Democrats failed to imagine the worst

[Dawood Ibrahim]

Jason Sattler

Hillary Clinton lost, but I failed. I failed millions of immigrants who’ve been assured they’ll be rounded up. I failed the Muslim Americans, African Americans and other minorities who have been reminded that they’re all suspects in their own homes. I failed the 20 million Americans, many of them previously uninsurable, who may now lose their health coverage, possibly forever. I failed above all to imagine that anyone would see Donald Trump as anything but a Macy’s Day Parade float filled with insecurities, greed and gas.
I couldn’t imagine that America would replace the first African-American president with a birther championed by the KKK and Chachi from Happy Days. I couldn’t imagine that more than half of white women would chose a beauty pageant nabob accused of being a serial groper over the first woman major-party nominee in American history. And I couldn’t imagine that the best polling, the best ground game, the best strategists ever assembled would get beaten by a guy who’d mastered little in his life but the art of firing people on TV.
I was so freaked out by Trump and his ability to lie, insult and contradict himself with impunity that I made the same mistake the Clinton campaign seemed to make. I thought outrage would be enough. Nope. Not compared to Trump — a walking nuclear reactor of white grievance. His own insufferable words deployed in ad after ad weren’t enough to destroy him. They might even have helped him with his bigger than life “tells it like it is” shtick that made him feel like the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man sent to save his fans from the threat of female Ghostbusters.
He promised his supporters that he was the antidote — or the poison — to the dynastic and incestuous world of Washington, DC politics personified by his opponent. Clinton promised us that she would save us from this maniac while keeping President Obama’s legacy intact. Trump promised his supporters a better life. He won, even if hundreds of thousands more Americans voted for Clinton. Now he has to deliver. And Democrats — for the first time in 24 years — must re-imagine our party without the Clintons.
This has to start with recognising the tremendous advantages Republicans have tailored over the past 40 years. They have their own media and their own majority gerrymandered out of a minority of Americans. They have a massive infrastructure of well-paid academics, organisers and functionaries. Thus their candidates and their staffs enter office far more prepared to make their power and policies permanent. Democrats need to replicate what the right as built as we prepare to resist any effort by Trump and the GOP to bash away at the few institutions that still protect the middle class, the climate and the most vulnerable.
Trump voters sure felt as if they were voting in their own interests — and that main interest seemed to be revenge. But do they have any idea how Trump’s actual policies will affect their lives? Did Trump voters know they were voting to give the rich trillions in tax breaks at a time when income inequality is near all-time highs? Did they know they were voting to roll back the Wall Street reforms designed to prevent the sort of crash we saw in 2008, which killed far more jobs than any trade deal ever could? Did they have any idea if Trump would sign House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a privatised system that resembles Obamacare?
How could they? The left and the media were so focused on the instability of Trump’s personality, and the psychodrama of his relationship with Ryan, that the reality of his proposals was rarely conveyed. America just voted to repeal most of 80 years of progress, and they didn’t even know that was on the ballot. For me, this failure of imagination was possible because I’d never accepted history’s oft-repeated lesson: This nation resists change the way Trump repels fact checkers. But this is just the past doing what the past always does — haunting those who expect the future to take care of itself. The writer is member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors and a columnist.
— Courtesy: USA Today


http://pakobserver.net/democrats-failed-to-imagine-the-worst/

@war&peace @GreenFalcon @Moonlight @Khafee @EgyptianAmerican @Morse_Code @LA se Karachi

 

[LA se Karachi]

Indeed, they did. We Sanders supporters repeatedly warned them. But they failed to listen. You can't nominate a historically unpopular candidate with so many issues and still expect to win. Her appeal to rural and working-class voters was limited. People wanted change, and for good reason. Almost all of the income growth in this country has gone towards the wealthiest individuals for the past 35 years. That's a fact.

With that said, both candidates were incredibly unpopular. Trump was more unpopular than Hillary Clinton. But motivation matters, and not enough of her supporters showed up to the polls. Still, she did receive the most votes of any Presidential candidate. But Trump narrowly won enough Midwestern states to win the electoral college.

