So How the Hell Did This Happen?

 

Wow, America. Wow. You really did it. You went ahead and handed the reins to a man who can’t be trusted to be in charge of his own Twitter account.

Based on the way that things seem to be leaning, Donald Trump is now the President of the United States. So how in the Hell did this happen?

First off, I guarantee you that piles of people are going to blame 3rd party candidates like Gary Johnson for ‘stealing’ millions of votes from Clinton. The people making those claims are idiots. Every candidate is a legitimate option for voters. Clearly, the two ‘big’ ones weren’t reaching those voters and they went another way. Good for them. Vote for whoever you believe in. Instead of blaming those voters for ‘wasting’ their vote, maybe try harder to actually reach them in the first place.

Really, there is one major guilty party in all of this, and that is…the Democratic Party.

For months it’s been nonstop talk about the Republicans and where do they go from here and how sad it is that this is the best choice they could nominate. And yeah, that is pretty sad. However, let’s look at the flip side. The best candidate that the Democratic Party could come up with was Hilary Clinton, someone they wanted so little to do with eight years ago that they brought up a guy named Obama and he won the nomination. They have so little in the tank that she was their best option. And where do THEY go from here? Who the Hell do they have coming along?

Again, lots of talk about schisms in the Republican Party, but what do you think is going on with the Democrats? A fair number of people in that party didn’t want anything to do with her. They wanted Bernie Sanders. They wanted to go a different way. Think they’ll be content today to just follow the party line that led them here?

The party just assumed that rust belt voters would continue to vote Democrat because that’s how things have always gone. Meanwhile, Trump actually went out there and actively campaigned. And while your local economy is getting driven into the dirt, yeah, you’re probably a little more willing to hold your nose and vote for the guy who’s claiming that he might change things and bring back the manufacturing base that you’ve been hemorrhaging for decades. Is it likely? No. But desperation breeds more desperation.

And this is maybe the most interesting part of all of this. Obama won on a platform of hope and change. Yet this time around, the Democratic platform was essentially ‘more of the same’. That didn’t resonate with people the way that the idea of changing things did. We had a sitting President with an approval rating of between 55%-57% actively campaigning for Clinton in states that he carried handily four years ago, but nobody cared. Because now the hope and change guy was just trying to talk up the establishment. They abandoned the platform that was a proven winner with voters and arrogantly assumed that everyone would just stay on board the D-train because…reasons. And we won’t even really campaign very hard in lots of those states because we’ll just assume that they’re ours again! Yeah, not so much. Arrogance is rarely pretty, and it certainly hasn’t panned out here.

Meanwhile, Trump was basically running some sort of dark and bizarro Obama-esque ‘change’ campaign. It was a Hell of a lot angrier and more repugnant, but he was the change candidate. And desperate people want change because they want to escape where they currently are. They don’t care about the awful shit you say when you promise them a better tomorrow. And popular entertainers kept doing him favors and humanizing him by bringing him in and showing people him actually possessing a sense of humor on occasion…thanks a lot, Lorne Michaels and Jimmy Fallon and others. You guys get to bear a little bit of blame for this fiasco, too.

The vast majority of the population is clearly pissed off and feeling disenfranchised. Facing that, the Democrats plugged their ears and covered their eyes and ran up a cavalcade of establishment political personalities to stump for her. That’s pretty much the absolutely worst thing you can do when people are angry at that very same establishment. And if anyone thinks that there aren’t rumblings of the same going on North of the border, you’re deluding yourselves. And people who are angry are a lot less likely to give a damn about ‘little’ things like personal morality and your platform on social issues. The Democratic campaign was a disaster. This was every bit the poorly run mess that the John Kerry debacle was. How the Hell it didn’t occur to ANYONE to perhaps stomp down on the e-mail scandal early is beyond me. Instead, we’ll just let it linger on and fester. Yeah, that was a winner of a decision. And that’s just the tip of the very big iceberg that the good ship Democrat just run into.

The worst part of all of this is that this is now going to be the tone of elections going forward. Get ready to see a lot more of this in a lot more countries, because it clearly worked. Whatever last shred of political discourse was left gasping for air and clinging to existence has been shot in the head and tossed in an open grave. It’s all going to get a lot angrier from here on in.

I clearly picked the wrong period of my life to try to be more positive…