The two times Obama won, Republican friends of mine shrieked, cried, announced it was The Death of America and predicted that within four years, this country would look a lot like one of those post-apocalyptic movies where the few who have survived fight off zombie attacks and battle for food. I'm not fearing that but I do think a lot of folks are going to suffer…and if there are roaming zombies, most of them are going to be former pollsters.
I feel there's been a kind of a two-part wrongness among those of us who backed Hillary. One part was to not fully understand the anger that's out there among people who think the country is in ruins when there are so many economic indicators that it's not, and how they feel the urban elites have neglected them. The other part — and this is the piece I really don't get — is why they thought Donald Trump, who has never given a shit about people who weren't rich and famous, was the guy to change that.
I followed this stunner of an evening primarily on various websites, which I found more satisfactory than any of the TV channels I briefly watched. On a website, if only two things happen in a half-hour, they put up two posts or maybe three. On TV, they have to say the two things over and over and over, plus say a lot of unimportant or wildly-speculative things because at any given moment, someone has to be talking. The more of it I listened to, the less I knew.
Among the calls I've received in the last few hours was one from a friend who's been hectoring me for some time. He's angry that while I voted for Bernie Sanders, I wasn't wildly outraged that Hillary got the nomination, nor do I think she stole it from its rightful owner. There's no question in his mind that Sanders would have won…and maybe he's right that Bernie would have, though I'm pretty sure he's wrong to be so certain of that. We'll never know what the opposition would have done to him. They certainly would have convinced a lot of people that this was a war to stop the Socialist Takeover of America.
Those who believe the government has too much power have just given it greater power than it's had in many years. The government couldn't do that much when no one party had a lock on all three branches of government. Gridlock was the order of the day.
It can do plenty when one does and that's what we'll have. That would be scary with anyone in the White House and it's very scarier with the guy who now looks like he's going to get there. As I write this, Hillary Clinton has not been mathematically eliminated but anything short of total pessimism seems disconnected from reality. Come to think of it, it all seems disconnected from reality. Maybe we should all go help build that wall on the Southern Border. Mexico's going to pay for it, you know.