I never thought, except in a few moments of fantasy, that I would be able to say that.
I have been interested in Trump as a phenomenon all year.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Wilson conceded that “Trump is still a very powerful force right now” because he appeals to part of the of the conservative base that Wilson said was activated by his “nativist” message. Wilson insisted that the donor class “can’t just sit back on the sidelines and say, ‘oh well, don’t worry, this will all work itself out.’”
“They’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump,” Wilson said. “And that’s a fact.”
Wilson is an alleged GOP consultant. Trump may be fatal to many GOP consultants as they were not only mistaken but disloyal to the team they were supposed to belong to.
What happened? Richard Fernandez has a theory.
Hillary’s real enemy was Obama’s real record of failure added to her own. Low-wage growth, a disastrous foreign policy, a catastrophic Obamacare, and numerous scandals to name a few weighed down on her like an anvil heavier than any insult that Donald Trump could lay upon her.
It’s important for progressives to realize this, for they are even now casting about for something to blame. Paul Krugman tweeted: “I truly thought I knew my country better than it turns out I did. I have warned that we could become a failed state, but didn’t realize …” Realize what? That the electorate wouldn’t notice the last administration’s debacles?
A lot of this can be laid on Obama. He has been a disastrous president. I thought he would be all along.
In February 2008, I posted this.
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Obama had no record of accomplishment. Jones put his name on bills he had had nothing to do with.
“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
Then his advisor, David Axelrod, got the Chicago Tribune, for which he worked at the time, to sue to open the divorce records of Jack Ryan, the Republican candidate. Ryan had gone through a nasty custody battle with his ex-wife, Jeri who was an actress.
The Tribune played it for all it was worth and it was a lot.
Any man who has been through custody battles with angry ex-wives knows that accusations are thrown around frequently. The absence of evidence is not an issue in politics, as we see with all the women claiming Trump molested them.
Ryan dropped out and Obama had another bonanza that was not his doing. Hillary inherited his failures.
She had her own, of course. They go back to where she fired the entire White House travel office to install her cousin and crony in the office.
Former Travel Office Chief Acquitted : Courts: Billy Dale had been charged with embezzlement. He says he used funds paid to the White House unit to defray costs for journalists.
WASHINGTON — Billy R. Dale, a White House official fired for allegedly mismanaging staff and press travel arrangements, was acquitted Thursday by a federal court jury of charges that he embezzled $68,000.
Culminating a 13-day trial, jurors decided in less than two hours that federal prosecutors had failed to prove charges that Dale stole funds paid to his office by reporters and photographers who traveled with the President.
A White House employee for more than 30 years, Dale broke into tears as the verdict was announced.
Dale, 58, was at the center of a Clinton Administration travel office fiasco two years ago that resulted in seven employees being fired, and later in reprimands for those responsible for the dismissals.
Hillary was responsible. Then there was Hillary’s obsession with secrecy.
A good historical account of the task force, and the fight over its proposals, can be found in a 1996 book titled The First Lady: A Comprehensive View of Hillary Rodham Clinton, that I co-wrote with my brother Timothy. Here is Chapter Nine titled “Health Care:”
Calling it a tour-de-force would be an understatement. There she was, the First Lady of the United States with the media and the entire Congressional leadership eating out of her hand. Flanked by Senators George Mitchell and Ted Kennedy in the Senate’s Lyndon B. Johnson Conference Room, Hillary stood there as the only First Lady in history to confer with Congress on a crucial domestic policy issue. Only a week before on January 25, 1993, the new President announced that his wife would lead a task force to overhaul the nation’s health care system.
It was, of course, a fiasco as the Republicans took both houses of Congress in 1994 for the first time in 50 years.
Additionally, Hillary as Secretary of State, initiated the the failed “Reset” with Russia, That involved the ridiculous mistranslation of “Reset.”
What the policy did not achieve was its primary goal to build a solid foundation for a stable relationship. All in all, the ‘reset’ policy ameliorated relations with Russia only for a limited period of time. As Medvedev received criticism inside Russia for “selling out the country to the West” and as it became more obvious that Vladimir Putin would assume presidency in 2012, Medvedev slowly withdrew from further engagement with Obama.
Her record with Libya is also famous, especially with the Benghazi disaster.
