The number one single today in 1958:
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1978, one of the most awful things ever foisted upon the American viewing public was shown by ABC-TV:
The number one British single today in 1979:
Isthmus reports two pieces of radio news:
John “Sly” Sylvester’s daily call-in program has been booted from 93.7 WEKZ-FM.
Sylvester, a longtime liberal commentator, announced on his Facebook page that he learned of the change Friday. WEKZ is part of the southern Wisconsin/northern Illinois Big Radio regional chain of eight stations, based in Monroe. He will remain a DJ for the station.
The change comes at a bad time for Madison listeners of liberal radio. On Nov. 9, 92.1 The Mic, WXXM-FM, dropped its progressive talk format and replaced it with Christmas music.
“The last two years I’ve been pulling double duty for Big Radio,” Sylvester wrote on Nov. 13. “In addition to my talk program, I’ve been hosting the morning show on sister station 105.9 The Hog [WWHG-FM, “Everything that Rocks,” based in Janesville]. Big Radio felt that in order for me to continue long-term with the company, it was best to make this change.”
Sylvester declined to comment to Isthmus about the change. Scott Thompson, owner of Big Radio, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A station official says that Sylvester’s show will return to WEKZ-FM next week, but as a music program.
“So Trump triumphs, and progressive radio gets unplugged on 92.1, and Sly gets canned? That doesn’t make any sense at all,” says Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, formerly editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine. He had been a guest on Sylvester’s program many times, as recently as Election Day.
“We need progressive voices on the airwaves now more than ever,” says Rothschild. “And there’s a real hunger for them, too. But the corporate media owners are reducing our outlets, making it more difficult for us to reach a mass audience.”
“I’m shocked to hear about Sly,” says Mitch Henck, a veteran Madison broadcaster whose program aired on The Mic until last week. The station is one of several owned by iHeartMedia, which also owns Madison’s WIBA-AM and FM, WTSO-AM, WMAD-FM and WZEE-FM (Z-104). Henck and Sylvester had previously worked together, and Sly was a frequent guest on Henck’s program.
Sylvester’s program aired from 3 to 6:30 p.m. on WEKZ since early 2013. Before that, it ran for 15 years on talk radio 1670 WTDY-AM (now WOZN sports radio, “The Zone,” owned by Mid-West Family Broadcasting). In November 2012 that station laid off its entire news and talk staff and temporarily replaced it with Christmas music. …
Does progressive radio have a future in Madison?
“It is hard to sell advertising on a lefty talk station,” says Henck. “NPR attracts millions of listeners every week. It is hard for more militant lefties to compete with that. It is rapidly becoming a podcast world. That is now my world.”
The media world is a business, which people tend to forget. If something doesn’t sell, it’s not going to survive long-term. That is particularly the case with big media companies such as iHeartMedia.
There have been numerous attempts to make liberal talk work on commercial airwaves. Almost all of them have failed, probably because there are a lot of would-be advertisers who don’t want to be on liberal programming, though many are fine being on conservative programming. The latter obviously exceeds the former given that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others are still on the air, while Air America is not.
I have difficulty believing those two decisions were made in the immediate wake of Nov. 8. I think 92.1 hadn’t been doing well financially far longer, or perhaps manage to decided to run as far as possible until the well ran dry, which was Election Day. If the problem was Sly, Sly would have been terminated, not just his show. (Perhaps his Social Dilemma will now appear afternoons.) They may have been casualties of the abomination that was the 2016 election, but the decision to end 92.1’s format and Sly’s talk show was made, I believe, well before Election Day.
For those (like Democrats) who believe the “working class” or “blue-collar” workers resent the rich, Joan C. Williams claims that’s not correct, starting with …
My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.
He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.
For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.
One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.
Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.
Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.
Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.
Manly dignity is a big deal for most men. So is breadwinner status: Many still measure masculinity by the size of a paycheck. White working-class men’s wages hit the skids in the 1970s and took another body blow during the Great Recession. Look, I wish manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to fulfill the ideals they’ve grown up with. For many blue-collar men, all they’re asking for is basic human dignity (male varietal). Trump promises to deliver it.
The Democrats’ solution? Last week the New York Times published an article advising men with high-school educations to take pink-collar jobs. Talk about insensitivity. Elite men, you will notice, are not flooding into traditionally feminine work. To recommend that for WWC men just fuels class anger. …
The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”
“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
J.D. Vance’s much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment. Hard-living families like that of Vance’s mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives, which is not uncommon among settled families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the poor.
Other books that get at this are Hard Living on Clay Street (1972) and Working-Class Heroes (2003).
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.
Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.
Jennifer Sherman’s Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t (2009) covers this well.
“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.
Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work as jobs left for Mexico or Vietnam. These are precisely the voters in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Democrats have so long ignored. Excuse me. Who’s stupid?