There is hope, however. Most Americans don't like Trump, including some of those that voted for him. In fact, he arguably doesn't have a mandate at all, given that Hillary received the most votes, not him. The mandate he does have comes from rural and working class voters to improve their economic situation. I suspect that he will disappoint them rather quickly. One can only expect so much from a Republican Manhattan billionaire who is a part of the very elite he criticizes. I, like many others, believe he will be a poor President.

But, Democrats have to learn their lesson too. They have to reinvent themselves as the party of the middle and working class. Never again can they allow Republicans candidates, who support policies that harm these groups, to illegitimately usurp this title from them. They have to make economic issues the forefront of their platform. They also must follow that by nominating candidates that truly support these ideas, and have the record to prove it. Only then can we begin to untangle ourselves from this mess.

 

[cloud4000]

It's incredible how many Democrats have lost their minds since Trump was elected to President. They are asking themselves how the hell did this happen? Has the country become racist overnight? Sorry, Virginia, they are many factors for Clinton's defeat and Trump's victory, and not all attributed to racism and sexism.

My thoughts:

1. Trump was running. No way this clown will beat Clinton, so Democrats stayed home.
2. Media, pollsters, and pundits told that Clinton had 100% chance of winning, so Democrats stayed home.
3. Same Democrats who voted for Obama in 2012 will automatically vote for for Clinton, so Democrats stayed home.
4. Clinton is more qualified, more experienced, more deserving, and she's a women, so Democrats stayed home.
5. So what if she's corrupt, incompetent, and a liar. She's still better than a racist, sexist, and xenophobe. So Democrats stayed home.

See a pattern here?

It doesn't help that these Democrats live in echo chambers and talk with people just like them. They failed to notice there are other opinions other than their own. Internet and social media have done some harm here, creating online ideological enclaves.

 

[Solomon2]

Indeed, they did. We Sanders supporters repeatedly warned them. But they failed to listen. You can't nominate a historically unpopular candidate with so many issues and still expect to win. Her appeal to rural and working-class voters was limited.

You're too kind. She considered them "deplorables" and in the case of coal miners vowed to destroy not just their jobs but the entire industry.

People wanted change, and for good reason. Almost all of the income growth in this country has gone towards the wealthiest individuals for the past 35 years. That's a fact.

I think that should be 25 years, not 35 years. Real median U.S. household income was the same in 2012 as in 1989: link

But Trump narrowly won enough Midwestern states to win the electoral college.

Trump unexpectedly won Florida and Pennsylvania, too.

I, like many others, believe he will be a poor President.

On the bright side, if he messes up really badly he'll be easier to impeach than Crooked Hillary.

But, Democrats have to learn their lesson too. They have to reinvent themselves as the party of the middle and working class. Never again can they allow Republicans candidates, who support policies that harm these groups, to illegitimately usurp this title from them.

"Illegitimately"?

They have to make economic issues the forefront of their platform. They also must follow that by nominating candidates that truly support these ideas, and have the record to prove it. Only then can we begin to untangle ourselves from this mess.

What could the Democrats do? Convince the likes of Mitt Romney to switch parties?

Sanders isn't a traditional liberal Democrat; he's always been a Socialist. Vermont is a small (627,000) and intimate state - only 5.7% of voters are immigrants You'd think Bernie with all his decades in elected office could make it thrive but instead Vermont has the 2nd worst economic outlook in the nation (after NY) based on "tax rates, labor policies and overall regulatory burden". But everybody still likes him...

 

[Solomon2]

November 14, 2016
When the Left-media Becomes a Crying Cult
By James Lewis
In July of 2011, when North Korea's butcher-dictator Dear Leader Kim Jung-Il died, all the NK Communist Party members in the land were ordered to cry hysterically, to ululate in grief at the death of Dear Leader, in public, altogether, on command. You can see it in this video, the Party cadres lined up on the hard snow in military platoon formation, men and women, bursting into tears when the command was given.

