Inconvenient Truths For The Depressed Democrat Patient

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VDH:

If progressives were to become empiricists, they would look at the symptoms of the last election and come up with disinterested diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses.

Although their hard-left candidate won the popular vote, even that benchmark was somewhat deceiving — given the outlier role of California and the overwhelming odds in their favor. The Republicans ran a candidate who caused a veritable civil war in their ranks and who was condemned by many of the flagship conservative media outlets. Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won.

He was outspent. He was out-organized. He was outpolled and demonized daily as much by Republicans as Democrats. Yet he not only destroyed three political dynasties (the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas) but also has seemingly rendered the Obama election matrix nontransferable to anyone other than Obama himself.

Not that Hillary did not try to copy Obama’s formula. She brought on Obama politicos to staff her campaign. She supported all the Obama initiatives, from Obamacare and record debt to a collapsed foreign policy. She spoke in a faux-inner city accent the same way Obama had to get out the African-American vote. She outdid Obama’s clinger speech by her own twist of “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” She returned to her own hard-left phase of the 1990s. Yet she was trounced in the electoral college and saw the fabled “blue wall” crumble.
DIAGNOSIS

Any reasonable post-election autopsy for a party would identify certain inconvenient truths.

1) The African-American vote is vital to the Democratic party, but it is dubious to suppose that blacks will register, turn out, and vote in a bloc (as they did in 2008 and 2012) for a Democratic candidate other than Barack Obama. The very efforts to ensure that 95 percent of blacks will vote for other Democratic nominees might only polarize other groups in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic America. Trump, of course, knows all this and will make the necessary adjustments.

2) Asians and Hispanics are less a monolithic voting bloc. Supposedly discredited melting-pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are still the norm and can temper tribal solidarities and peel away from Democrats a third of their assumed constituents — in an electoral landscape where there is already only a thin margin of error, given that Democrats have written off the white working classes. In the case of Latinos, red states such as Texas and Arizona are unlikely to be flipped soon by Latino bloc voting, especially if Trump closes down the border and ends illegal immigration as a demographic electoral tool of the Democratic party. And Latino electoral-college strength is dissipated in states that are likely to be blue anyway (California, Nevada, New Mexico).

3) The race/class/gender agenda so favored by coastal elites and promulgated by media, Hollywood, and popular culture is an anathema to Middle America, especially its strange disconnect between affluence and the mandate for purportedly progressive equality. Moralistic lectures from wealthy people are not a way to win over the working classes. Rants by Hollywood celebrities and racialist sermons by would-be DNC chairs will not win over 51 percent of the voters in swing states. The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

4) Fairly or not, the entire environmental movement, as represented by Al Gore’s campaign against global warming, has become elitist and often hypocritical, and is evident in the lifestyles of wealthy utopians who have the capital and influence to navigate around the irritating results of their nostrums. Building Keystone is a better issue than the Paris Climate Change protocols. There is little support for Bay Area environmentalism among blue-collar building trades and unions — largely because radical climate change is now a religion and skeptics are hounded as heretics.

5) For the foreseeable future, the blue wall of the Midwest seems more vulnerable than the red wall in the South. The small towns and cities in swing states are as electorally powerful as the large, blue cities.

6) What the media and Democrats see as Trump’s outrageous extremism now looks, to more than half the country, like a tardy return to normalcy: employing the words “radical Islamic terror,” or asking cities to follow federal law rather than go full Confederate, or deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes, or building a wall to stop easy illegal entry across the U.S. border, or putting a temporary hold on unvetted refugees from war-torn states in the Middle East. In the eyes of many Middle Americans, all these measures, even if sometimes hastily and sloppily embraced, are not acts of revolution; they are common-sense corrections of what were themselves extremist acts, or they are simply continuances of presidential executive-order power as enshrined by Obama and sanctified by the media.
TREATMENT

As a result, one might have thought that Democrats would look in 2017 to bread-and-butter economic issues and try to find candidates who are 21st-century updates of Hubert Humphrey or Harry Truman, or perhaps populist minority nominees or a younger version of Joe Biden. Or is it even worse? The Democratic party of 2017 is nothing like the party of 2008, when Hillary Clinton in the primaries ran as a guns-rights Annie Oakley, with a boilermaker in one hand and a bowling ball in the other, and Barack Obama kept assuring the nation that gay marriage was contrary to his religious principles.

