Democrats: Be of Good Cheer

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
--Salena Zito, "The Atlantic"

Enough tears. Enough mourning. Let's see what good might come of this defeat.

In a phrase: Now it's the Republicans' turn to bear the weight of having to govern, and to take the blame.

1. Healthcare:

President Obama, even when he had control of both houses ,was unable to convince Congress or the people that a government run health insurance system was a good idea. This, despite the well known success of Medicare, the biggest health care system. Maybe the only way for this to happen will be for the Republicans to kill Obamacare and substitute an alternative which fails even more spectacularly.

Obamacare had to be a give away to the health insurance industry to get it passed. But the basic premise was so structurally flawed, it had to fail. The fact is, the whole premise of a company is it exists to make money for its shareholders. Insuring people who actually have illnesses is a sure road to losing money.  So insurance companies have always run away from covering anyone who actually needs medical care. This happened with Obamacare. It will always happen with any private, commercial system. When the object is to make money, the plan will fail to provide coverage. But a government system like Medicare does not exist to make money. It exists to spend money to provide care. Eventually someone has to realize that healthcare cannot be an industry like other industries. It is a public project.

Despite its problems, Obamacare managed to cover 20 million previously uncovered or under insured citizens and it reduced overall health care costs--a surprise. But the structural flaws were bound to catch up with it and when premiums soared right before the election, I think that had more effect to seal Hillary Clinton's fate than even the FBI.

What will happen when the Republicans replace Obamacare with Ryan voucher care will be a huge shock to those 20 million, and when the bad old days of a large uninsured population flooding through Emergency Rooms and people lose houses and go bankrupt from medical costs will be a huge reaction.  The Republicans will not be able to explain their way out of it. They'll claim everyone is happy but that will kill them. The only question is whether it will happen in time for the mid term elections.

The Democrats would be smart to not help the Republicans at all by passing laws to forbid exclusions for pre existing conditions. The Democrats, Elizabeth Warren included, should step aside and say, "You killed it. You replace it. Good luck." This will be painful, but it has to happen.

2. The promise of reversing globalization, bringing factory jobs back to the Rust Belt:

New factories may return to the Rust Belt, but not the jobs. These factories will employee 300 workers and 3000 robots, not the 3000 workers they had before. This may help some small towns, but the Rust Belt will still be a wasteland unless it shifts over to a new commerce. If factories making solar panels replace all those closed car plants and steel mills, Trump will get a second term, and maybe he'll deserve it.  Hillary would not have been bold enough to get this done.

But, those jobs may prove even more essential because the trade wars will mean no more cheap clothes, appliances and goodies at Walmart. Inflation will spike big time, as far as I can tell. After all, if you can't import cheap goods made by low wage workers in China, the goods you have available have got to be more expensive.

The coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia will still be beyond help because they think all they can do is mine coal and will never be able to learn anything new. Mr. Trump may send them back to the mines to mine "clean coal," but of course there is no such thing as clean coal. We may go back to burning more coal and we'll have Beijing air in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit.  Let's see how the white male high school graduates like breathing that. The problem is, of course, it will be years before climate change actually does anything palpable and then the Trumps of the world will deny it had anything to do with what they did wrong.

4. Building the wall and making Mexico pay for it:
This is a win/ win for President Trump, and there is no bright side, in the short term for Democrats, unless Democrats become smarter about public relations. If they do, this could be part of his undoing.

As Selena Vito of "The Atlantic" observed, Donald Trump's detractors did not take him seriously, but they did take him literally. Donald Trumps supporters did take him seriously, but they did not take him literally.

There may be some cosmetic wall, but whatever it is, Trump will say it fulfills his promise and all his white voters will cheer. 
 Since the whole flood of illegal rapists was a hobgoblin to begin with, Trump will be able to claim success in vanquishing the zombies who were never there to begin with. But, eventually, it may dawn on some, even in the Rust Belt, there are still as many Brown and Black people as ever.

WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP MIGHT DO WHICH WE CAN CHEER:

1. Extracting U.S. military from bases in Germany, Korea and around the world.
Much as I love President Obama, he did not get us out of Afghanistan completely enough, and I've never been able to understand why we have soldiers in Germany and Korea. Rumor has it Trump is planning to increase Navy warships in the Pacific to "guard our trade routes" whatever that means. But if he closes army bases, that would make sense.
If he pulls us out of NATO, I'd be surprised, once he hears from those generals who he knows more than, but if he does, I personally would not mind.  I have to agree with him we do not need to be the world's policeman. I think Bernie felt the same.
Of course, I'd love him to close one marine base in particular: Gitmo. If anyone can do it, it would be him. If he did do this, it might be a sign that it took Nixon to go to China and it might take Trump to do the right thing and be allowed to do it.

