RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have a take slightly different from David’s on the Democrats’ sharp decline in presidential numbers.

Hillary was a terrible candidate, no question. I could never understand why anyone on our side feared her. She’s never been good at this. She won a senate seat in New York, where the GOP barely has a pulse. She would have been nominated (or coronated) in 2008 if she could have gotten to 40 percent with Dem voters; she couldn’t, which is why Obama got consideration that someone of his inexperience and radical background should never have gotten … and he duly zoomed past her. This time around, the party rigged it for her, and she still struggled to beat a batty 75-year-old self-proclaimed socialist who wasn’t even a Democrat until 2015. As I’ve said a number of times, she was certain to be just as bad a candidate in ’16 as she had been in ’08, except now she had Benghazi and a generally lousy tenure at the State Department hanging around her neck – and that was before we learned about the homebrew email system, destruction of government records, mishandling of classified information, etc.

But all that said, I look at Hillary as Obama’s policies without Obama’s aura. Obama the historical figure has always run ahead Obama’s policies. Because race remains a highly charged issue in American life, the first African-American presidency excited people in a way the prospect of a woman president does not. By that, I mean to imply the opposite of sexism: Geraldine Ferraro appeared on a presidential ticket a generation ago, Sarah Palin eight years ago, and women have been holding high-level cabinet, congressional and judicial posts for decades. The electorate has more women than men, many women are visibly successful in private industry, and our close ally Britain now has its second female prime minister. It’s just not that big a deal to people. The playing field has leveled to the extent that when, sometime in the easily foreseeable future, a woman wins the White House, it will be based on merit, not sex. Hillary’s problem is not that she is a woman; it’s that she is Hillary.

Obama is a very different story: people who are not particularly supportive of his agenda have nevertheless supported his presidency – although the number declined markedly after his policies took hold in 2009. His personal charm has always been lost on me – I find him aloof, thin-skinned, condescending, and dishonest. But even I can see that he is handsome, graceful, impressively confident, has a great voice, is clearly comfortable in his celebrity, and is by all accounts an admirable husband and father. Many people like having him as their president. His presidency’s historic nature makes them feel better about the country (which is why it is so tragic that he further divided the nation racially when he was uniquely positioned to unite us). Even if people are not crazy about the direction in which Obama has taken the country, he often does not get blamed for his policy failures.

But let’s take Obama The Historic President out of the equation. Since he became president and Democrats got onboard his aggressively statist governance, the party has been routed across the country: in both houses of Congress, and in state and local governments. When Obama’s policies are on the ballot without Obama, Democrats tend to get shellacked.

In addition to her lack of political gifts, Clinton was plainly hurt by her scandals, WikiLeaks, and the FBI’s machinations, which publicized many of the sordid details uncovered by the bureau’s investigation and then redirected the public’s attention to the emails after she hoped she had put them behind her. Still, as much as anything else, Clinton was hurt by the implosion of Obamacare in the critical final weeks of the campaign. It is Obama’s signature policy, and she had to run on it.

Obama’s policies do not run well without Obama on the ballot.

It will take a long time to analyze exactly what happened in the extraordinary election of 2016. It is already clear, though, that what propelled Donald Trump to the presidency was his grasping, before others caught on, that the contest was far less about right versus left, or even Republican versus Democrat, than about the country versus Washington.

He is now President-elect Trump. On Monday, however, he seemed a likely loser. In his pre-mortem, Charles Krauthammer opined that, even in defeat, Trump would remain the de facto leader of the Republican party because he had “created a movement.” I think, though, that the movement actually created the Trump candidacy.

Indeed, the movement was emerging fitfully in the late stages of the Bush 43 administration — a time when most people would have pegged Trump (to the extent he had identifiable politics) as a member of the establishment camp that catalyzed the movement. It is the movement whose outlines were sketched by Angelo Codevilla in 2010, pitting “the ruling class” against the country — the latter consisting of ordinary Americans of all races, ages and creeds, who were outraged when the bipartisan Beltway and its corporate cronies colluded in a massive wealth transfer to bail out insiders in the mortgage meltdown. It is the movement that gave rise to the Tea Party and other grassroots revolts against Washington’s monstrous growth and intrusiveness, the rigged system that prospered as everyone else’s economy flat-lined.

In the Obama years, as the divide widened, the political establishment took on a post-American cast. But the American people, it turns out, still like being the American people. The electoral blowback, beginning in 2010, has been intense, notwithstanding Obama’s 2012 reelection (in which he lost nearly 4 million voters from his 2008 victory). Equally intense has been the opposition to Washington’s way of doing business. While the media have been unable to hide their disdain for what the narrative holds to be the divisive forces that prevent Washington from “getting things done,” increasing numbers of Americans, across ideological lines, objected to the things Washington was doing.

Donald Trump saw an opening to become their champion, and that is what he made — or remade — himself into. For a very long time he was not taken seriously, just like the alienated forces he represented were not taken seriously. I certainly did not believe he was for real until very late in the game — and I say that as someone who has been aligned with the anti-ruling-class temper from the outset; I simply never thought Trump was the right vehicle for the movement.

But that was not for me to say, and now I get to hope and pray that he proves me wrong.

Democrat Hillary Clinton publicly conceded her loss to Republican Donald Trump Wednesday, calling on the nation to give the president-elect a chance to lead while acknowledging that her defeat was deeply painful.

In a speech before supporters in New York, the former secretary of state said this election had revealed that the U.S. is “more deeply divided than we thought,” but she urged her allies to have an open mind about the man who will be the 45th president.

“We must accept this result,” she said. “Donald Trump is going to be our president.”
Mrs. Clinton said she congratulated her Republican rival and offered to work with him for the good of the country. She asked her backers to “never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”

After suffering a shocking defeat at the hands of an opponent with no political experience, Mrs. Clinton’s decades-long career in public service came to a likely conclusion in the brief but somber speech. Fighting back emotion, she offered encouragement to the young leaders who would follow in her footsteps and revealed her own sadness about an abrupt ending that she didn’t appear to anticipate.

“This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it, too…This is painful, and it will be for a long time.”

Mr. Trump pulled off one of the biggest upsets in political history on Tuesday, rolling up victories in key battlegrounds and notching unexpected wins in a few Democratic-leaning states. Mrs. Clinton had the edge in most polls leading into Election Day, but Mr. Trump rode a populist wave fueled by frustrated voters to win the presidency.

In her first public remarks since the election, Mrs. Clinton said she was proud to have been the champion for women across the country. CONTINUE AT SITE