I know a few Trump voters, more than I wish I knew, but nonetheless, there they are. When the moment arises and we begin to talk about Trump, I know that now is a good time to enter into a dialogue. There are a number of Trump voters who know know they were duped. If you meet one, as I have a few times over the past few days, this is not the time for us to run their nose in it, as good as that might feel. No, now is the time to admit that our candidate had far too many negatives and that our party failed to nominate a candidate that had more appeal to so many voters. They were duped. They know it. The citizens who voted for Trump and now regret it are up for grabs and now it not the time for revenge. Now is the time for understanding and forgiveness, and making certain we get their vote next time.
Of course, if anyone still supports Trump, it’s time to make a note in their file that they cannot be reasoned with, no matter the circumstances.
Make them acknowledge that Trump / Russiagate is real before you kiss and make up . 🙂
And that Benghazigate was a lie.
No, that’s just bringing up old arguments. It’s like an old married couple arguing about something 20 years ago. Any marriage counselor would give the same advice. Let it go. Work on the positives.
Swing voters don’t care about Russia or Benghazi=those are issues for the base voter. Doesn’t matter that Russia is very real and Benghazi is a bunch of bullshit, opinions on this have become as polarized as they are about social issues like abortion. The new middle of the roader says ‘dont give a shit’ to that like they say about social issues. Economics is the only way to a recovery-as the Labour Party just showed us across the Pond and the successful Clinton campaign did in 1992.
Of course.
I can try somewhat to sympathize with being duped, though even on that point there was plenty of evidence this would happen BEFORE the election, so even that has its limits. I will never, however, abide this line: “No, now is the time to admit that our candidate had far too many negatives and that our party failed to nominate a candidate that had more appeal to so many voters.” She had a lot more positives, most of the negatives were the result of a generation of unfounded attacks, and she still got the most votes!
This is a textbook case of willful denial. Nobody outside of the blue states liked Hillary or trusted her. Her day is over. Experience has never mattered-swing voters always favor outsiders over insiders. Learn these facts well, or you are doomed to repeat the same mistake our party did in 2016. I might add you argued that this would never happen, while I predicted the very strategy he would use to win.
Too bad! I refuse to acknowledge that such was our problem unless you also let me acknowledge what horrible judges of character and competence some voters are. Yes, I got proven wrong somewhat on voters, but I was going where the evidence led and I refuse to just say that’s the way it is and tailor strategy to people who don’t know competence or lack thereof when it slaps them in the face. She DID get the most votes – that is a fact! Also, she was consistently at the top of the lists of most admired women, though I confess I never have figured out how that can simultaneously be true with being hated and distrusted by so many. I am never going to throw away my own primary vote or other manifestations of my support to mere strategy at the expense of a qualified potential POTUS.
And let’s not forget that lots of people *inside* the blue states didn’t like her or trust her; many only voted for her because she was the lesser of two evils!
Only two evils?
Let’s not forget that many of us found Mr. Sanders to be long on rhetoric and very short on substance. When questioners pointed out the political impossibility of doing what he proposed, his answer was to rely on magical powers wielded by a “political revolution” that he would, of course, lead.
Mr. Sanders, in fact, performed very poorly during the primaries in comparison to Ms. Clinton. Yes, he got more votes than pundits expected. No, he never came close to winning the primary. With some exceptions, the states where Mr. Sanders did best were the states where the primary process is most removed from the people (through caucuses, for example).
I’m disappointed that we are STILL talking about the “trust” issue here. This canard was the direct result of a multi-billion dollar investment by the right wing over a period of decades. There has never been any “there” there. If there is a lesson in this aspect of politics, it is that media advertising is persuasive and money talks.
We see the lies promulgated by the right wing each and every day, and we see how tens of millions of Americans embrace those lies as gospel truth. “Global warming is a hoax”. “Government is bad”. “Obamacare is bad for working-class people”. The “trust” issue of Ms. Clinton is another of these media lies, fabricated by wealthy right-wing crackpots (like Richard Mellon Scaife) and promulgated by their media sycophants.
Ms. Clinton was the best of the field of primary candidates who stepped forward for the 2016 campaign. She is loved and admired by many. She spent a lifetime fighting for her and our beliefs.
I think it’s time that we either leave the past behind or address it fairly. I’m weary of hearing the same canards about Ms. Clinton repeated over and over again.