Despite repeated requests in late 2011 and early 2012 for new agents to help improve the security of the compound, “no additional resources” or “personnel” were sent by the administration.
I don’t think we yet know what Stevens was doing there. Her record of SoS was a failure.
Then we come to the corruption. The book, “Clinton Cash “ has not only made the author rich but has aided the FBI investigation of the Foundation, which seems to function as a money laundering operation.
What about Trump ? He has been thinking about this for years. This time, he may have seen an opportunity or it may just be that he is getting older and wanted to try. It may have begun as a lark, as many suspect, or it may have been serious from the start.
What beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election wasn’t Donald Trump’s well-oiled machinery, American bigotry or the Republican Party. It was God or, if you prefer, “the facts” which did it. Hillary’s real enemy was Obama’s real record of failure added to her own. Low-wage growth, a disastrous foreign policy, a catastrophic Obamacare, and numerous scandals to name a few weighed down on her like an anvil heavier than any insult that Donald Trump could lay upon her.
I tend to agree. He has shown amazing energy and resilience through the campaign, however.
Slate is demonstrating hysteria but also a grain of sense.
We should blame all those people around the Clintons more than the Clintons themselves, and the Clintons themselves deserve a ridiculous amount of blame. Hillary Clinton was just an ambitious person who wanted to be president. There are a lot of people like that. But she was enabled. The Democratic establishment is a club unwelcoming to outsiders, because outsiders don’t first look out for the club. The Clintons will be gone now. For the sake of the country, let them take the hangers-on with them.
I can certainly agree with that and I hope some Media people follow.
For the sake of the country, let them take the hangers-on with them.
And can the please take the Bushes and their hangers on with them as well.
Fernandez, as usual, calls it. If the WSJ had a clue they’d hire him and run him in alternate weeks from Bret Stephens.
“If the WSJ had a clue ”
Yes. The opinion page has been a beacon to me for years. That may be fading. They are too committed to what sounds like crony capitalism to me.
You can’t tell on the national map, but Illinois was closer than many of us dreamed it would be. Chicago is still solidly Democrat. That isn’t going to change anytime soon, but key areas outside of the larger cities swung to Trump. The western and northern parts of the state – middle class and agrarian oriented counties that have voted Democratic for decades, choose Trump this time. I’m very surprised. This is a big change.
Another point to add to Grurray’s: if the Libertarian vote in Colorado had instead been cast for Trump, Colorado would be red on the national map.
I had a security clearance, all the time I was in, but only dealt directly with classified for a couple of years when I was the security NCO at the video production det. Sometimes we had to do classified materiel – and of course the scripts were classified, and kept in a safe, and had to be couriered here and there.
All I can say is that I had been as careless with classified materiel as Hillary and her staff were … I’d still be in a cell in Leavenworth.
My daughter stayed up until 2 AM watching the returns – I couldn’t bear the tension. I was hoping for a blow-out, on the part of all those voters who couldn’t stand Hillary, or those who didn’t open up to pollsters — but between Hillary having the establishment media locked up tight and massive voter fraud, I thought she might squeak in by a margin. I knew there was a huge underswell of support for Trump in Flyoverlandia and a visceral cold anger – but I didn’t want to put my hopes on it.
Now, of course, comes the fun part …
My wife was walking around the house saying, “I can’t believe it.” until she left for a luncheon date with a classmate.
Good comment at CTH:
the real patriots in the FBI, the Secret Service and elsewhere can speak up, investigate crimes and help make this country truly great again.
Rumors the Secret Service may go back to Treasury. Whatever those guys want, they get, I suspect. Trump’s personal thanks to them was an indicator.
They hated Hillary. I wonder who gets stuck with the duty of guarding her after this?
Mike:
Thanks for helping me keep the faith through the campaign! Whenever I became discouraged, I stopped by here to see what you and the others thought about the way things were developing. I wonder how many of the “Never Trumpers” who disagreed with you ended up voting for him? Certainly Trump is no panacea, but he was all that truly sane Americans had to get the clinton machine chopped up. (What is the worst job in the world today? hillary!!!’s SS Detail.) And to Sgt Mom: ditto on the verdict that would have been rendered for those of us with clearances had we been as careless/clueless as hillary!!! was. I remember being told, “Avoid ANY HINT of impropriety!” Guess hillary!!! didn’t understand that too well.
