You did’t blame anybody else on BMG for failing to proffer an ‘substantive alternative.’ You didn’t try to counter it with logic. You didn’t say “this is why you’re wrong.” You seconded a call to remove on the simple grounds that it was simply unacceptable. And so it was.
The situation is not at all different. The voters simply stated “Fuck You” and voted Trump despite every indication that he is dishonest, corrupt, stupid, petty and monstrously incompetent. But there… you DO try blame somebody else. You try to call out Hillary Clinton and the Democrats for failing to proffer a “substantive alternative.” You cling to your precious dislike of Clinton as though it is adequate reason for you, or anybody, to accept Trump. This is dangerous: this normalizes racism, sexism etc to the level of an acceptable alternative. It is not an acceptable alternative. My point.
I also agree with the emerging consensus of the party going forward, starting with Sanders and Warren, that we cannot dismiss ALL of his supporters as racists and expect to win their votes. Studies confirm this.
I get your upset as we all are that Clinton didn’t win. But insisting on following the same failed strategies of engagement is only going to make the situation worse.
“Most importantly, the Dems…offered little to induce minority voters to oppose Trump and vote for Clinton.”
If there’s anything that makes me want to throw in the towel on politics, this is it. Minority voters needed/were expecting INDUCEMENT to oppose Trump and vote for Clinton – SERIOUSLY?! The voters who were targeted for harassment by a campaign embraced by white nationalists? I get the results prove me wrong to some extent, but I still say anyway that America in 2016 should have rejected such a campaign without prompting. Hillary Clinton should have been able to hide for the last few months and STILL beaten him. For that matter the Dems should have been able to nominate a candidate nobody ever heard of and not campaign for that person either. The DUMB candidate should be so obviously offensive for being DUMB that voters on their own would flock to the polling places JUST to vote for WHOMEVER ELSE was also listed on the ballot just on general principles. I am disheartened beyond words that my country is not there yet.
There is a belief in many communities that the only difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the latter are more honest in their racism. I add that there is a century-old tradition of hostility between the black working class and white progressives. This is not ideological; the most hostility I hear against the white Left comes from black leftists.
The distinction between black and white disaffection is that the latter vote Republican, and the former don’t vote at all.
Had there been credible grassroots outreach by the Clinton campaign to black voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, the results would have been very different.
And re: Voter suppression. A competent ground game foresees this stuff (it wasn’t exactly hidden), and takes steps to counter it.
At its best New Deal/Great Society liberalism had labor and populist components that counterbalanced its elitist progressive faction.
Not coincidentally, there was a strong, organic, and accountable component which is absent in contemporary Democratic structures.
…and we won elections.
I don’t understand the hostility, nor do I think it’s productive. I’m also of the you vote because it’s election day mindset so I have great difficulty with the inducement charge (though ironically my strongest training/experience is in field, including GOTV).
An ironic case in point is how the institutional racism within Bernie Sanders’ campaign hurt him in South Carolina:
The same thing happened vis-a-vis the electorate at large from the Clinton campaign in the final election (In the specific case of black voters the dynamic was more racialized class bigotry than racism per se – an operational distinction without a difference). So in Pennsylvania, for example she hand-delivered the State to Trump.
As an aside, Trump even got a slightly higher per cent of the black vote than Romney did in 2012.
Long story short, Clinton’s organization operated as a Donald Trump outreach mechanism, due to the equal-opportunity bigotry hard-wired into the organizational culture of her campaign.
…of progressives acting in a racist manner, since in my book progressive and racist are pretty much mutually exclusive by definition. Your Glover example isn’t specific enough. Campaigns always target, but not focusing on a certain group does not mean the campaign has anything against that group. I doubt you would find a single racist in the Sanders operation.
But if you want more, here is some more Sanders stuff given his reputation for condescending racism in Vermont; this is addition to introducing a bill in Congress to dump nuclear waste from the Vermont Yankee power play in a primarily Latino town in Texas.
If that’s not enough for you you might want to read What It Takes by Richard Be Cramer. The book (still in print) is about the 1988 Presidential campaign, and goes in some detail about Michael Dukakis’ class bigotry and racism (as well as how he shafted principled progressives in Brookline).
Oy vey!
It’s still in print.
One of the more interesting aspects of his first race for Governor in 1974 was that Dukakis ran against a Republican incumbent from the Right. Said opponent was “soft on crime; soft on welfare”.
And let’s not forget: “Lead pipe cinch; No New Taxes”.
By and large their turnout is low.