The BBC wondered at the time whether all that public crying was real or not, since Dear Leader controlled every human being in that country, by sending any wrong 'uns to his vast concentration camps to be starved and worked to death. Every tear-stained face in those black-clad platoons knew with absolutely certainty that they would be arrested and sent to death if they failed to show enough dramatic grief. Some unconvincing mourners were undoubtedly grabbed and taken away to the camps.

North Korea's national cry-in for the loss of Dear Leader is an important lesson about human politics: the power of closed cult indoctrination. Turns out you don't even need death camps. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment showed how it could be done with legally free Stanford students in the prime of life, able to walk away from the experiment any time they liked, without murderous guards armed with guns. All you needed was a Stanford grad student wearing a white lab coat. A whole series of experiments showed the same kind of thing.

The iron key to mind control is having one source of "real" information, and shutting off any competing ones. It's all Scientology has to deliver for its faithful followers to stay in that imaginary world. Most of the more fanciful religious and non-religious cults on the web have followers who indoctrinate themselves. The Five Star Movement in Italy started as an internet cult in the ‘90s telling teenage kids about airplanes spreading out chemtrails to control the minds of Italians; today the Five Star Cults controls a plurality of votes in the Parliament in Rome. Today "brain hackers" are no doubt using the same dark arts on the more gullible of their webizens. It's one reason why teenage kids a decade ago started to put metal objects through their ears, lips and noses. To them those were magical symbols as surely as a reversed swastika was an object of power to the Hitlerjugend.

Cults are human universals. A lot of tribal groups are nothing but cults: The key is always restricting information, and crushing dissent. That's why U.S. cults often block communication between members and their families.

Karl Marx had only a few precepts for his followers to remember, and the most important one was, 'First, conquer the organs of propaganda." Which meant the schools and the newspapers in 19th century Berlin. Marx was employed as a "journalist," a word that was just as phony then as it is today. His real passion was mass agitation, and in that way, he was a kind of genius. When you control every message a person receives 24/7, through teachers and professors, through news media, and through their peers, you imprison people just as effectively as concrete blocks and iron bars, complete with AK-47s.

The United States used to have about a hundred newspaper owners, most of them small. Today we have half a dozen giant transnationals that can reach perhaps 90 percent of the population. If you wonder how it is that the American Left has all that power, the mental media monopoly is all you need to look for. They are so convincing that they even persuade themselves about plainly false superstitions like global warming. We may think we have made progress since the Dark Ages, but the fact is that humans are as superstitious as ever, perhaps more so. If you were a medieval peasant walking behind an ox plow all day you probably had more contact with reality than today's college indoctrinees.

So today we see the same thing happening on the American Left, for pretty much the same reason: Ever since the late 1960s, the Hard Left has run our schools, colleges, and mass media, with the inevitable result that American liberals live in a mental box where only one truth is allowed to be voiced: the Left created the worship of Obama the Savior (we will slow the rising of the seas), and Hillary the Woman of Destiny (who will liberate women for the worship of Gaia). These people are not technically crazy, although their beliefs do not correspond to reality. They are only deeply indoctrinated and protected from contradiction.

Today's Butcher of North Korea, Kim III, may have just murdered his wife, probably with an artillery piece, as he is wont to do to express displeasure at family members. But when Kim inevitably passes on, the national outburst of grief will be just as loud and dramatic as before.

You might object that American Leftists do not live in fear of imminent execution if they fail to cry hard enough at the Victory of Demon Trump. That seems true enough, but it ignores a basic fact about mentally closed cults, namely that they create their own realities, and if enough young feminists at Wellesley believe that Hillary's defeat equals Mass Mind Rape, they will feel and act exactly as if it's true. Cult fantasies are incredibly powerful, even with otherwise normal people. You don't need an actual artillery piece to blow up the victims: They create that reality all by themselves. Since every faithful member of the college Left is pledged never to listen to a dissenting opinion, they have cultified themselves. There's nothing we can do to make any difference: they are mentally armored. All we can do is wait for reality to assert itself.