Double-extra-super-plus-ditto.
It strikes me as hilarious that people who were duped about Hillary Clinton are all too willing to forgive others for being duped about Donald Trump… They are, in affect, making the argument for those of us who weren’t duped to forgive them.
I’m all for it. They will have my forgiveness when they ask for it. But they have to ask for it. Then we can, together, direct our attention to the … ahem… elephant in the room: the propensity to lie and cheat — indeed the gleeful abandon — with which the GOP scars the moral landscape.
And of course, I wouldn’t call her evil at all (or Sanders for that matter).
I think a bigger question is how do we beat Trump in 2018 and 2020? It’s not by running on the message that didn’t work in 2016. It’s running on something new, different, and exciting to voters. This goes far beyond Hillary or Bernie. Democratic voters settled that question in 2016. Swing voters settled the question of Trump or Hillary in 2016. So let’s actually figure out what message works with those voters and how to win them back. I give Al Franken tremendous amount of credit for doing that. So is Steve Bullock-and considering that they have won more Trump voters than either Bernie or Hillary have-it’s worth listening to their perspective too. This goes way beyond left v center. It’s about class and our party’s inability to communicate those issues effectively. I think once we field candidates who can, we can reverse this tide.
And I find it really discouraging that the first reaction many people had to John’s reasonable original post is the same vitriol and blaming that characterized this blogs primary coverage. I honestly don’t care about the personalities from last election. I care about messaging our ideas to the voters we need to be winning. It isn’t a choice-we tried winning without them and we lost-bigly. Time to focus on winning enough of them back to form a majority and a government. And absolutely young people and minorities are part of who we need to turn out too.
We need to EXPAND turnout among those who stayed home and probably would have been with us, preferably enough to CRUSH the Trump coalition rather than try to win more than a few over.
Johntmay, above, explicitly blames the messenger. Now you say it’s the message. Which is it?
And, while you’re at it tell my why, according to what you’ve said so far, under any and all circumstances the message (or the messenger) is responsible for the voters actions (or re-actions)??
You forget that so were our last three Presidents. Obama ran on hope and change, Bill ran on feeling your pain, and Carter ran on honesty. That’s it. Specifics lose elections. Al Franken has really figured this out. He said our problem is our bumper stickers should read ‘continued on next bumper sticker’. You don’t win elections with 20 point policy papers but with a spirit and a ethos that you have the voters back and will fight for them.
Franken is focusing like a laser on pointing out how Donald Trump has lied about not cutting Medicare, lied about not cutting Social Security and lied about making a system better than Obamacare. These are huge lies and they are lies that will lose him voters that trusted him more than Hillary on these issues. Of course those voters are irrational and likely had other biases at play. That didn’t stop Obama or Bill Clinton or Al Franken in MN from winning many of them. Franken says he knows 10% of his state voted for him in 14′ and voted for Trump in 16′. He is trying to figure out why instead of demonize them and right them off. He also did not spare Hillary the blame due to her campaign, and he is a very close friend of theirs.
We can criticize her without being called disloyal Democrats. We can also criticize Bernie without being disloyal progressives. Our weaknesses go deeper than the last primary and the personalities involved. It is a serious failure of our party to effectively communicate it’s values to people that should be our permanent voters. And ignoring this failure or blaming it solely on the other side will only perpetuate it and right wing government for several more decades. I am tired of losing-I want to win. And I am willing to talk to anyone to make that happen.
When I speak of substance, I’m not talking about wonky specifics. Each of the three candidates you mention came to the campaign with FAR more effective track record than Mr. Sanders — Mr. Carter and Mr. Clinton, especially, had strong records of accomplishments to reference as a governor. Mr. Obama backed up his “hope and change” rhetoric with whatever level of specifics was appropriate for a given forum.
As the GOP falls all over itself attempting to repeal Obamacare, we learn more and more how exquisitely well-crafted it was. Mr. Obama deserves great credit for putting together arguably the best that could be done for health care reform in 2008. The political chops of the Obama administration in making Obamacare a reality stand in stark contrast to the chaos we see as the GOP demagogues attempt to dismantle it.
I find it preposterous to compare the performance of Mr. Sanders during the campaign to any of these three.
