Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

xxxp that's kinda the Trump way - see also the NYT's letter "apologizing for their unfair coverage of Trump"

indeed, if he's gonna say stuff like this, don't say anything about him at all.

maybe shakey, xpost, but i think they are thinking about the next four years. sanders and warren know they need to minimize the danger of a trump presidency, which means working with him, despite what it might do to their political reputations

"half" might have been inaccurate, but it's not like it wasn't true. (i understand it was impolitic.)

xxp the reason it wasn't seen as as bad as stuff Trump says is basically there's a lot of sympathy in white America for the view that calling someone racist is worse than being racist.

the deplorables comment was badly calculated and i would see it as a major misstep in any other campaign. it still defies understanding why that was seen as worse than virtually anything trump has said in public over these past eighteen months

part because they have higher standards for Hillary, part because she attacked a large swath of the electorate directly. Trump at least had the "no, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about the illegals" cover

really any Dem operatives expressing a willingness to "work with Trump" or whatever would be smart to watch their back. Take a lesson from how GOP leaders who did not adequately defer to Tea Party rage ended up - they got primaried/run out of office. Dems should be working to exploit the rage + fear of the party's membership, not tamp it down. anger motivates.

xxp

i saw a relative of a friend become very animated in a fb thread this week just because of the use of the word 'deplorables'. she said it changed her vote.

gotta think that most people who are willing to change their vote over something like that are just looking for an excuse

like twenty xps to horseshoe re: drinking - I haven't had a drink or cigarette since election night, pretty much decided it was time to actually start living healthier if I'm going to have to face a future of unchecked white nationalism, unaffordable healthcare and environmental deregulation (and because Trump would inevitably drive me to drink more and more). If I'm not a spry elderly person I'll be fucked.

sanders and warren know they need to minimize the danger of a trump presidency, which means working with him,

NO it doesn't. It means opposing him tooth and nail, just like the GOP did with Obama. The only way to "work with" him is to exploit and drive wedges between him and the GOP leadership. But that won't be accomplished by publicly stated willingness to go along w him on stuff they happen to agree on. GOP didn't give an inch to Obama on shit they actually wanted, because they didn't want him to get the credit. Why would the Dems want Trump to get credit for doing anything, that will just cement his power.

xp

i agree clinton had v detailed reasons why she'd make a great president (tho possibly not the clear, easy to understand reason she really needed), but ultimately the real problem was running as a continuation of obama. inequality has RISEN. people desperately want to SHAKE OUT OF THIS FUNK. it was a change election and clinton was an establishment candidate running on 'more of the same but better/more'. right? sorry for being all cap'n save-a-conventional-wisdom if that's what i'm being, i am receptive to hot takes, i'll take whatever i can get

Trump is smart enough to know that if he gets some accomodation out of Sanders or Warren or Schumer or whoever, that he has effectively damaged them politically, he will be co-opting them and claiming the lion's share of the glory, while they will be pilloried by former supporters.

xp

shakey otm, obstructionism is the way to go

maybe a slight pass for the few Democratic Senators left in deep-red states but I'd think the positioning should be to let the GOP fuck things up royally on their own and make the economic downturn and new deficit balloon centerpieces of 2018.

yeah, I kinda saw Clinton as similar to LBJ in '68.

Paul Ryan shoves through the end of Medicare, Trump vetoes it or relies on public accommodation with Sanders or Warren to kill it is a scenario I could easily see used to make him more palatable where he currently isn't

we're all well aware of how the ability of a legislative minority to gum up the works is deeply embedded in our system (thx slave-owners!), time to exploit it. shoe's on the other foot now.

Trump isn't gonna veto shit.

Trump doesn't even wanna show up for work

You really think Trump would veto a Medicare-end bill? He won't even read the bill.

^^^

first you would have to explain to him what Medicare is, how it works, why Ryan wants to kill it... by that time he's already fallen asleep in his taco bowl

I've said repeatedly that Sanders would have won, but the discussion of what Clinton did wrong should take into account that she actually won the popular vote, and it's not really that close. Her mistakes were strategic, not fundamental. If it was a change year, why did the establishment candidate get more votes?

Daily Beast: CBS reports Trump wants top secret clearance for kids

It would be all about popularity and approval ratings for him - he doesn't actually need to read the bill or know what it is if he thinks it's going to make people not like him.

how is he gonna know if people don't like him or not? the polls are all wrong! plus people are so excited at his rallies, they're just amazing! he will never think that any sizable chunk of the population legit does not like him.

i don't see why total Rs-against-obama-style oposition isn't our #1 priority

who could possibly think we owe Rs any good faith? or that if we gave it they wouldn't abuse it?

it is our #1 priority, you're not going to see a serious voice on the left advocate working with trump

Sanders already did!

and pvmic, but fuck this "senators in red states get a pass" nonsense. vote with your party

xp no he didn't..........................................................

Republicans re Obama: "Our primary goal is to make him a one-term president."
Democrats re Trump: "We need to find ways to work together."

Yeah, it's gonna be an awesome eight years.

multiple xposts obviously

sigh.

the norms of american politics and peaceful transitions of power dictate that people say nice things after an election. he's not gonna vote with the republicans xp

i'm sure you can find plenty of examples of republicans making nice after obama's 2008 win. it's not binding and doesn't mean shit

right - and I am hoping that all this "hey let's give him a chance" bullshit evaporates by January 21st but otoh idk Dems post-Reagan have been really stupid/cowardly when in this position.

i'm sure you can find plenty of examples of republicans making nice after obama's 2008 win.

would be curious what you dig up tbh

xp

the norms of american politics and peaceful transitions of power dictate that people Democrats say nice things after an election.

I do remember more than a couple Republicans in November 2008 muttering about Working Together For the Sake of the Country.

Before the inauguration.

remember Judd Gregg? He was all set to be appointed to the Cabinet until he got pressure in January 2009.

Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ he recalls. His informants said [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden says.

The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

this feels like bizarro world. Sanders being grown up doing the dirty job of consensus politics while Hillary stans want him to rage against the system.

ah good old arlen specter

^^ I thought I'd seen every kind of sentence

the deplorables comment was badly calculated and i would see it as a major misstep in any other campaign. it still defies understanding why that was seen as worse than virtually anything trump has said in public over these past eighteen months

I'm sort of interested in whether that was the first time anyone used "deplorable" as a noun.

Like, it was remarkable poetic for HRC.

Aargh, remarkably

it was used before, just by snooty 19th century robber barons

basket of remarkables

deplorables was a fake controversy

oh come on

certainly doesn't make her seem less like a reptilian space alien

it was a "fake controversy" in the sense that clinton wasn't wrong, but it's still a pretty dumb thing for a politician to say about people who might be voting for her

she was saying it about people who explicitly wont vote for her

the repurposing of the nasty woman thing was good.

I knew it was a mistake when defenders rushed to say, "But if you read the NEXT paragraph..."

im just saying there are exactly zero people who weren't already not voting for her who decided not to vote for her when she said it