2. He might tolerate transgenders in bathrooms and gay marriage, and the Republicans would have to swallow that. Of course, they can simply wait 15 minutes and he'll forget he ever said that and reverse himself.

WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS ALREADY TAUGHT US ABOUT OUR OWN ASSUMPTIONS:

1. The role of money in elections:
 Maybe it's time to stop worrying about Citizens United.
The reason Democrats and people who care about democracy have been so upset about the Citizens United decision is the assumption that money means power, money means votes.
But as the Koch brothers have pointed out, they have spent millions of dollars in a variety of elections where their candidates lost anyway. So money does not always translate into votes.
In some cases attractive ideas, however fallacious, beat money.
Hillary Clinton outspent Trump 9 to 1 in Forida and still lost that state. She out spent him in every state she lost.
Trump, in fact, went back to a 19th century style of campaigning: Big rallies, and word of mouth rippling out from there. Bernie Sanders did the same.
The idea of money making the difference may make more sense when there really is very little difference between candidates, but in the case of two really different options, money and ads do not matter.

2. The importance of the "ground game" is over rated. "Studies" supposedly show that people who have been contacted by volunteers in their community can be persuaded to vote for the candidate and can be cajoled into going to vote on election day. Having gone door to door, I thought most people considered us canvassers an annoyance, and those who were happy to see us were already going to vote for our candidate. HRC had computers tracking our visits and there will be computers showing how many of those we visited voted. What those computers cannot tell us is whether or not they would have voted anyway or who they actually voted for. This time around, many Democrats we assumed would vote for HRC may have wound up voting for Trump. And some of those we "convinced" to vote for HRC may have changed their minds back to Trump after talking with their neighbors.
Trump said if he lost he would have wasted his time. I think we canvassers wasted our own time, although it did make us feel we were trying.

3. We need better ways of knowing what voters are thinking and doing.
Clearly, there are structural problems with polling now.  Polls are all about statistics and methodology and when you cannot get a representative group to sample, your poll is meaningless. The reason we believe polls even though we no longer answer our own phones is Nate Silver has been right in the past. We judge polls on past performance rather than on knowing how they are done and seeing the obvious flaws because they have successfully predicted outcomes in the past. Now we can scrap that method.
In one sense, what the polls showed us is the much of what we see on TV and accept because it is said authoritatively is about as reliable as the authoritative statements we saw Moody's and other institutions making in "The Big Short." They had all the trappings of science and technology and they had no idea what they were doing.

Michael More had his finger on the pulse of his friends in the Rust Belt and he knew from anecdotes and from talking to a small number of people what was going to happen and he predicted Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania specifically because he was out there talking face to face. The age of being able to sample impersonally by plugging big data into computers should come to a close. Garbage in; Garbage out.

4. Seeing new leadership in the Democratic Party:
 I came to actually admire and respect Hillary Clinton through all this, and I really feel sorry for her because she really wanted to be President, worked hard to prepare for it was denied by a buffoon.
But she was like the aging athlete, the Brett Farve, the Babe Ruth who had a brilliant career but could just no longer bring her team the championship. Her time had past, but she didn't know it.
But the truth is, she could not be the agent of change which the Rust Belt and other parts of neglected America have demanded. She would have changed things gradually. But for many, gradual is not good enough, especially if your health care premiums are skyrocketing.
She was the choice of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and all the other party old line who wanted incremental change where Bernie Sanders wanted a revolution. Bernie, like Michael Moore, knew what Trump knew and what these unseen, un named party bosses could not see, would not believe.

The Bright Side of President Trump

Okay, enough sulking already.  Get up out of bed.
We now have President Trump. King Joffrey.
President of the disrespected.
What is done is done.
Democracy, well not really democracy, but the electoral college system, has spoken.
It's a done deal.
There is a bright side, however.
This man can be entertaining.
As George Carlin once noted, class clown was fun to be around.
The class clown is President now, nothing we can do about it.
When he gets out of hand we can try a dope slap.
The snarling dogs around him may be a problem, but we can learn to laugh at them, too.
What I want to know is, where are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert when you need them?
If they had been around, this may never have happened.
John Oliver cannot carry the load all by himself.