Cheers!!!
chuck
Three points for you:
(i) The Wikileaks emails showed how the Clintons controlled the Dem party, thus assuring victory over Sanders, and presumably ensuring that nobody else ran. But why hadn’t Obama seized control of the party so that he could ensure that somebody with a better chance of winning ran? He had all the power of a Prez. Was he just too damned lazy? Too damned selfish?
(ii) All the bonkers comparisons of Trump to Hitler or Mussolini were never answered. I wonder whether better analogies would be to Adenauer or de Gaulle. But then presumably the vast majority of Americans would have no idea of who they were.
(iii) Another comparison, which was obviously unusable, would have been to Gorbachev. Negotiating with Reagan to end the Cold War might be comparable to Trump binning the absurd neocon lust for war with all and sundry.
Hold on, the answer to (i) is obvious. The Clintons knew too much about the parts of his life that he wanted to keep hidden.
Fourth point: can he avoid assassination?
Dearie: Re, (i), Obama was/is nothing but a low level Chicago machine party hack. He didn’t even stick around there long enough to pick up a mentor to bring along to help him take over the national machine. I guess Rahm could have helped him do that but he wanted to go back home and take over the real machine. It seems reasonable to infer that Obama made some sort of promise to the Clintons that if they supported him so strongly in 2012 he would help clear the way in 2016, e.g., by pushing Biden aside. I wonder if Slow Joe knew that he simply doesn’t have the brainpower for the top job. Nah, he’s not that smart.
I refused to let myself be optimistic about yesterday. When that silly NYT probability needle thingy suddenly swung Trump’s way when it became clear that FL, NC, & OH were falling and MI was next, it was the most glorious feeling.
Mike addressed your (i) up in his article. Obama was a tool. As a Democrat State Senator, he did whatever the two or three bosses who control the legislature told him to do. One of them decided one day to pick him out of a lineup and crown him king. The rest was up to the party Machine to make it happen. He had no power or say in the national party even when he was president. He was strictly a Machine guy. Their guy in Washington.
Whoops, Brian beat me to it.
Another thing to consider is how little the office of the President really affects the next election. We’ve seen three recent two-term Presidents unable to get their party elected again. And before Reagan/Bush, it hadn’t happened in 40 years since Coolidge/Hoover.
“He was strictly a Machine guy. Their guy in Washington.”
A lot of Chicago machine guys can’t talk or read a TelePrompTer as well as Obama can. He really does remind me of the movie “The Candidate,” which was supposed to be a left wing critique of Republicans.
On election day, McKay wins. In the final scene, he escapes the victory party and pulls Lucas into a room while throngs of journalists clamor outside. McKay asks Lucas, “Marvin … What do we do now?”
Except Obama had Axelrod and crew to tell him what to do. Nancy Pelosi had the theory that Hillary lost in 1994 because she excluded insurance companies from her secret commission. So, they let insurance company lobbyists write the bill.
Nancy and Harry Reid know nothing about anything but politics so they could not know that insurance companies hate health insurance. It’s a loser. What insurance companies want to do is administer, for a fee, employer sponsored health plans. In this case government is the “employer,” meaning they are spending other peoples money.
That is why it’s failing, Insurance companies all want to be administrators since health insurance is no longer insurance. The reason why HSAs work is that the patients are spending cash and there is no claims processing fee. Insurance companies hate that. They live on fees for claims.
If you run the disqualified Hillary against the unqualified Trump, you deserve to lose.
I don’t expect big things from Trump: I’d have held my nose and voted for him as the lesser evil. He’ll probably be blamed for the imminent financial collapse though it will be none of his doing. At best he may briefly impede the decline of the USA, just as King Arthur (or someone else) briefly impeded the Anglo-Saxon conquest.
But I am delighted at the eclipse of the Clintons – that’s an unmitigated boon.
How long will it take for Hellary to swap from denying that her health is poor to begging for mercy because her health is poor?
Perhaps.
But he can credibly say he saw it coming, and blame the previous regime for the collapse.
Compare and contrast with the chosen one of the gop, Jeb! Bush, who at one point said something to the effect that he wouldn’t blame the previous administration for anything that happened while he was president.
Basically, Jeb! would have acted as if reality had just begun on inauguration day, pretending everything that happened before it had no impact on the present.
In other words he was a fool.
