Back to back wildly improbable
events consumed us in the past week. The
Cubs won the World Series after a 108 year drought and a real estate developer
and reality TV show host upended an established politician from the incumbent
party to win the presidential election. The Cubs victory was so momentous that
people were out in cemeteries planting little “ W” flags next to the graves of
their parents and grandparents. I jested
that the cemeteries must have been jammed last week with Democrats rushing out
to register voters. It surely has been a
momentous and earth-shattering time as the Chicago River was dyed blue and the
electoral map turned red.
Much is being written about this
tectonic shift and I don’t want to regurgitate and distill what others have
written. I was both right and
wrong. In my January 16 post, back when
all the Republican candidates were still in the running I spun out the reasons
I thought that Trump could win it all, despite being written off by the
MSM. But even by election day I thought
he would lose by 3-4%. In retrospect, I
picked up the right trend and vibes but I did not see that he could overcome
Clinton’s overwhelming advantages. She had a lock on Illinois, New York and
California, massive funding, an economy that was growing and at full employment
(depending on how you count). Moreover,
she had the luster of being the first female candidate for president and a MSM
fully behind her, and, as we learned from Wikileaks, actively collaborated with
her campaign. On paper, she should have
demolished him at the ballot. But election
campaigns, like sporting events, are not won on paper.
Trump is a disrupter. And we are living through an era that
desperately needs disrupting. He is also
a businessman that knows how to listen to his customer. Perhaps the most graphic depiction of the
election was the map showing the districts that each party won—mostly covered
in red with blue specks on the edges and in the middle with the caption, “Can
you hear me now?”
This was also an era of
anomalies:
-Trump WAS born with a silver spoon in his
mouth---and a brash, rich New Yorker and yet connected with working class
America in a way no other politician has since Ronald Reagan.
-Trump, maligned as a misogynist (in part,
supported by the videotape of him making horrendous comments) fired two men
that were running his campaign and it took a woman to straighten it out and
propel him to victory.
· - Despite being the first woman candidate and with
Obama running around telling men to get over their sexism, Clinton did not do
all that well with women (many professional women I know voted for Trump), especially
white women.
· - Trump, derided as a bigot, performed better than
Romney among blacks and Latinos.
- Trump defeated the most well
-oiled and financed candidate in history, the Republican establishment which
actively fought him, the MSM, and George Soros.
That’s pretty impressive no matter how you slice it.
He appealed to the common sense
of Americans and the complete absence of it by governing Democrats.
You can’t double the cost of
health insurance and look a workingman or woman in the eye and say that the plan
is working. You can’t show pictures of our sailors on their knees, held at
gunpoint and then thank their captors for being so cooperative. You can’t ship pallets of cash to hostage
takers on the day captives are released and deny that it’s a ransom payment. You can’t say ISIS is contained and then have
a major attack by ISIS occur the very next day.
You can’t release terrorists from prison and claim you’re doing it to
make America safer. You can’t have a
spokesperson run around claiming it was a filmmaker that incited a spontaneous
riot that overran our embassy when it was known not to be true or claim that
the prisoner for whom you are swapping terrorists served with “honor and
distinction” and then put him on trial for desertion a few month later. And you certainly can’t have your attorney
general meet privately with a material witness in a criminal investigation and
claim they were discussing golf and grandchildren or have her call to meet ruthless,
violent, and vicious Islamic terror with “love and empathy.”
All of this flies in the face of
good old American common sense—the Ben Franklin kind that seems to have disappeared from the coasts
but apparently is still alive and well in America’s heartland. The single most important factor in this
improbable topsy-turvy election is that a large swath of Americans woke up and
said, “Wait a minute. This makes no
sense to me.” And Donald Trump found
those people.
But let me stick with the
improbable and take a few contrary positions to come out of all
this:
- ·
We may in fact, owe Barack Obama a great deal
of gratitude. Yes, I opposed him in most
of his policies, both foreign and domestic.
But I am rethinking my views on the Affordable Care Act. Yes, it is awful, flawed, unworkable and
drowning. But it is out there and needs
to be dealt with. It forces the issue.
Obama paid a terrible political price for pushing it through. I would argue that it probably cost him the
House (65 seats lost), the Senate (12 seats lost), hundreds of seats at the state level (12 states to Republican control) and
ultimately was in part responsible for losing the White House. But another way to think about it is that the
ACA was an ugly, incomplete, overly written and barely readable first
draft. My prediction is whether the
Republicans repair or repeal and replace it, several important features will
remain. Health care is an important
issue and a foundering ACA means, oddly, that the President and Congress will
need to make it an immediate priority. Barack Obama sacrificed his party on it. It is not going away completely and dealing
with health care is vital to our people and our long term fiscal health.
How will this turn
out? I’m not yet ready to hazard a guess
but I’m at least going to enjoy the rest of 2016 with one wish fulfilled---that
we have neither a Bush or a Clinton in the White House for the next four years.
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