One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we’ve treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs.
At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Republicans have one: Unleash American business. Democrats? They remain obsessed with cultural issues. I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.
Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Clinton mentioned this approach, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not stress it.
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.
Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.
Who gets this? Scott Walker and some Wisconsin Republicans.
Who does not get this? The Capital Times reports:
John Nichols, associate editor of the Capital Times and correspondent for The Nation, was less surprised. Last week on “UpFront with Mike Gousha,” he said that while he expected Clinton to win Wisconsin by a reasonable amount, it wasn’t unthinkable for Trump to win, citing the British Brexit vote as proof of the potential difference between pre-election polls and actual results.
Nichols suggested that several Clinton campaign missteps, including her failure to visit Wisconsin during the campaign, may have cost her the state. He suggested that visits to western Wisconsin and Milwaukee, along with a reallocation of victory party money to television advertising aimed at rural Wisconsin, would have been hugely helpful.Wisconsin state Democratic Sen. Kathleen Vinehout argued on “UpFront” that some of the reasons Republicans prevailed included a surge of working class first-time voters and ineffective Democratic campaigns.
After the election results, Vinehout called clerks and election judges in western Wisconsin to try and determine what happened. She found estimated increases in first-time voters making up as much as 10 percent of the vote, with the majority of these first time voters being what she considered “typical Trump voters,” describing them as “white men with work boots and fuzzy beards in their early 30s to mid 40s.”
“And I’m kind of frustrated with some of the Madison insiders who constantly run cookie cutter campaigns, and they don’t realize a campaign in a rural area is very different,” Vinehout said. “If you’ve got a candidate who’s really in that area, who does the parades and the chicken dinners … It’s much better than talking with wealthy people and putting a lot of money into TV ads or direct mailers.”
Looking toward the future, Vinehout said Democrats had a lot of learning and listening to do in order to fully understand where they went wrong.
The number one single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1963:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland”:
Charles Schumer had a dream. With Nevada’s Harry Reid retiring, New York’s Schumer was in line to become leader of the Senate Democrats—and likely Senate majority leader, given the disarray among Republicans, what with their unelectable presidential nominee.
It did not happen. Republicans lost two seats but are assured of at least 51 in the new Congress—52 barring an upset in next month’s Louisiana run-off. And of course the unelectable Donald Trump was nominated. Schumer must feel like Charlie Brown during football season, or Charlie the Tuna: “Sorry, Charlie.” No wonder he goes by Chuck.
It was not wrong to think the Republicans were in something of a state of disarray. The mistaken assumption that Trump was unelectable, combined with the no-doubt-accurate one that the GOP Senate majority was at risk encouraged a sort of every-man-for-himself mentality. “Is Split-Ticket Voting Making a Comeback?” asked a Washington Postheadline during the August Trump slump. “With Trump on the Ballot, Some Republicans Hope So.”
The New York Times scooped the Post by some 3½ months, with a story on April 29—a few days before Trump secured the nomination—titled “Wary of Trump Effect, Republicans Hope for Split Tickets”:
Republican senators like [Pennsylvania’s Pat] Toomey who are running in swing states—about six, and enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate—need voters who would reject Donald J. Trump to nonetheless pull the levers for the party’s other candidates in November. . . .
But ticket-splitting voters in federal races have become increasingly rare over the last two decades, hitting a low in 2012, when only 10 percent of [voters] divided their votes between parties. That was down sharply from 1972. The ranks of straight-ticket voters have expanded along with the rise in partisanship and its attendant rancor in Congress.
So what happened? The Daily Caller’s Blake Neff offers an interpretation favorable to Trump:
Overall, there were eight Republican-held seats and one Democrat-held seat that were competitive going into Tuesday night: Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Florida, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Missouri.
Of the nine Republicans in these competitive races, six of them stood by Trump or, in the case of Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, didn’t reject him. Three of them, though, explicitly rejected Trump: Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Mark Kirk in Illinois, and Joe Heck in Nevada.
The final results are telling: The three candidates who rejected Trump all lost, while the rest triumphed.
“False,” responds the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack:
If there had been a price to pay for ditching Trump, you would expect that these candidates would’ve lost by more than Trump, but they ran about even with him. In Nevada, Heck and Trump each lost lost [sic] by 2.4 percentage points. In Illinois, Kirk lost by 14.2 points; Trump lost by 16.0. In New Hampshire, Ayotte lost by 0.1 points; Trump lost by 0.3.
There aren’t any Senate races in which GOP candidates rejected Trump and performed worse than him, but there are examples of Republican candidates who rejected Trump and did much better than him.
