A diary of election day.
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The Cataclysm: Notes on Election Day and the Politics of Hubris
link:http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1478710712.html
counterpunch
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The electoral experience is getting farther and farther removed from the issues that matter to most of us, from health care to the climate, jobs to homelessness, consumer debt to child care. The skin of the system is getting thin, the circuitry beneath is beginning to show through, like some over-worked android on WestWorld.
+ The polls all suggest that it will be a big night for Hillary. She either has a 94% chance of winning, an 84% chance of winning, or a 71% chance, according to the alleged savant of analytics Nate Silver, who has been hedging his bets over the last two weeks. That’s a 23% margin of error for the leading pollsters. No wonder they make the big money. Could they be wrong? You bet.
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...Hillary Clinton has completely rejected even the pretense of class-oriented politics, in favor of targeting discrete demographics of voters, sending coded messages through the color and cut of her pantsuits to suburban women in Philly suburbs and insurance brokers in Tallahassee. This is the politics of identity, where your working conditions are less important than where you shop and what you buy. There is no unifying message to her campaign. Instead there are thousands of messages, each individually tailored and targeted like those stalker ads on Google and Amazons. It’s politics by algorithm.
Meanwhile, Trump’s blue-collar voters are condemned by the liberal elites as neo-Nazis and Klan-like automatons. Over the last few weeks, MSDNC has devoted much attention to the imbecilic David Duke’s attempt to ride Trump’s coat-tails. Duke is polling at less than 5 percent among Republicans in his vainglorious run for the Senate in Louisiana. What about the Trump voters who reject Duke’s racist bilge? How do the Democrats explain them? They don’t even try. The American underclass, both black and white, those marginalized by globalization and a government that works only to further enrich the rich, are viewed by the Democrats’ leader as a collection of “deplorables” and “super-predators.”
The Democrats have totally surrendered to the logic of neoliberalism and the impoverished and pulverized victims of their policies must be blamed for their own pitiful condition. The poor will be fined for being poor. Where’s the long-term dividend in that cynical brand of politics?
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…..+ Running against one of the worst Congresses in history, with an approval rating of less than 12 percent, the Democrats seem poised to pick up only a handful of seats in the House, perhaps as few as five. Of course, that may have been exactly the kind of Congress that HRC wanted. Much easier to go after entitlements by striking a deal with Paul Ryan than Pelosi.
+ Here’s an example. Trump is winning Vigo County, Indiana, stomping grounds of the old Socialist Eugene V. Debs, by 13%. Obama won that county by 1% in 2008, a clear sign of Trump’s appeal to union and working class voters on NAFTA and industrial trade policy.
+ Evan Bayh, the neoliberal Democrat and corporate lobbyist, got whacked in his return to Indiana, where he pushed aside Baron Hill to claim the Democratic slot. Bayh hadn’t lived in the state for years and couldn’t even remember the address of his condo in Indianapolis. Good riddance.
+ In 2012, Obama won the union vote in Ohio by 23 points. Trump and Clinton are running even.
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….+ She had the ground game, she had the money, she had the press, she had the advertising, she had the polls. All that meant nothing.
+ One of the key numbers of the night? 69 percent of the electorate is angry at the federal government. They feel the government has let them down. They’re right.
+ If Trump wins, liberals will have no way to process the results. It’s beyond their conception. Their brains will simply melt.
+ Dick Cheney once said that Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter. Trump may teach us that sexual predation doesn’t matter. Of course, it never really has mattered politically in the US, in part because of the hypocrisy of the Democrats over JFK, Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
+ Kaboom! Trump wins Ohio, followed by staggering wins in North Carolina, Iowa, and finally, Florida.
+ Rachel Maddow is desperately trying to scapegoat the Greens and Libertarians for Hillary’s loss in Florida. It’s an absurd charge. Libertarians don’t vote for neoliberal, war-mongering Democrats under any circumstances. Paul Krugman is fingering Jill Stein, who got less than one-percent of the vote: “Jill Stein has managed to play Ralph Nader. Without her Florida might have been saved.” Nonsense. Hillary has only herself to blame. Despite a big Latino turnout, Hillary only won 51% of the women’s vote in Florida. No hanging chads to be found.
+ If Trump ultimately wins Michigan, will Michael Moore implode or explode?
+ In the 60s and 70s, Civil Rights legislation drove southern whites into the Republican camp. Now 40 years of neoliberal economic policies have caused working class voters to abandon the Democratic Party in droves. Just look at the exit polling on how union households voted: 47% Clinton; 45% Trump.
+ It will come as a shock to both the Democratic and Republican leaderships that there is a class war going on in America. It’s too bad for working class people that Donald Trump is the one leading it.
+ The glass ceiling is looking more and more like a glass coffin…
+ Putin / Nader 2020?
+ A huge and bitter loss in Wisconsin with the defeat of Russ Feingold, probably the most honorable Democrat running for the senate. This crushing defeat, like so many others tonight, can be blamed on the incompetence and arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership, which sacrificed the senate and the House for the fools gold of the Clinton campaign.
+ The DNC rigged their primaries to insure the nomination of the only candidate who could lose to Trump. Is it any wonder that same brain trust, high on the fumes of their own hubris, lost all those senate seats, too?
+ The DNC spent more time conspiring to defeat Bernie Sanders, than they did the Republicans. They absorbed nothing from the Sanders campaign, from the issues that resonated with his followers: a corrupt system fueled by corporate cash and militarism, working class people demeaned and ridiculed, the American youth burdened by debt with no opportunity for advancement, blacks and Hispanics treated as political chattel, captives to a party that demands their loyalty yet does nothing for them. The Clinton team vanquished Sanders, paid him off and then marched on arrogantly toward their doom.
+ Clinton herself showed a singular lack of courage to the very end of her campaign. She couldn’t even speak out against the brutalization of tribal people in North Dakota defending their water and burial grounds against the mercenaries of Big Oil. How could anyone look at her silence in the face of those ongoing atrocities and believe that she’d ever stand up for them?
+ My old history professor at American University, Allan Lichtman, has developed a formula for forecasting presidential elections that has correctly predicted the results of every campaign since 1984. In September, Lichtman ran the numbers on Clinton and Trump and predicted that Trump would win. Even after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, Lichtman stuck to his formula. He was widely derided. But Allan was right and all those smug pollsters and pundits were wrong, terribly, madly wrong.
+ Six states voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump today: Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Based on those results, it’s hard to argue, as some are already doing, that “racism” was the chief factor driving Trump’s victory.
+ Hillary, who based much of her campaign strategy on decisively winning the women’s vote, lost among white women by a 10-point margin: 53-43. Think, for a moment, about that 53 percent number for Trump. It’s safe to say that Hillary ran the worst campaign since Al Gore. In fact, it was worse than Gore’s in almost every respect.
+ Could Bernie have defeated Trump? On a fair playing field, sure. But there was no way Sanders was going to be permitted to emerge from the Democratic primaries. Wall Street needed a candidate it could trust and Hillary was it. The Establishment feared a threat from the Left more than from the wild-ass right. And for once, they didn’t see what was coming right at them.
+ Is this the final repudiation of neoliberalism?
It should be. But don’t bet on it.
It’s up to us to make it so.
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