Lock him up!  Lock him up!  Lock him up!

Kushner used private email to conduct White House business

Yesterday, Newsweek published a story accusing Bernie voters of tipping the 2016 election to Trump.  It uses data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, compiled by Political Wire, that showed that, indeed, 10% of Bernie primary voters went for Trump in the general. It then goes into a swing state analysis that showed that Trump’s winning margin was less than the Bernie’s voters who went for Trump.  The implication was clear – stubborn Bernie voters wrecked Hillary’s bid for the presidency.  How evil they were and inconsiderate of Hillary and all of her supporters.  Fair enough.

There was an interesting mention, though, of a few not insignificant details at the very end of the article…First, the 10% of Bernie voters that went for Trump paled in comparison to the TWENTY FIVE percent of Hillary voters who went for McCain in 2008 (hypocrisy, anyone?).  More important, and one that I hadn’t realized was so large, was that almost 30% of Bernie voters were actually self identified Republican or leaned Republican.  Conversely, Hillary only attracted about 6 or 7% of the same demographic.

So, was it Bernie and his evil bots who wrecked Hillary’s election, or was it actually the fact that Hillary failed to attract the same demographic that Bernie did?  Trump certainly attracted a wide demographic of support.  Bernie attracted a wide demographic of support.  Hillary simply did not.  So, should the headline of the Newsweek article have been BERNIE SANDERS VOTERS HELPED TRUMP WIN AND HERE’S PROOF,  or should it have been HILLARY CLINTON LOST BECAUSE SHE FAILED TO ATTRACT A WIDER DEMOGRAPHIC THAN TRUMP?

I know the answer, but Hillary’s supporters, and many in the party, still cling to the myth that Bernie wrecked her election.  The inconvenient truth is that the numbers are the numbers and they speak for themselves; this lesson must be learned by the Democratic party lest it have to re-learn it in 2020.

I’m not holding my breath.

After Cheeto Jesus’ inauguration, he announced with great fanfare two councils of CEOs all designed to Make America Great Again, whatever that means.  The two councils, the Manufacturing Council and the Strategy & Policy Forum, were supposedly organized to help shape policy to increase business and generate jobs for American workers.  In reality, though, they were simply figurehead in nature, designed to reward CEOs for supporting Trump.  In fact, to my knowledge the councils never actually met outside of the initial photo ops, and were just used to raise the profiles of its members.

All that puffery came crashing down the last few days after Trump’s catastrophic response to the violence in Charlottesville, defending neo-Nazis and racist white supremacists and attacking the media for simply asking questions.  In the face of this disaster, CEOs began bailing from the Manufacturing Council. Today, the Strategy & Policy Forum met in a conference call, and in the face of a crowd of CEOs ready to resign, they disbanded.  Later, through Twitler, Trump also disbanded the Manufacturing Council.  I guess he decided that the defections were simply too glaring to gloss over.

This development is not insignificant.  Think about it – Trump rode to the WH on the backs of bigots and the ignorant; but worse, he also rode on the shoulders of business executives who were so self interested in stuffing their wallets even more full that they allowed themselves to be used to elect a depraved carnival barker.  These very same executives are now fleeing like rats off a sinking ship.

As much as I despise Donald Trump and his infestation of the White House, he’s actually not the problem.  As much as I opposed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy (twice), she’s actually not the problem.  Barack Obama’s presidency being blocked from greater accomplishments is actually not the problem.  All of the screaming heads on cable TeeVee are not actually the problem.  The idiots in state houses all over the country trying to strip people of their rights and places to go to the restroom are not actually the problem.  All the other nonsense going on in politics around the US is not actually the problem.

The actual problem?  It’s the Did Not Vote vote.  Did Not Vote wins most every election.  Have a look at this map:

Of eligible votes in 2016, Clinton received 28.43% (65,845,063) of all votes compared to Trump’s 27.20% (62,980,160) and Did Not Vote received 44.37%(102,731,399).  Did not vote won, and the American people lost.  Again.  This is how you get nut jobs like Dan Patrick, Sid Miller, Greg Abbott, and Rick Perry elected to statewide office.  When half of eligible voters can’t be bothered, this is what you get.  If voters actually voted, Russian hacking wouldn’t matter.  Gerrymandering would have much less effect.  Politicians would be driven toward compromise and making government work, rather than barricading themselves in their extreme corners heaving molotov cocktails at the opposition.  They would stop holding Americans hostage over budget squabbles, healthcare, Social Security, and energy policy.