In Ohio, Rob Portman announced in the wake of the Access Hollywood video, just like Kelly Ayotte, that he couldn’t vote for Trump and would write in Mike Pence. Portman won Ohio by 21.4 points; Trump won by 8.6.
In Arizona, John McCain likewise dropped Trump after the Access Hollywood video. McCain won by 12.3 points; Trump won by 4.1.
McCormack has a somewhat better argument here: Neff is cherry-picking by omitting considering only “competitive” races and omitting Portman and McCain, both of whom were thought to be endangered at various times during the campaign.
On the other hand (as McCormack acknowledges), there were successful Senate candidates who ran considerably behind Trump: Missouri’s Sen. Roy Blunt (by 15.9 percentage points) and Indiana’s Rep. Todd Young (9.6). Blunt and Young both backed Trump.
And it’s not surprising that Senate candidates, especially incumbents—i.e., all the Republicans mentioned here, except Reps. Heck and Young—would tend to run ahead of the presidential nominee, since they are free to run campaigns tailored to voters of the state. (Though a corollary of most Republican Senate candidates’ running ahead of Trump is that most Democratic Senate candidates ran behind Hillary Clinton.)
But Neff and McCormack both miss the bigger story, which FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten noticed: In all 33 Senate races decided on Election Day, the winner was from the same party as the presidential candidate who carried the state. If, as expected, Republican John Kennedy wins the Louisiana runoff, it will be 34 out of 34. That did not happen in any of the 25 previous presidential elections since the 17th Amendment established popular election to the Senate—not even in 1920.
A similar pattern holds in the House. All 30 of the states Trump carried (assuming he holds on in still-uncalled Michigan) will have majority-Republican House delegations in the new Congress. Of the 20 states Mrs. Clinton carried, 17 House delegations will be majority-Democrat. Two (Colorado and Virginia) will be majority-Republican. Maine will be evenly split, with one representative from each party, and Trump took one electoral vote there, from the Second District of Republican Bruce Poliquin.
The Senate trend does not bode well for Schumer’s hope of becoming majority leader. In 2012, Democrats won Senate races in five states Mitt Romney carried: Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. (Republicans took one seat in a state President Obama carried, Nevada.) Those seats are up in 2018, as are Democratic seats in the Trump states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
If 2018 is a repeat of 2012—that is, if all Trump states elect Republican senators and all Clinton states elect Democratic ones—Republicans will gain nine seats, giving them a total of 61 (or 60 in the event of a Louisiana surprise), a supermajority sufficient to stop a filibuster, assuming filibusters still exist, more on which below.
To be sure, that’s a big if. For the past quarter-century, the president’s party has tended to do poorly in midterm elections, losing Senate seats in 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2014 and gaining them only in 2002 (1998 was a wash). But it is equally true that the DemocraticParty has done poorly in midterms, gaining seats only in 2006.
Further, the 2010 and 2014 midterm results turn out to have been strongly predictive of the 2016 presidential ones. In 2010 only three states’ Senate outcomes differed from the 2016 presidential results—Illinois and New Hampshire, the two seats the GOP lost this year, and West Virginia, a special election for the same seat Democrats held in 2012. In 2014 the total was three states, with Republicans taking seats in Colorado and Maine and a Democrat in Michigan.
Even if the trend away from Senate-presidential splits proves durable, no doubt many seats will remain competitive. Trump carried six states with less than 50% of the vote: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton failed to top 50% in seven states she carried: Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia.
Demographic changes could yet move states like Arizona, Florida and North Carolina into the Democratic column. And the biggest wild card will be President Trump: If he and the Republicans overreach or fail, Democrats could come roaring back. Still, the GOP’s prospects in the Senate look much better than the Democrats’ for the simple reason that there are more Republican states. Even in 2008, the closest election to a landslide since 1988, John McCain carried 22 states.
Which raises some interesting implications for Schumer, assuming the Democrats choose him as their leader. In the past, the Senate minority leader’s job has been among the most powerful in Washington under the circumstances that will prevail next year—namely, a president and House controlled by the other party and a Senate majority short of 60 votes. By holding together, the Senate minority could block anything via filibuster—and Schumer would be able to lose as many as seven votes while doing so.
But the filibuster ain’t what it used to be. In 2013 Reid’s Democrats used what is called the “nuclear option” to abolish it for all nominations except Supreme Court justices. The Republicans could do the same if the Democrats try to block an appointment of a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia—or, for that matter, a GOP legislative initiative such as a repeal of ObamaCare.
Thus if the Democrats wish to preserve the filibuster, they will forbear from employing it. Either way, the result of Majority Leader Reid’s power play in 2013 will have been to render Minority Leader Schumer all but powerless in 2017.
Before Nov. 8 there were seven states with Democratic governors and legislatures. There are now four.