I struggle with the irony that when Mr. Franken calls out the lies of Mr. Trump and the Republicans, he is applauded — while Ms. Clinton was loudly attacked when she did the very same thing.
I think you’re absolutely correct that “those voters are irrational and likely had other biases at play”. It is no accident that Mr. Franken is a white male. Here are two plain truths that I think we MUST acknowledge:
1. A portion of Mr. Obama’s mandate was the direct result of his being the first black President.
2. Our electorate embraces things said by males of any race while rejecting the exact same things when said by a woman.
It seems to me that the statements you applaud from Mr. Franken epitomize “blaming the other side”.
Here’s my issue with your emphasis on winning the next election (” I am tired of losing-I want to win”: the result is that female candidates need not apply, and black men must meet standards far higher than their white counterparts (including, most importantly, that they not act like black men).
If we accept the thesis that “our candidate had far too many negatives and that our party failed to nominate a candidate that had more appeal to so many voters” then we commit ourselves to perpetuating the worst aspects of the right wing’s dominance of our culture.
I want government that better reflects our values. If we need to lose some elections in order to accomplish that, I’m willing to pay the price.
I am not willing to see my party morph into Republican-light in order to sway the tiny number of racist and sexist voters (of all races and both genders) who made the difference in the 2016 election.
I really don’t know what you mean by these statements:
During the primary anyway, her attacks on Sanders came from his right. That a $15 minimum wage was too high, that single payer wasn’t feasible, and that universal college tuition was not practical. She then adopted all of these proposals as the nominee when the party platform did. It’s worth noting she wouldn’t have done as well as she did had she embraced her original policy proposals instead of that platform. The only problem with that platform is that she didn’t talk about it enough during the general election.
She thought,as Sen. Franken aptly put it, a ‘prevent defense’ was enough to win. Instead of talking about her positive, populist and progressive vision for America, 9 out of 10 of her tv ads were attacks on Trump’s unfitness for office. I think we wasted a golden opportunity to run on the record of a successful two term Democratic president and the most progressive platform in our party’s history.
Again there is this bizarre cognitive dissonance at play where somehow reassembling the New Deal coalition is embracing ‘Republican lite’ policies. Bernie Sanders is to the right of zero elected officials in Congress today. He isn’t moving our party to the right-he is moving it to the right now. Al Franken, Tom Perriello, and Steve Bullock get this. Even Kirsten Gillibrand is getting this in her own way. And it’s worth noting Sanders rhetoric and his policies are largely indistinguishable from Sen. Warren who routinely is praised here by many of the same people condemning him.
I don’t have time to dig through the archives here, but what I mean is that Ms. Clinton was repeatedly attacked here for attacking Donald Trump. Repeatedly, and loudly.
When Ms. Clinton said that single-payer wasn’t feasible, she was (a) attacking HIS proposal for single-payer, and (b) she was telling the truth.
Are you seriously arguing that America will support single-payer today?
Am I seriously arguing that America will support single-payer today?
Yes, if we had the right leadership.
You write, in this very comment, “9 out of 10 of her tv ads were attacks on Trump’s unfitness for office” and you characterize that as a “wasted opportunity”..
Yet one comment upstream, you glowingly cite Mr. Franken for saying that Mr. Trump is unfit for office (because he is a pathological liar).
It appears to me that something else is going on here.
Ms. Warren has a credibility and force that Mr. Sanders STILL lacks. After more than a year in the public light, I still don’t see Mr. Sanders doing anything substantive.
I’m not criticizing any reassembly of the New Deal coalition. I am not willing to throw minorities and women under the electoral bus. Are you defending the decision of Mr. Sanders to, for example, actively support a strident anti-abortion candidate, while refusing to support a progressive Democrat in Georgia?
I fail to see how you reconcile your desire to reassemble the New Deal coalition with a man who in mid-April says that he does not consider himself a Democrat.
I don’t know if I’m suffering cognitive dissonance or not, but if I am I am not alone in that.
I think that we must tell the truth to each other if we’re going to win. An aspect of that is acknowledging that a significant part of the electorate IS racist and sexist. That means that we must either change that behavior or pander to it.
I choose the former.
Eh we don’t see eye to eye on this. That’s ok.