Meanwhile, kids, have a good cry and don't forget your hanky.

In July of 2011, when North Korea's butcher-dictator Dear Leader Kim Jung-Il died, all the NK Communist Party members in the land were ordered to cry hysterically, to ululate in grief at the death of Dear Leader, in public, altogether, on command. You can see it in this video, the Party cadres lined up on the hard snow in military platoon formation, men and women, bursting into tears when the command was given.

The BBC wondered at the time whether all that public crying was real or not, since Dear Leader controlled every human being in that country, by sending any wrong 'uns to his vast concentration camps to be starved and worked to death. Every tear-stained face in those black-clad platoons knew with absolutely certainty that they would be arrested and sent to death if they failed to show enough dramatic grief. Some unconvincing mourners were undoubtedly grabbed and taken away to the camps.

North Korea's national cry-in for the loss of Dear Leader is an important lesson about human politics: the power of closed cult indoctrination. Turns out you don't even need death camps. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment showed how it could be done with legally free Stanford students in the prime of life, able to walk away from the experiment any time they liked, without murderous guards armed with guns. All you needed was a Stanford grad student wearing a white lab coat. A whole series of experiments showed the same kind of thing.

The iron key to mind control is having one source of "real" information, and shutting off any competing ones. It's all Scientology has to deliver for its faithful followers to stay in that imaginary world. Most of the more fanciful religious and non-religious cults on the web have followers who indoctrinate themselves. The Five Star Movement in Italy started as an internet cult in the ‘90s telling teenage kids about airplanes spreading out chemtrails to control the minds of Italians; today the Five Star Cults controls a plurality of votes in the Parliament in Rome. Today "brain hackers" are no doubt using the same dark arts on the more gullible of their webizens. It's one reason why teenage kids a decade ago started to put metal objects through their ears, lips and noses. To them those were magical symbols as surely as a reversed swastika was an object of power to the Hitlerjugend.

Cults are human universals. A lot of tribal groups are nothing but cults: The key is always restricting information, and crushing dissent. That's why U.S. cults often block communication between members and their families.

Karl Marx had only a few precepts for his followers to remember, and the most important one was, 'First, conquer the organs of propaganda." Which meant the schools and the newspapers in 19th century Berlin. Marx was employed as a "journalist," a word that was just as phony then as it is today. His real passion was mass agitation, and in that way, he was a kind of genius. When you control every message a person receives 24/7, through teachers and professors, through news media, and through their peers, you imprison people just as effectively as concrete blocks and iron bars, complete with AK-47s.

The United States used to have about a hundred newspaper owners, most of them small. Today we have half a dozen giant transnationals that can reach perhaps 90 percent of the population. If you wonder how it is that the American Left has all that power, the mental media monopoly is all you need to look for. They are so convincing that they even persuade themselves about plainly false superstitions like global warming. We may think we have made progress since the Dark Ages, but the fact is that humans are as superstitious as ever, perhaps more so. If you were a medieval peasant walking behind an ox plow all day you probably had more contact with reality than today's college indoctrinees.

So today we see the same thing happening on the American Left, for pretty much the same reason: Ever since the late 1960s, the Hard Left has run our schools, colleges, and mass media, with the inevitable result that American liberals live in a mental box where only one truth is allowed to be voiced: the Left created the worship of Obama the Savior (we will slow the rising of the seas), and Hillary the Woman of Destiny (who will liberate women for the worship of Gaia). These people are not technically crazy, although their beliefs do not correspond to reality. They are only deeply indoctrinated and protected from contradiction.

Today's Butcher of North Korea, Kim III, may have just murdered his wife, probably with an artillery piece, as he is wont to do to express displeasure at family members. But when Kim inevitably passes on, the national outburst of grief will be just as loud and dramatic as before.