I suspect he was chosen to be the gop standard bearer because he was too dumb to realize he was being set up to lose to Hillary- or was so vile that he was willing to be a patsy, betraying the GOP base yet again.
Forgive me for rambling.
Probably not long at all, Dearie. Look for the “poor, sick elderly woman” card being played very soon. Possibly before the end of the year.
Dearie’s concern should get more attention. I remain very puzzled as to how the U.S. avoided financial collapse during Obama’s first term much less his second. I recall thinking before that first term that no matter who won that election, the winner had a very rough financial road ahead. But never saw much of a bumpy road.
I know some of the answer when I look at rates paid for savings, which do not encourage/create savings. Meanwhile very low rates charged for loans. Banks cannot loan what they don’t have. Means in some manner banks rely on government transfer of fiat money. Keynesian unicorn power. Firmly believing that what cannot go on won’t, I now wonder about this coming presidential term.
“I remain very puzzled as to how the U.S. avoided financial collapse during Obama’s first term ”
ZIRP.
I don’t know that Trump can raise interest rates without a crash. I just hope he waits until I get my new home loan locked in in Arizona. I anticipate a housing crash in California and will be happy to leave this dying state. The hoses in Tucson that I am looking at and will make an offer on this weekend are selling for less than they sold for in 2003 or are selling for more but include upgrades.
Long ago, when I was buying a house in California in 1969, nobody anticipated appreciation. A house was a structure you bought to live in. It was a commodity. Nobody expected to make money on it.
It has debased the economy to change that. Inflation has devastated the US economy and many, especially the young, do not realize it.
Tucson is a nice place to live and the real estate market has not recovered from 2008. A lot of that is due to ZIRP which has harmed the “snow bird” Tucson population who used to spend every winter there and return to Minnesota or Iowa every summer. They are poor now and cannot afford two homes. Thanks to Obama.
It will be very difficult to unwind this. I wish Trump luck in doing so. In the meantime, I will be living in a nice home at a reasonable price,
It is to me amazing that so many candidates ignored Trump’s message – before Trump. It was there for the taking. They were tone deaf. Many still are, like Ryan.
If being a “conservative” these days means appropriating trillions more to the national debt, then count me out. Bush Sr started to dilute the brand until today it means virtually nothing.
This reminds me a bit of the 1980 election, when all the pundits were predicting a Carter win.I remember that magical night. In fact I was there – 10′ from Reagan – at his last campaign stop election eve at the Mission Valley Shopping Center in San Diego. His warm up guy was saying that “I think you will be surprised this evening”.
They had advance knowledge of some exit polling.
I was ambivalent Tuesday – bracing for a Hillary win but at the same time knowing that you can’t always trust the pollsters (or the MSM for that matter).
I was watching O’Reilly today or yesterday and he had an interesting guest on – Krauthammer? When asked to explain how Obama’s personal popularity could still be 53% against a Trump win, the guest said that people liked Obama but hated Obamaism.
I’ve decided that a decent analogy for Trump is de Gaulle. So the equivalent of the Pieds-Noirs are in for a big disappointment. Still, surely he won’t be worse than Hellary would have been.
P.S. “people liked Obama but hated Obamaism”: racist swine, eh?
I’m warming to the King Arthur analogy. He may only have impeded events but the impediment lasted two generations, which is not bad going. Mind you, the invaders this time aren’t namby-pamby Anglo-Saxons.
people liked Obama but hated Obamaism
Many people don’t look at things closely.
Obama’s still high approval shows that few know what is happening outside their own little box.
He has devastated our economy and foreign policy. Clinton did much the same and got out of town before the roof fell in on 9/11.
Clinton still was popular.
Snake oil still sells.
Mr Stockman agrees with me: financial/economic woes ahead.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-09/david-stockman-jig-america’s-voters-just-fired-their-ruling-elites
“The Democratic establishment is a club unwelcoming to outsiders, because outsiders don’t first look out for the club.”
That applies to the repub establishment, as well. They were as interested in defeating Trump as Hillary.
Here is a factoid about this election. The states of Maine, Virginia, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon all would have been won by Trump if one county’s vote was removed.
Given how skewed the polls were in favor of Clinton, I tend to reject the veracity of polls showing 53% favorable opinion of Obama. It seems obvious now (to me) that the media shows only what the media wants you to see.