Comey. His sanctimonious bullshit was exquisitely timed to do the most damage with the smallest window of recovery.
The blame goes to the big money boys who planted and planted and planted the anti Clinton propaganda. 30 years worth of BS adds up.
That hasn’t happened yet, has it? Has it? Telling me what is going to happen in the future is meaningless compared to what has and is already happening. As it stands gun control is, overall, a losing issue when it comes to national elections. And that has not changed yet, has it?
I didn’t say it was the deciding factor. I said it was a perfect storm of several factors and gun owners were just one of them and should have been included on the list of many.
And some gun owners have turned on the Republican candidate. In 1992 some stayed home because George HW Bush signed an import ban on some firearms pissing quite a few people off. It wasn’t the deciding factor on that election but it was one of many. So your argument is wrong.
With Gary Johnson, the media decided he was a crank and so they didn’t report anything about him. Usually, that’s how the media treats joke candidates.
In the case of Trump, they decided not to do so and ended up granting him the world’s largest campaign donation via free exposure in, probably, the history of American elections. The consistently failed to cover his policy platform or run through why it was moronic, and instead just focused on how non-PC he was.
If the media had decided that Trump was the joke candidate and instead decided that Johnson (or whatever other 3rd party candidate) was the real opponent to Hillary Clinton, then they would have done their best to promote the hell out of him and done their worst to shoot down his policy platform because a good horse race sells newspapers.
Every election in the US ends up pretty darn close to 50/50, even when there’s a large discrepancy in the quality of the candidates. And that’s because people will back the clear loser, just because they like a dark horse candidate. And, when the race is all about popularity, not muscles or speed or anything, that equates to a case where a dark horse candidate will always just about come in even with the clear winner.
And that’s stupid.
Fundamentally, Trump was elected because election via popularity contest is not a very good way of ensuring that you get elected leaders who are smart, capable, or trustworthy. You don’t hire your electrical engineer by gathering a panel of judges and asking him to wear a thong and do a pole dance for them. That would just be stupid.
The popular election worked for 200 years to the extent that it has because party leaders selected the candidates, because the right to vote was restricted to the educated, and because TV charisma wasn’t yet a factor of campaigning. You had to sell yourself, primarily, through the written word.
Now, I’m not saying that all of those are good things. I’m not saying that we should go back to restricting the vote to land-owning men. It makes sense that you would have everyone being represented able to have a say in the elections. But if you go and talk to a hundred janitors, one of them will be the sort of wise sage that dispenses Morgan Freeman style wisdom at every turn, and that’s great, but eighty of them are going to be complete morons. If you go find a hundred land owning college graduates and talk to them, maybe five or ten will really impress you with their wisdom and five to ten of them will be morons. In the ideal world, your one sage janitor would be the one voting for all janitors and the 5-10 sage college educated land owners will be voting for all college educated land owners.
But if you enfranchise the entire population and handcuff the electoral college to them, and don’t find a way to make sure that you’re giving extra weight to the people who will do a good job of representing their class and making wise and reasoned choices that really do a professional job of investigation and consideration, then you’re just going to move the quality of your candidates from Teddy Roosevelt to Donald Trump.
Blaming Trump voters isn’t reasonable, because if Michael Moore ran as the Democratic candidate against Donald Trump in 2020, the vote would be 50/50 between the candidates. That’s completely stupid, but it’s true. The media would focus on the two of them, because they were the picks of the two major parties. People would sort out on either side to try and prevent the other guy from getting in and to keep the horse race even, and we’d be stuck with a complete moron as the president whichever side won.
And the problem is that we’ve not considered the choices we’re making over the last 200 years. The states chose to expand the election of their electoral college picks from coming from an electoral district to being state wide, to give the state a greater relative strength in the Presidential vote than they’d otherwise have. They forced the electoral college to submit to the popular vote, because it served to strengthen the selective power of the dominant party in that state. More and more groups were enfranchised because it was “fair” or because it gave more power to one political party or the other.
None of this had to do with establishing a rigorous hiring interview that ensured that we were getting the best possible candidate with the actual qualifications and personality that is necessary for the job. It was all just selfish or, at best, Ivory Tower idealism.
Fundamentally, everyone will accept power if you grant it to them. If you tell people, “Hey you could vote for the candidate in the primaries if you write angry letter to the party heads and threaten to not donate money to their cause”, then suddenly the party head has to allow your average rube to vote in the primaries. Maybe the party head adds superdelegates to try and protect against the power of stupid, but eventually someone will tell everyone, “Hey, you could have more power over the Presidency if you write angry letters to the party and threaten not to donate money, if they’ll get rid of superdelegates.”
And again, I’m not saying that party heads should select candidates. When they do, then that feeds right in to backroom shenanigans and Harvey Weinstein style creepy fucks gaining high position, because they’ve found a way to blackmail their way to the top. But there was never a point where someone said, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s actually sit down and think about if there’s a better mechanism that takes into account everyone’s concerns and doesn’t just put the decision into the hands of the lowest common denominator.
And the reason that no one does that is because the person saying “Hey, you should X” is usually someone who just wants to win more power and he’s using the lure of fairness, anti-corruption, etc. to gain that power. He’s not interested in the fate of the country, he’s looking out for #1 and selling it to you as empowering the common man or being a voice for the embattled South, or whatever else.