The average income of Trump supporters exceeds the national average. In addition Trump captured majority votes from college-educated white men and white millennial men.
So all this piling on working class voters is nothing more than class-bigoted bullshit employed in arguably (relative to resources) the most incompetent campaign in American political history.
n/t
Non-voting blacks
Trump voting non college women
Working class white men
College educated white men (new)
White Millennial men (new)
Trump voting Latinos
Trump voters in WI, MI, PA, OH, NC, and FL
Bernie Sanders supporters
The Clinton campaign staff
The Russians
Comey
Wikileaks
I expect more to surface in the coming weeks…..
I voted for Berne
Maybe there was a lower Black turnout for Hillary because there were racist Blacks who just couldn’t pull the lever for one more whitey, even though she was a woman and said she felt their pain. They showed up for Barack and will again when a person of color gets the nod.
There was a lower black turnout for Hillary for the following reasons:
(1) Because their vote was taken for granted, there was little in the way of competent outreach.
(2) Those people who did work for her in black communities weren’t local, were too arrogant to develop expertise in local dynamics to gain any credibility or respect from the grassroots.
(3) A corollary to point two: Locally credible people, including local elected officials offered their services to the Clinton campaign; those offers were rebuffed, their phone calls weren’t returned, and in many cases the people themselves were personally insulted by the Clinton folk.
(4) The Clinton outreach was astoundingly incompetent in its operational premises. To quote an elected official in Ohio: “Who ever got the [highly elaborate and creative expletive] idea that Jay Z and Beyonce have any [equally creative expletive] political credibility with black folk?
(5) That there would be voter suppression mechanism on election day were a given, but few resources were devoted to assuring the right to vote.
(6) The on-the-ground logistics of GOTV were ignored in many communities – and this goes back to the Clinton campaign’s rejection of warnings and offers of assistance from qualified locals.
Your premise of racial essentialism on the part of black voters- the term “people of color” is demographically meaningless and politically racist – isn’t supported by the facts. What drove black turnout in 2012 was the black reaction to voter suppression attempts, the (belated) actions of the Obama people to use these attempts for black voter outreach, and the (equally belated) infusion of campaign resources for voter protection and get-out-the-vote.
Your premise notwithstanding black people aren’t passive, nor are they sheep.
Guess what, there are racist Blacks, Asians, Whites, etc…
We’ll see when the first Asian is nominated, or whatever category you want to name. Not everything is so complicated.
…when I accepted the implications of what I was hearing from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina.
Doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed off, though…
…but those constituencies have no excuses for supporting a DUMB candidate either!
…but he ain’t dumb.
The word is in all caps for a reason. People keep forgetting I use it as an acronym.
I don’t think people are forgetting. I don’t think your choice of acronym was very intentional.
Whatever Donald Trump is, he is not “dumb”.
Should have read: “I don’t think your choice of acronym was accidental”.
That word by itself may not be the most accurate, but I wanted it to be memorable (though at the same time, someone who believes much of what he does can’t be that bright either). I had this fantasy that if I and others started using it enough it would go viral, start trending, or something (and I HAVE received positive feedback on this as well). His outrageous negatives needed to be hammered home so decisively that I wish we had gotten to the point where no American could hear or read Trump’s name in the media with out automatically thinking (repeat after me) “Dangerous Unqualified Misogynistic Bigot”.
Warren is my hero. What ever else they might have done in the past or might do in the future, Warren, Sanders, and Reich are the party thought leaders right now (and, I hope, Obama can be too, once he’s out from under the presidency.) They are laying out agendas and being aggressive. EVERYONE agrees that we must stand against racism, homophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia/nativism, misogyny, and other forms of hatred/discrimination. That’s a given. Exactly how do you do that? You don’t do it by demonizing everyone who did not vote for Clinton in the election. You do it by condemning specific actions of Trump and republicans (such as the hiring of Bannon) and making it clear WHY. What’s not recognized by some is that, as jconway said, we have to seize the moment and make common cause with the voters who want reform for working people (whatever party they’re from or whatever candidate they voted for last week)–against the wall street interests and their republican puppets in the legislature. Warren gets this. It’s smart strategy. Sanders gets this. Reich gets this. They are all, in different ways, delivering the same message. I’m with them.
First of all, I’d like the point about Warren of all people taking WS money fact-checked. Second, even if she did I would argue the way she has acted makes her not a hypocrite, but rather whatever the polar opposite is.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/22/elizabeth-warren-fight-when-financial-interests-are-local-warren-doesn-always-fight-them/DkghG96OG60w9IZm1H1dhM/story.html