The Irony: Trump Wins Rigged Election

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; she had more votes than Donald Trump.
But, of course, she lost the electoral college vote, and she agreed to play by the rules. The electoral college, of course is the ultimate in election rigging: legal but rigged.
Those rules were established in the 18th century to avoid exactly the kind of President Donald Trump is: a rabble rouser to appeals to the unwashed, ignorant and passionate rather than the cooler heads of the ruling class. The people could vote, but  the electors could over rule that vote if the rabble voted into someone the electors considered simply too reckless.
It's never worked that way.


So, after screaming for months about how the election would be rigged, Donald loses the vote but wins based on the established structure of rigging.


It should be noted the presence of the electoral college may well suppress votes in "safe states," and many voters in Alabama, Mississippi who would have made the effort to vote for Trump may have stayed home, knowing their state would go for Trump. The same is true for Maryland, California and New York, where voters bet Clinton would win.


And the bigger picture is that Trump's election would not mean as much if the House and Senate were in Democratic hands. The popular vote for Republican Congressmen is the real problem for Democrats, and that is not rigged--except by Gerrymander.


Who knows if you can trust any of the polling data, but exit polls suggest Latinos voted 30% for Trump and Blacks did not turn out in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they had for Obama, and that gave the Election to Trump.


So, you reap what you sow.
I'd like to check the lead levels in a lot of communities. Might explain some brain damage voting behavior.

Joy in Mudville

One of the aggravating things about Trump's victory is having to put up with the joy expressed by his supporters.
This morning, at my wife's exercise class in Exeter, NH, the instructor, observing how depressed her participants looked, concluded the class by saying, "Well, good work out. Go out and have a better rest of your day."
And one man shouted out, "It already is the best day of my life!"
The rest of the group stared balefully at him.
But really, let the man gloat.
The people who voted for Trump are, in large part, losers in our society, people who sense they have not succeeded and they want to find the government as the culprit in their underclass status.
Not everyone fits this description--some winners voted for Trump--but mostly his crowd was losers who he convinced he would make into winners.
But, of course, he will not get them winning again.
They are destined for disappointment.
Right now, they are enjoying "their" win, much as fans of any professional sports team does, telling themselves and each other, "Oh, WE won." But of course, they have not won anything.

As my son observed last night, "Well, this is the best day Mr. Trump will have for the next 4 years and it's the best day his fans will have."

President Trump: The Son Also Rises

The sun rose this morning. I took my dog out for his walk. The streets were unusually quiet, less traffic, but otherwise, a normal day.


"Processing" is what we are all doing now.


Thoughts bubbled up:


1. Conspiracy:  All those votes collected locally have to be entered into computers at some point, collected centrally and sent on. Despite the cute little cartoons about how this happens they were playing on NBC, fact is, like so much else in modern American life, it's so high tech, we really don't know how this happens and where a hacker could change the results. The Russians have hackers...

2. Realizing all the pundits, political scientists, TV experts, Nate Silver, Politico, pollsters were wrong. "The math is very difficult for Donald Trump."  But I was never polled, and I live in New Hampshire. I don't answer my land line or my cell phone if I don't know the number. Most people don't answer their phones when the "ground game" people call. So, if people are unwilling to be polled, how can the polls be reliable? Another article of faith: The ground game. The ground game is so 20th century. Donald Trump didn't need no freakin' ground game. We were wasting our time. Well, we were learning about voters, but it didn't help win.

3. The elephant in the tent: That old story--there's an elephant in the tent and outside the tent are people who have never seen an elephant, have no idea what it is and each reaches through a crack in the tent. One feels the trunk, one the tail, one the ears, one the feet and each one describes what is under the tent differently, depending on the small part they can feel or see. Nobody can see the whole, because it is too big and hidden from them.  That's the way I felt canvassing in New Hampshire. I could not see what was happening in the rest of the country, or even the rest of the state. All I knew is what I could see in my small space, and around here, it looked like there were a lot of angry, aroused people who wanted to throw a brick through the glass window of Washington, wanted to vent their rage and to shake things up, just as Michael Moore described. 

