ajax18 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 21, 2021 9:49 pm
You know I've been quite depressed about the presidential and specifically the senatorial election in Georgia. But as all powerful and evil as this unholy trinity of Big Government, Wall Street (the 1%), and welfare collecting voters is, they still needed voter fraud to win this election.
I can relate to your depression. I remember going to work the day after Trump was elected, sitting on the train in a state of shock. What to me was an obvious choice was not obvious to the rest of the country, or at least enough of the rest of the country to carry the electoral college.
Clinton won the popular vote. It was the second time in the last 20 years that a candidate has won the popular vote and lost the election. There is an argument to be made that the electoral college distorts the will of the people. I could have focused on that and said that Hillary Clinton was the true President. But those weren't the rules in effect. There were hard truths to be learned that had nothing to do with the electoral college. Clinton's "basket of deplorables" statement could have been the shorthand for how the Democratic party treated the concerns of "white trash". In GOP circles "basket of deplorables" became a rallying cry like
Nevertheless, she persisted for the Democrats.
In 2016 People responded in part to 'tell it like it is' Trump partially in response to 8 years of "noDramaObama". And after 8 years of Obama, people perceived the coolness of Clinton as being emblematic her isolation from the suffering of white Americans. Elections are not just about ideas, they are about the context of their time.
When you look at the defeat of Trump, where only 4 years ago he had a 300+ electoral vote victory, I can see a Trump supporter thinking that fraud must be the culprit. But if you dig a little deeper, there are a lot of legitimate reasons other than fraud for what happened. Res Ipsa and others have more than adquately explained why the court challenges failed, but I wanted to offer some historical context.
Trump's approval rating never went above 49%. George H.W. Bush, another one-term President, had an 89% approval rating after the Gulf War, yet lost an election 2 years later. The U.S. was in a mild recession. I don't remember people claiming that Bill Clinton stole the election.
George Bush was a World War II flying hero, Congressman, Chairman of the RNC, Ambassador to the United Nations, Director of the C.I.A., and a two-term Vice President. He was arguably one of the most qualified Presidents in our history. The diplomatic and military team he assembled for the 1990 Gulf War sucessfully demonstrated to the world that the United States was the world's only remaining superpower. And yet he lost in 1992.
The country was in far better shape in 1992 than 2020. While it is fair to say that COVID-19 had decimated the economy, it is also fair to say the the lack of coordinated response at the national level has resulted in tens of thousands of Americans needlessly dying. It was Trump's wish to have the country recover from Covid before it was capable of recovering, because he wanted a strong economy for his re-election.
John McCain couldn't shake the stench of the housing crisis and crashed economy in 2008, even though none of it happened on his watch. Everything happened on Trump's watch. A Trump victory would have been like Herbert Hoover winning in 1932.
Donald Trump was elected in 2016 through an confluence of events creating a perfect storm. It was an unlikely victory, and since Jaunary 2016 we've beem watching the tenuous coalition try to stay together. Watching Trump triangulate his policy and positions during his Presidency, you see that he was caught on the horns of a dilema: If he appealed to his base, he alienated those who are not his base. He never found a path where he could hold on to his base
and expand his popularity, ergo his popularity never rose above 49%.
In the past 36 days, 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. I'm pretty sure that is deadlier than the deadliest 36 days of any war in American history. So while from your perspective the election may have seemed stolen, from my perspective the election is very much in the norm of Presidential elections throughout our history: you break it, you bought it.
After Romney lost in 2012, there was a movement within the Party to reach out to minority groups. The GOP reachout to minorities means has evolved into attempting to disenfranchise voters of color in large urban areas of swing states.
Is the GOP going to be defined by Donald Trump's insistence that the election was stolen? Mitch McConnell, who stood passively by while the suggestion of a stolen election was allowed to fester, has come around to the idea that you can't define the party on a falsehood. To tie the future of the GOP to Trump is to tie the future of the party to a sinking boat. And that's
before SDNY, City of New York, State of New York, et al, start combing through his tax records, financial dealings, and his co-conspirator status in the Michael Cohen case. Stoking anger about the election results was a good fund-raising tactic in the short term, but in the long term it is poison for the party.
At the beginning of Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War, narrator David McCullough says "Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other, and killed each other in great numbers, if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive how that was possible."
After January 6th, I'm not as sure. It still depends on how much we follow the better angels of our nature.