You might object that American Leftists do not live in fear of imminent execution if they fail to cry hard enough at the Victory of Demon Trump. That seems true enough, but it ignores a basic fact about mentally closed cults, namely that they create their own realities, and if enough young feminists at Wellesley believe that Hillary's defeat equals Mass Mind Rape, they will feel and act exactly as if it's true. Cult fantasies are incredibly powerful, even with otherwise normal people. You don't need an actual artillery piece to blow up the victims: They create that reality all by themselves. Since every faithful member of the college Left is pledged never to listen to a dissenting opinion, they have cultified themselves. There's nothing we can do to make any difference: they are mentally armored. All we can do is wait for reality to assert itself.

Meanwhile, kids, have a good cry and don't forget your hanky.

 

[LA se Karachi]

I think that should be 25 years, not 35 years. Real median U.S. household income was the same in 2012 as in 1989:

No it shouldn't be. What I said was:

Almost all of the income growth in this country has gone towards the wealthiest individuals for the past 35 years. That's a fact.

But, it wasn't always this way:

http://www.businessinsider.com/income-inequality-2012-8

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/who-gains/#/?start=1980&end=2008

http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/29/smart-charts-economic-recovery-1-percent/

It's more unequal than other wealthy countries too:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

Trump unexpectedly won Florida and Pennsylvania, too.

Personally, I consider Pennsylvania to be a Midwestern state, perhaps incorrectly. The eastern-most part of it definitely isn't. But then, he didn't win that part of the state. Either way, I was including it in my statement.

Trump winning Florida wasn't unexpected. Polls were showing it to be very competitive, and it's flipped back and forth between the two parties in Presidential elections. It's been incredibly close these past 15 years. It was the closest state in 2012 (and 2000 of course).

On the bright side, if he messes up really badly he'll be easier to impeach than Crooked Hillary.

I hope that's true.

"Illegitimately"?

Yes, illegitimately. They have consistently advocated for lower taxes on the wealthy, a lower minimum wage, fought increased regulations in the financial sector, unions, and removed protections for consumers. They're quite open about it, and tout themselves as being "pro-business". This doesn't really need explaining, does it?

What could the Democrats do? Convince the likes of Mitt Romney to switch parties?

Goodness, no. Mitt Romney is about as far removed from what I meant as I can think of. There's a reason that Hillary did worse than Obama in rural, working-class white America. They liked Trump more than Romney.

Sanders isn't a traditional liberal Democrat; he's always been a Socialist. Vermont is a small (627,000) and intimate state - only 5.7% of voters are immigrants You'd think Bernie with all his decades in elected office could make it thrive but instead Vermont has the 2nd worst economic outlook in the nation (after NY) based on "tax rates, labor policies and overall regulatory burden".

He's a social-democrat, in the vein of Northern Europe. There are many people like him elected all across Europe. Sanders has never been President of this country, or the Governor of Vermont. He served as mayor of one city (Burlington, Vermont) in the 1980s. And then he was elected to Congress in 1992 (federal, not state office). Where did you get the idea that he's been in control of Vermont's economic policy all these years?

The ranking you posted is not a ranking of of economic well-being. It is only a ranking of the things you listed: taxes/regulations, and was created by a right-wing group. All it shows is that taxes aren't low on the wealthy, and there are more regulations in place than other states. Both positives, in my book.

Vermont is doing just fine. The Republican dominated southeast isn't, however. The rural west is, but few people live there. Here's a ranking of where people are healthy and wealthy from The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/u...-places-to-live-in-the-us.html?abt=0002&abg=1

But everybody still likes him...

People like to complain about democratic-socialism. But everybody still loves Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland. Not to mention countries like Australia, France, the U.K., Germany, and Japan are more "socialist" than America. Yet, they seem to be doing pretty well. Better than the U.S. in many areas...