To reiterate-Mello was personally opposed to abortion and no longer opposed to abortion rights. He is no different from Joe BIden, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, or Lydia Edwards in that regard. It is worth noting both candidates for VA governor ran as staunch progressive populists with centrist or socially conservative baggage in the past and nobody batted an eye like they did for him.
Even if Mello had continued to oppose some abortion rights, I am still open to supporting candidates like that who are with us on economic issues. Joe Moakley was a staunch union liberal who also opposed Reagan’s El Salvador policy, an he happened to be against abortion rights. Under your metric, many great Democrats would be ostracized from the party over their failure to have 100% abortion rights ratings. I strongly feel a populist who is more culturally moderate could get elected in parts of the country where we are no longer competitive. I would rather a caucus in universal agreement on moving to single payer, reining in corporate America, and tackling income inequality that can agreeably disagree on aspects of abortion rights. Moreover he was running for Mayor which is a position that has nothing to do with abortion policy. I am willing to tolerate diversity on abortion rights up to the House level. For the Senate and certainly for the presidential nomination I would support a strong litmus test and would not vote for a someone like Mello. But for the Mayoralty of Omaha, Paris is worth a mass. That’s how we rebuild our bench and a 50 state party.
Your insinuations that Sanders and his supporters don’t care about racial or sexual inequality is a baseless and profoundly dishonest attack. Your candidate was a Goldwater Girl handing out leaflets for the single biggest opponent of the Civil Rights Act while mine was putting his body on the line organizing sit ins that desegregated our alma mater. It is unlikely I would never have met my wife had Bernie Sanders not fought for desegregated dorms and co ed housing. He has consistently opposed mass incarceration which was a hallmark of the Clinton crime bills. Then First Lady Clinton called him a key ally in her unsuccessful fight to get health care reform passed. Sanders was endorsed by more BLM chapters, more BLM movement leaders, and more NAACP members than Hillary Clinton. He was endorsed by Cornel West and Ta Nehisi Coates who are the leading voices for a more radical approach to black liberation. This is not someone moving the Democratic party to the right on race, and for the life of me I cannot understand this cognitive dissonance you are trafficking in where moving to the left on economics and reaching out to economically dislocated working class voters is somehow moving the party to the right on sexuality or race. It isn’t.
Where we agree Tom:
1) Hillary would’ve been a progressive President
2) Hillary was the most qualified candidate running in 2016 (Bernie was not unqualified, but he had far less foreign policy expertise and wasn’t tested on those questions at all during the campaign)
3) Hillary was subjected to a sexist double standard
4) Bernie should join the Democrats already
5) Bernie is also not a good candidate for 2020
Also on Franken, my point bringing him up is I think he points out how to be an effective progressive that reaches out to Franken/Trump voters without sacrificing his core. He also is an effective resister to Trump since he focuses his priority on those issues where Trump is fucking over workers and not just on Russia. One can feel, as Sen. Franken and I do, that Trump was unqualified and Hillary was right to point this out while also pointing out she had a great positive platform to campaign on and didn’t focus on that to her detriment. We should’ve gone on offense on the economy, not just his unfitness for office.
This is laughably wrong. Hillary Clinton won nearly 33 million votes in states and CDs where Mr. Trump won the electoral votes, I’ll concede that not all 33 million Hillary Clinton voters in states Donald Trump won “liked” and “trusted” her, but surely you must admit that, in fact, millions did. To be clear, Hillary Clinton won 44 percent of the vote in the states and CDs where Trump won those EVs.
With respect, jconway, the willful denial is yours. You’re denying the reality that while individuals may well be polarized, individual states as a whole aren’t especially polarized. Had 1-in-1o voters switched from Mr. Trump to Ms. Clinton (or vice versa, as appropriate), 34 different states or EV-CDs with 345 total EVs would have flipped.
TL; DR the idea that Hillary Clinton was only liked or trusted by people in “the blue states” is flat wrong, and stating otherwise is unhelpful.
Here’s what bothers me about this: It does not compute.
It is not possible to be duped about or for Trump without, also, having been duped about or against Clinton. Or, put another way, they SIMPLY cannot have, on the one hand, been dimwitted oblivious rubes who while voting for Trump SIMULTANEOUSLY made cogent, informed, (and in your view a correct) analysis of Clinton, on the other hand. I doesn’t work that way.