4. Bernie and the DNC: Bernie tapped into that urge for change, for revolution. My friends and family said, "Hey, we're doing okay. We're getting taken up into the ruling hierarchies. We don't want revolution." Could Bernie have beaten Trump? I thought so at the time. Thought he would have been a better bet than Hillary. But I thought Hillary would be a better President, so I worked hard for her once she won the nomination. But it bothered me she beat Bernie by beating him in states she didn't have chance of winning in November: the entire South and Southwest. Didn't anybody else notice this? We chose our Democratic nominee on the basis of her performance in the South?  Bernie, meanwhile was doing great in the rust belt. Didn't that mean anything to these power brokers?

5. Trump, bad as he is, is still better than Ted Cruz.  Trump at least has no actual real deep seated beliefs.  Problem is, he is surrounded by the most unappetizing scoundrels, that guy from Breitbart or whatever that reactionary website is, Rudy Guliani, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, the demented Ben Carson. The President appoints thousands of officials and his will be really virulent. And his Supreme Court nominees will insure the Supreme Court goes Scalia for a generation.  Kiss Roe v Wade good-bye. Abortions will become illegal again.  I'm not all that unhappy about abortions after 21 weeks or even after 18 weeks being illegal, but going back to the coat hanger in the back alley days will be nasty.

It's a new world today. An earthquake happened. The humbled have risen up and turned the world upside down.

In some times and places that change spelled doom for some people: Jews, who were living at the top of society were stripped of their homes, their clothes and sent off to concentration camps. Is that likely in the USA?  In the Jew-SA?  Hopefully won't happen to Jews. But what about Muslims? Are those Muslims Donald Trump saw celebrating on the New Jersey roof tops after 9/11 in danger?  And what about Mexican Americans, Central Americans living illegally in the USA? Will the goon squads come around to round them up?

Andrew Jackson brought a populist revolution to the White House. Like Trump, he was a wealthy man who appealed to the hoi polloi. They trashed the White House. We may have to read more about President Jackson for clues about what to expect.

It will be fun watching them build the wall, though. All those Kentucky coal miners down there building the wall.  West Virginians, too. I'm looking forward to seeing all that. 

Oh, and did I mention, Sarah Palin for Secretary of State. She can see Russia from her porch. And Vladimir thinks she's pretty hot.

Unkindest Cuts

Pennsylvania goes for Trump.
Yikes.
Who saw that coming?
Michigan, Wisconsin. 
Who saw that coming?
Florida, North Carolina, Ohio: okay, knew those would be close. 

Make America White Again.
Make America Hate Again.

Fact is, this is still the country we have.  This is who we are. Whites are still the majority and they are here to tell you, they are still in charge, not some coalition of Hispanics, Blacks and hippy Whites.

One third of Hispanic males voted for Trump.
"Hispanics love me," he said. Guess he was right.

What will this Brave New World be like?
Actually, one might expect it to be like the sad old world, when Whites ruled, the America of the 1950's. Except those factory workers going off to work in the morning, to their union jobs, while their wives stayed home to raise the kids--not gonna bring that back. Ozzie and Harriet are both working now. The factory jobs belong to robots, not White men with high school educations.

The Cleavers lived in a world of segregated schools and bathrooms, of considerably less wealth than people have come to expect. 

I can think of every face I have seen, screwed up in rage, ignorant, angry faces belonging to people determined to vote for Trump. 

Close those borders to Muslims and refugees. Build the wall. 
Are we great again yet?
Remember that Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. 

Case Studies: Election Day

Talking to people on Election Day is fraught with concern about starting an unpleasant conversation, so we are careful not to ask how others voted, but that doesn't mean we're not interested to know.


Of course, we all are looking for an indication of how the election will turn out from sampling the few people we can sample, as if one or even 10 people can tell you how millions are voting.
On the other hand, as they say in medicine, sometimes a single careful case study can tell you more than a study of a thousand patients who you do not know much about.
Just now I spoke with a man who is very rich, well educated, lives in North Hampton, flies his own airplane and he said, "Well, some people you just have to keep down." Of course, I immediately assumed he was talking about the raucous crowds we see frothing at Trump rallies. But then he said, "I worked at a construction site once. Those union guys tried to run me out of town because I wouldn't join the union."
So, I assume, he's voting for Trump because Trump will know how to keep those union guys down.
Of course, the union guys will vote for Trump because he's convinced them he'll bring back those great factory jobs once he's renegotiated all those terrible, horrible, no good trade deals.
So Hillary loses from both ends. The union guys hate her because she is single handedly responsible for all the bad trade deals going back to NAFTA. And the rich guys hate her because she supports the working man and his unions.