I have seen a few videos and articles about how James Madison’s government is designed to be robust and correct for mistakes, but just saying that something is resilient doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. Maybe it will come back, but so far as I have seen, all of the answers to Donald Trump have been things like, “Hey, we should get rid of superdelegates” and “Hey, we should get rid of the electoral college.” Which is just saying, “Hey, that shit that let this criminal moron into the office on the other side? We should do more of that sort of thing on OUR SIDE.” And sure, that gives you, the electorate, more power but that’s how you end up electing Michael Moore for President.
Donald Trump is the president because most people are stupid, Ivory tower idealists have romantic images about stupid people and come up with excuses to empower them, and greedy bastards use those ideas to their advantage for personal gain.
We need to trust and enable Representative Government. You need to give up power to wiser heads, not just in the government but also during the election cycle. I’m not saying that the old ways are correct. I’m saying that we need a different way that actually makes sense and is based on science.
James Madison set the government up the way he did because he knew a shit ton about Ancient Greece and all of the experiments in different governmental and corporate setups through history. He did an analysis and made a proposal based on past experience.
Our past experience is that as populism has eroded the quality of the vote, we’ve gone from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump as our lowest hanging fruit and, however much you may hate Nixon, that’s till a really far drop. Populism was not the solution. Direct democracy is not the solution. The Ancient Greeks tried it. Democracy, tyranny of the majority, and ochlocracy were feared by the founders of our nation, and that’s because they could history and see how it turned out. We’ve all turned our back on history and instead decided to run happily towards those failed experiments.
Lol, a flat-out assertion w/o any corroborating evidence? Seriously?
Show us the data that gun owners switched from George Bush to Clinton. Because history doesn’t support this. My data shows:
- Ross Perot
- Recession
- Broken tax pledge
- Foreign policy fatigue
As the driving factors in Bush’s loss. The fact the NRA didn’t support him may have been, at best, a distant 5th in his loss, but given the Perot factor this was hardly decisive, especially given Ross’s famous gun control stance: “I don’t think we ought to give machine guns to the crazies”. So one can’t argue that gun owners went to Perot and it is very difficult to believe, without corroborating data, your assertion that stay-at-home gun owners made a significant number of the 5.7 million votes that separated Clinton from Bush.
http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Ross_Perot_Gun_Control.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/George_Bush_Sr__Gun_Control.htm
The great compromise works just fine, until you cap the number of Representatives in 1929. Now that we don’t have enough granularity to represent population equally in the House, it’s all gone to hell.
Does anyone have the numbers on how much of Virginia’s population counted as only 60% of a human?
Jesus Christ! I didn’t say they switched I said some of them stayed home, it’s not the same. And I said it was one of many factors. First you post I have no evidence of it, then you say it may have have been factor #5 which corroborates my claim that it was one of several factors. Thanks for helping me make my case.
This insistence you have that gun owners aren’t one of several forces to be reckoned with is ludicris.
- Hillary was an unusually weak candidate.
- Without a powerful right-wing media America would be in much better shape, but if FoxNews didn’t exist I think something would arise to take its place.
- Backlash against PC has become a problem. If “anti-gunnism” falls under the broad umbrella of “PC” then it was certainly decisive.
- Various GOP Vote suppression measures played a role. They certainly swung Pennsylvania; if also Florida then that was decisive.
- Comey’s announcement was badly timed.
- Stay-at-home voters are a major hindrance to democracy and rational outcomes. I’d suggest mandatory voting, but the conflict of that with GOP suppression measures would lead to huge strife.
- The electoral college handicaps D’s significantly. Not so much because of the power of rural voters in Montana, etc.—these are partly offset by the more informed voters of small “states” like Delaware and D.C.—but because of a gerrymandering-like effect, though due to happenstance: Of the four biggest states, 2 (CA, NY) landslide for D, while two (TX, FL) are close but R. This
So: If we were asked to rank the top five “reasons for Trump’s victory” this might have been an interesting exercise (in epistemology?). But the poll only allowed one box to be clicked, so I went with the obvious if uninteresting answer: "Trump voters."
Which proves my point that it’s nothing to do with rural vs urban but everything to do with states (or the District) with small populations vs those with large ones. Rhode Island does pretty well for itself in the Electoral College too. It’s population isn’t very “rural” either.
They left us a way to change it. Get to amending, or at least trying to, and find out if your fellow citizens agree with you that this is an important issue that needs to be changed.
Vince Foster.
Well, that’s a very good post. And the implications are depressing.
Thank you SO much. I had NO idea that the constitution could be amended.
Great post.
In defense of the media, they were just pursuing the bottom line. Donald was good for ratings, so they covered him. They had a vested interest in his continuing campaign so they covered it as if he was a serious candidate which he most assuredly was not. As noted earlier, CNN cut from a Hillary speech to show an empty podium at his rally. The media even covered him selling his silly steaks. But because they knew he could get ratings, he was covered In the short term, the media got to make some money. In the long term, democracy was destroyed.
Actually, you were right the first time. In the present climate it is absolutely impossible for an Amendment to be enacted if it might disadvantage Republicans politically.
The Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t be passed today.
I blame voters generally, not just Trump voters. As a society we’ve been far too confident about the strength of our democracy. That is going to change.
I highly recommend reading this article. Who created a climate to allow a candidate like Trump to flourish, win the nomination and the white house?
The left, and the press and of course. The article is called " He fights ", and judging by his first two terms, he’s delivering knockouts taking the pages out of a famous radical book, and applying his own version of verbal judo.
Neither could the First.
If your complaint is that your ideas aren’t popular enough to win passage, and therefore will not be enacted, you should know that I consider that a feature, not a bug.