Instead of seeing Barack Obama (both his successful two elections and his failed two terms) as the wave of the future, Democrats would be wise to reassess his electoral legacy as a unique phenomenon. In truth, Obama’s legacy is twofold: He took the party hard left, and he downsized it to a minority party of the two coasts and big cities. And then he faded off into the sunset to a multimillionaire retirement of golf and homilies.

The progressive movement, the Democratic party and its cultural appendages in entertainment and the media seem to be doubling down on a failed electoral strategy. Instead, they all hope that either Donald Trump will crack and spontaneously implode after some new sort of Access Hollywood disclosure, or that their own unrelenting invective will eventually grind him down, as it did with Richard Nixon.

Consider a potpourri of left-wing reactions to Trump. Would-be Democratic National Committee chairwoman Sally Boynton Brown pontificated: “I’m a white woman. I don’t get it. . . . My job is to listen and be a voice and shut other white people down when they want to interrupt.” Ashley Judd gave an incoherent rant at the Inauguration Day protest marches. In reading a bizarre poem, she variously compared Trump to Hitler, alleged that he had incestuous desires for his own daughter. and then indulged in rank vulgarity

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Face the facts liberal demacrats Obama has been americas #1 worst prsidents in americas some 240 year history get used to it No Hope and No Change

@Spurwing Plover: @Spurwing Plover:
And, due to him just like #2 on the worst President list, he gave us a LEADER. The GOPe is a bunch of getalongs that just like securing their sinecures and could care less about the people that elected them, unless, of course, they have a lot of money to donate.

Here’s an inconvenient truth for Donald Trump: Women voters are going to be his downfall.

Are powerful women Trump’s Achilles heel?

Throughout his campaign, Trump has made use of a handful of compliant women who will do his bidding: his daughter, Ivanka, whose polish and charm lulled many voters into thinking her father couldn’t be that bad; his campaign manager turned counselor, Kellyanne Conway, whose artful deflections and word-salad obfuscations cover for her boss’ lies and ill temper on the Sunday morning shows; and his wife, Melania, a smiling, silent partner whose presence doesn’t seem to register with her husband until he needs an attractive prop for a photo. His well-known, vulgar and misogynist comments about women coupled with his penchant for beauty pageants and his string of model wives reveal a man who doesn’t see women as his peers but as his playthings. It’s no wonder his Cabinet has so few female members — women, for him, are objects for his aesthetic and sexual enjoyment, not intelligent and competent advisers worth taking as seriously as men.

And then there’s former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who pretty much told him where to get off. A credible President doesn’t require an acting Attorney General to follow illegal directives.

Trump, so thin-skinned he is incapable of turning the other cheek to criticism even from random people on Twitter, predictably had a toddler-style meltdown over Yates’ insubordination. His team sent a huffy statement to the press calling her fidelity to the constitution and her oath of office “betrayal.” Not content to go after her decision alone, they also launched an attack on her record and character, calling her “weak” on borders and “very weak” on immigration (Trump provided no evidence to support these claims, but perhaps they’re just some of those “alternative facts” we’ve been hearing so much about.)

This probably has something to do with his tiny little—you know—hands.

obama is pure evil. This country survived a near catastrophic fate by avoiding his heir apparent. The damage done by obama is born of pure hate of America and it’s people.

You need to get some new material. Republicans have controlled the House for the past 6 years, the Senate for the past 2 years, and now control the White House as well. From this point until they’re all happily run out of town on rails, they’re solely responsible for any major screw ups that occur—unless, of course, you want to give some credit to the lying right-wing media outlets that helped these opportunistic jackanapes get elected.

Trump Files With FEC For 2020 Election Bid, Outmaneuvers Nonprofit Organizations

Why not link it, so people can read the article and see how he’s setting things up to use the law as an instrument of intimidation, to his own political advantage?

Trump Files With FEC For 2020 Election Bid, Outmaneuvers Nonprofit Organizations

The move is consistent with Trump’s campaign promises to reduce the financial influence of private special interest groups on Washington.

Right. And the Citizens United decision was a giant step forward for freedom of speech.

I’m guessing the dim bulbs comprising the Red Hat Brigade aren’t even conscious of the monumental inconsistency.