So you can either say voters were duped OR Clinton’s high negatives mattered. You cannot say both. It is a contradiction to do so. If they were, in any way duped, then Clintons numbers, good or bad, matter little. They may, in fact, have been duped about Clintons negatives… However, If Clintons negatives drove them, then they were not, in fact, duped and, in fact, made a rational calculus.
Either the voters were irrational or they were not. They cannot simultaneously have been easily fooled and irrational where Trump was concerned and wholly rational and possessing penetrating clarity where Clinton was concerned.
Furthermore, if the voters were irrational (and I contend that there is, in fact, no rational reason to vote for Trump) then you cannot use rationality to amend their future behavior. I lived through the summer of 2004 when every Republican I met and everywhere I went I heard “anybody but Bush.” They used a lot of the same rhetoric too, about being fooled and snookered. When the rubber hit the road, however, they flocked in their millions to re-elect him.
The Democrats, post-04, made arguments that very closely mirrored arguments now: One has only to substitute names; put “Howard Dean” where “Bernie Sanders” sits and the arguments are interchangeable… and boil down to the same thing: if only we were more this or better that… But voters in 2004 didn’t want more this or better that and the same is true for voters in 2016: They were irrational. They wanted something that can’t be articulated and so threw that lever in a haze of cognitive dissonance and irrationality. Nothing about anything any Democrat did, however much crystalline and complete clarity it held in its fulsome rationality, can dent that.
You can say both. They were duped by a con man and the Democrats offered an alternative with high negatives. Her negatives were real. His promises to save working class America were not.
They made a rational choice. Both parties had let them down for decades. If nothing else, Trump represented “something new”.
What in tarnation does “her negatives were real” mean?
If it means that too many voters believed decades of utterly baseless accusations, then I suppose they were “real” — and is yet another symptom of how deeply dysfunctional are society is. It it means that she actually IS all the terrible things that her detractors say, than NO — a thousand times NO — that are NOT “real”.
The claim that vote for Donald Trump was rational is itself an attack on those who voted for him. That is because he was openly and explicitly racist, misogynist, ignorant, and dishonest. He bragged about not paying his taxes. He ridiculed disabled people. The only way a voter could be rational and vote for Mr. Trump is if that voter LIKED the behavior he or she saw.
There were some who excused this atrocious behavior because they believed that some mythical “real” Donald Trump was somehow different.
Donald Trump told the voters, loud and clear, that he favored the very wealthy. His entire life, lifestyle, and persona reflects his desire to be among the very wealthy. Anybody who is not wealthy and who somehow deluded themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump would somehow help them is deluding themselves.
Whatever else the people are who voted for Mr. Trump, they are NOT rational.
They were not baseless. They were real. She had many flaws, not the least of which were too many connections to Goldman Sachs and their ilk, refusal to campaign in working class areas, her insistence that health care as a human right, as won by all the citizens of the developed nations of the world would, in her words, never ever happen. She was not good at campaigning, apart from big money donor events. Obama saw that when he ran against her, and won.
The neoliberals and the professional class liberals in the party looked past all those flaws, as you do each time to post something about her.
Donald Trump ran on values not issues, overall. Hillary ran on issues designed to appeal to certain demographic groups. She did not run a campaign on values other than “Trump is a bad man”.
If a person sees their life evaporate before their eyes, as the factories close, the malls are empty, their wages are stagnant, their neighbor’s home is foreclosed, they went to five funerals for friends or family who have OD’d on opiates, all during eight years of Bill Clinton, eight years of Bush, and then eight years of Obama, voting for Trump because if nothing else he is different is a rational decision. Anything else is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.
Let me see if I understand your argument.
You seem to be saying that:
a) Ms. Clinton has “too many connections to Goldman Sachs”
b) A voter who chose Mr. Trump over Ms. Clinton was being “rational”.
I’m sorry, but that is itself just not rational.
I’m not interested in rebutting, yet again, your distortions of what Ms. Clinton said and didn’t say. You’ve been making the same utterly baseless accusations for more than year. Repetition does not increase their accuracy.
When a person is drowning, they often attempt to pull underwater the swimmer attempting to rescue them. Such behavior may be predictable and understandable, but it is most decidedly NOT rational.
What those “rational” voters are now seeing is that the “rational” choice they made is driving away even more jobs, taking away even the limited health care they have, giving even more tax breaks to the very wealthy while cutting federal services even more.