 

[T-72]

Still, she did receive the most votes of any Presidential candidate. But Trump narrowly won enough Midwestern states to win the electoral college.

https://twitter.com/x/status/798519600413601792

 

[LA se Karachi]

https://twitter.com/x/status/798519600413601792

Lol. If you've ever been to California (I live here) or New York, you'd know how absurd that claim is. Look at how badly he lost both states. Both are very liberal, Democratic states. People who turnout to vote tend to be older, wealthier, and white when compared to the general voting electorate---groups that favor Republicans/Trump. In fact, the opposite is true. Turnout in swing states like Florida was already relatively high. People voted because they knew their vote would have an impact. California and New York, on the other hand, had relatively low levels of turnout because the winner was a forgone conclusion. If we shifted to a popular vote system, turnout in these states would rise, and more Democrats in "blue" states would vote.

If more people turned out, he would do worse. Much worse. There were many unmotivated Democrats/liberals this election because of Hillary Clinton---a possibility we discussed months ago, if you remember. Not to mention that even before this election, studies have been done on non-voters in American elections. What they've found is that many of them are young or low income, and they favor Democrats.

 

[Solomon2]

If more people turned out, he would do worse. Much worse. There were many unmotivated Democrats/liberals this election because of Hillary Clinton---a possibility we discussed months ago,

I must agree. The DNC screwing Sanders was a big mistake. Even without the email leaks it was evident at the Convention.

And thank for the corrections on the economic data.

Goodness, no. Mitt Romney is about as far removed from what I meant as I can think of. There's a reason that Hillary did worse than Obama in rural, working-class white America. They liked Trump more than Romney.

I cited Romney because I consider him an example of a moderate Republican technocrat who would appeal to many Democrats, had he not been unfairly trashed by the mainstream media. As a Democrat he might or might not pull the Dems back towards the center, but he'd certainly be a more competent administrator than Obama. I'm sure Romneycare would have worked better than Obamacare - not only better thought out, but none of those juicy development contracts that were handed out on a noncompetitive basis to Obama supporters...the rollout was very messy, remember? And the Dems would have carried North Carolina, where doubtless the Obamacare-related inflation of healthcare costs soured many on the entire system.

 

[T90TankGuy]

Rather then moaning after the fact if only they had gone out and voted.

 

[Gandhi G in da house]

Why is it that the American media seems to care far more about the suffering of illegal immigrants rather than the legal citizens of the country ?

 

[T-72]

Lol. If you've ever been to California (I live here) or New York, you'd know how absurd that claim is. Look at how badly he lost both states. Both are very liberal, Democratic states. People who turnout to vote tend to be older, wealthier, and white when compared to the general voting electorate---groups that favor Republicans/Trump. In fact, the opposite is true. Turnout in swing states like Florida was already relatively high. People voted because they knew their vote would have an impact. California and New York, on the other hand, had relatively low levels of turnout because the winner was a forgone conclusion. If we shifted to a popular vote system, turnout in these states would rise, and more Democrats in "blue" states would vote.

If more people turned out, he would do worse. Much worse. There were many unmotivated Democrats/liberals this election because of Hillary Clinton---a possibility we discussed months ago, if you remember. Not to mention that even before this election, studies have been done on non-voters in American elections. What they've found is that many of them are young or low income, and they favor Democrats.

I have, hadn't the slightest interest in politics when I was there but I've learnt since.

So the coastal hubs vote blue, 3 out of 4 broad geographical areas anyway, 1 swings either way. Have not looked up the numbers for the US but coastal regions are generally more populous than the heartland for any country, wonder if changing to a popular vote wins system would even be fair now that one party has so much influence there.

but, it works the other way too, I'll bet a ton of people in places like Alabama, Tennessee etc didn't bother because they knew how it would work out electoral college wise there this time.

At this stage I wouldn't be that dismissive of Trump, if he campaigned hard in those blue areas he'd win a lot of people over.

way more than Bernie ever managed.

The leftists rioted and got violent after that particular rally

Trump was not a bad candidate, he was the best candidate ever, amazing how he fought against 100% of the mainstream media who were totally opposed to and very unfair to him and still got enough people in the swing states behind him to punch through the media.

Years after he's gone Hollywood will make a feel good movie and win bigly at the oscars.