If the majority of Americans actually voted, we would have a government that actually worked.  As it is today, while people sit around watching America’s Got Talent eating their Cheetos and drinking their Diet Coke, evil and/or crazy people make decisions that damage our democracy, threaten Americans’ lives, and make us the laughing stock of the world.

This is the actual problem.  This is what actually needs to get fixed.

Our readers who are Hillary loyalists don’t like when I write about the disaster of her campaign last year and the mess that is the Democratic Party.  Like it or not, though, the criticism is true, and I’m not the only one.  Tim Dickinson wrote a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone this last week that talks about how the party got hollowed out during the Obama years especially during Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s term which set a low watermark for corruption and plain ol’ incompetence.  Even Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate and former DNC chair, got into the act and was quoted in the piece saying, “That congresswoman had no idea what she was doing.”  And that was the polite criticism.  Rather than grow the party, she actually used her position for self promotion to launch a campaign to land her in House leadership.  That blew up and she dug in when even Obama tried to oust her from the job.  We all know how that story ended.

It gets worse, especially for Hillary’s campaign.  An unnamed Democratic strategist described her candidacy in blunt terms:

“And she was really surprised by how strong Trump was – and part of it was she just sucked. At a really fundamental level we gotta get people to acknowledge what a f*****g piece of sh*t her campaign was, because Donald Trump should not have won this election.”

Well, OK, then.  That’s about as blunt as it gets (even more blunt than me).  The rest of the article speaks of how Tom Perez is trying to un-fossilize the party, recruit new candidates, and resurrect the money machine that it became under Howard Dean and Barack Obama during the very successful 50 state strategy in 2006 and 2008.

However, the job is not a simple one.  During the Obama administration, Democrats lost all over the country in state and federal elections due to simple neglect (and DWS’s incompetence).  No one, including Obama, was in charge during that time, and his staff had no national plan except to get him re-elected in 2012.  There’s now a huge deficit to make up for all that neglect, and Trump is certainly leaving a huge opportunity for the Dems to hoover up if only they don’t blow it…again.

This Rolling Stone article is a sobering read, and will certainly piss off loyalists.  But truth is truth, and facts is facts. This chapter is long from over, and the sooner progressives recognize what a complete disaster 2008 to 2016 actually was, the sooner they can fix it.

“A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump.”

Greg Sargent, writing in the Washington Post, revealed results of polls and focus groups taken by Democratic pollsters since the election, and the above quote is the over-arching theme; many people who voted for Obama in 2012 switched to Trump in 2016 because they either believed Trump better represented their interests, or opposed Hillary as a candidate.  The studies found that over and over, it was clear that the Democrats have lost serious ground with working class whites.  I believe there are several reasons for this: First, working class wage growth has been stagnated since the Reagan years, virtually destroying the American dream of a home, a car, and higher education.  Second, the Republican noise machine has successfully targeted this group since the early 90’s, blaming Democrats and liberal policies for the working class’s woes.

What’s happened?  Well, for one, starting with Bill Clinton, the Democrats have allowed themselves to be dragged farther and farther to the right.  As staunch liberals died off, the new generation of Democrats, lead by Clinton, adopted more conservative policies including limiting welfare, don’t ask don’t tell, and DOMA.  He took one stab at healthcare reform with Hillary leading that effort which ended in failure.  For the rest of his White House days, he was embroiled in scandals, some manufactured but some stupidly self-inflicted.

During those years, the Democrats, rather than being staunch supporters of workers and US industry, tried to walk the fine lines between liberal-moderate-conservative to avoid being labeled by opponents, and stopped defending labor and the Working Joe as Republican policies to push industry and money offshore seriously damaged US workers.

The inexorable slide was slowed a little by the rise of Barack Obama and his populist/social justice agenda.  He spoke clearly to the working class, and they came to him by the millions. However, after he was elected, he was effectively stymied in many of his initiatives because of Great Recession as well as the weakness of the Dems and pervasive stonewalling by Repubs.  The only significant legislative legacy for Obama was the ACA, which is now threatened with repeal after the Dems were swept out of office in 2016.  Now they are thrashing around trying to make sense of the shocking loss in November.

The Democrats ignore these findings at their own peril.  The opportunity to make huge gains in 2018 and 2020 are there; all the Dems need do is grasp the message and policies that propelled the party to dominance for the 40 years begun by FDR.  They need to reclaim their legacy of being the party of the middle and working class.  Until they do that, they will continue to flounder.

It’s time to stop licking wounds.  It’s time to acknowledge the mistakes and poor leadership in recent years and get to work.