Some of us, including Ms. Clinton, said at the beginning of the campaign that this is what Mr. Trump would do if elected. Now he is doing exactly what we predicted.
And you claim that the voter who put this thug in office is “rational”?
Sorry, no sale. Absolutely not. Unless you are perhaps using an “alternative dictionary” to define “rational”.
Does not look like we’ll ever agree on this subject.
No, John, you can’t say both.
We’re not talking in the abstract about whether this situation might obtain in any given election. We’re talking about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in this particular election. Every negative that Clinton was purported to possess he also was purported to possess and worse, some of it on video. If people were deterred from voting for candidate Clinton because of her negatives…. how to explain the vote for candidate Trump, who had equally high negatives? You can’t say high negatives hurt her but not him. .. Not without a double standard, at least, and that’s not rational either.
How do you explain the citizens who voted for Obama, twice, and then either voted for Trump OR effectively voted for him by staying home and not voting for Clinton?
I don’t explain them. I say, in the possible (but unlikely) instances you describe, that such behavior is irrational: therefore, and by definition, not in reference to a logical, or even consistent, train of thought. Or, said another way, inexplicable. Which is my point.
If you can’t explain it or see it as rational behavior, you can’t stop it from happening again. If the leaders of the Democratic Party are in line with your point of view and not mine, Trump is a lock for 2020 and Pence is a lock for 2024.
Again, you’re making my point for me. Upstream, here, I specifically brought up the 2004 election in exactly this context.. There was no logic progression from “anybody but Bush” to Bushes re-election: it simply was not rational. I THEN said that the arguments made then are the arguments made now, as in ‘if only we were more this or better that or more rational” in exactly the manner you are making today. This rationality attempted post 2004 did not stop the irrationality of 2016. The rationality you propose will not stop the next round of irrationality.
If the voters are irrational, nothing is “a lock.” Nothing can be predicted.
You are making the mistake of thinking that (A) you are a rational person and that (B) you made a rational decision to support Clinton so thereby (C) anyone who did not vote for Clinton was irrational.
I have said many times, as has jconway that there was a rational reason to vote for Trump. It was as simple as kitchen table economics. Many of these voters lived through several administrations of one party or the other with no perceived economic improvements in their lives. Based on that, it would be irrational to not vote for Trump when he promised to be completely different from either party.
Of course, these voters are now discovering that he lied, but that does not remove the rationality of their past votes and it may not make their future votes for him irrational if Democrats continue to offer the same message that did not resonate the last time.
You are quite mistaken. I have my many faults, but such stupidity and simplemindedness are not amongst them. A vote for Donald Trump is an irrational vote. It was irrational in the primary when his opponents were largely white and male. It was irrational in the general and was objectively so, regardless of whomever his opponent might have been. It will be irrational the next time he stands for election regardless of who runs against him.
One mistake you are making is INSISTING that A) negatives DID impact whether or not some cast their vote for Clinton and 2) negatives DID NOT impact whether or not some cast their vote for Trump. That’s called “wanting to have it both ways.” Or, as noted, a double standard.
Of interest, (perhaps only to the psychotherapist) is your notion that people were ‘duped’ and should be forgiven for that… these are the same people who accused Hillary Clinton of being a liar and and of being untrustworthy who went and voted for Trump: You want to forgive those who were ‘duped’ by Trump who said “I won’t be duped by Hillary Clinton.” It cannot be the case that the purported lies of one candidate drove the electorate into the arms of the other candidate. If untrustworthiness hits against her, it should hit against him. That it did not is, what’s the word… irrational.
The other mistakes you are making are, in no particular order: insufficiently cloaking your intense, long-standing, dislike of Clinton; not understanding your own latent sexist behaviour and language; and not hiding the glee you feel being able to blame (a) her for the loss.
Now you’re trying to re-write history acting like they are entitled to be shocked at the news. These voters were told that he lied, again and again. The New York Times actually used the word “liar” in direct reference to Donald Trump, one of the only times in my lifetime that a major newspaper came out and and directly said it. Nearly every newspaper in the country ENDORSED Clinton and underlined the point of Trumps untrustworthiness in the endorsements. CNN, at one point, pointed out how he directly contradicted himself several times in one sitting.