Frank Bruni piles on:
Despite all the discussion of demographic forces that doomed the G.O.P., it will soon control the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress and two of every three governor’s offices. And that’s not just a function of James Comey, Julian Assange and misogyny. Democrats who believe so are dangerously mistaken.
Other factors conspired in the party’s debacle. One in particular haunts me. From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.
Liberals miss this by being illiberal. They shame not just the racists and sexists who deserve it but all who disagree. A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.
Political correctness has morphed into a moral purity that may feel exhilarating but isn’t remotely tactical. It’s a handmaiden to smugness and sanctimony, undermining its own goals.
I worry about my and my colleagues’ culpability along these lines. I plan to use greater care in how I talk to and about Americans more culturally conservative than I am. That’s not a surrender of principle or passion. It’s a grown-up acknowledgment that we’re a messy, imperfect species.
Donald Trump’s victory and some of the, yes, deplorable chants that accompanied it do not mean that a majority of Americans are irredeemable bigots (though too many indeed are). Plenty of Trump voters chose him, reluctantly, to be an agent of disruption, which they craved keenly enough to overlook the rest of him.
Democrats need to understand that, and they need to move past a complacency for which the Clintons bear considerable blame.
It’s hard to overestimate the couple’s stranglehold on the party — its think tanks, its operatives, its donors — for the last two decades. Most top Democrats had vested interests in the Clintons, and energy that went into supporting and defending them didn’t go into fresh ideas and fresh faces, who were shut out as the party cleared the decks anew for Hillary in 2016.
In thrall to the Clintons, Democrats ignored the copious, glaring signs of an electorate hankering for something new and different and instead took a next-in-line approach that stopped working awhile back. Just ask Mitt Romney and John McCain and John Kerry and Al Gore and Bob Dole. They’re the five major-party nominees before her who lost, and each was someone who, like her, was more due than dazzling.
After Election Day, one Clinton-weary Democratic insider told me: “I’m obviously not happy and I hate to admit this, but a part of me feels liberated. If she’d won, we’d already be talking about Chelsea’s first campaign. Now we can do what we really need to and start over.”
Obama, too, contributed to the party’s marginalization. While he threw himself into Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he was, for much of his presidency, politically selfish, devoting less thought and time to the cultivation of the party than he could — and should — have. By design, his brand was not its. Small wonder, then, that its fate diverged from his.
He anointed Clinton over Joe Biden, though Biden had more charisma and a better connection with the white voters who ultimately supported Trump. Had Biden been the nominee, he probably would have won the Electoral College as well as the popular vote (which Clinton indeed got).
And had Bernie Sanders been? Michael Bloomberg would almost certainly have jumped into the fray, sensing unoccupied territory in the political center, and an infinitely saner and more capable billionaire might well be our president-elect.
Democrats bungled a terrific opportunity to retake the Senate majority by ignoring the national mood as they picked their candidates. A party that prides itself on looking out for the little guy went with the biggest names it could find.
That happened in Wisconsin with Russ Feingold, in Indiana with Evan Bayh and in Ohio with Ted Strickland, all of whom were defeated by Republicans who couldn’t be tarred as insiders or as emblems of the status quo because the Democrats had just as much mileage on them.
Senator Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican, campaigned as the outsider and the underdog, and he ended up beating Strickland, the state’s former governor, by more than 20 points. Like Feingold and Bayh, Strickland could hardly claim the mantle of revolution.
In contrast, Democrats had success in a House district in Central Florida that didn’t initially appear to be promising turf by running Stephanie Murphy, a 37-year-old first-timer, against John Mica, 73, who had been in Congress for nearly a quarter-century. “Change” was Murphy’s mantra, and, like Trump, she used it to turn inexperience into an asset.
A party that keeps the White House for eight years customarily suffers losses elsewhere, as if the electorate insists on some kind of equilibrium. That happened under Bill Clinton and again under George W. Bush — but not to the extent that it has happened under Obama.
His presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats (depending on how you count), more than 60 fewer House seats, at least 14 fewer governorships and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began. That’s a staggering toll.
While the 2016 race for governor in North Carolina remains undecided, the settled contests guarantee the G.O.P. the governor’s office in 33 states: its most bountiful harvest since 1922.
If Democrats don’t quickly figure out how to sturdy themselves — a process larger than the selection of the right new party chairman — they could wind up in even worse shape. They’re defending more than twice the number of Senate seats in 2018 that Republicans are, a situation that gives the G.O.P. a shot at a filibuster-proof majority.
Meantime, the perpetuation of Republican dominance at the state level through 2020 would grant the G.O.P. the upper hand in redrawing congressional districts after the next census.
But new presidents typically get an electoral whupping after their first two years, and there’s every reason to believe that Trump will govern — or fail to — in a fashion that prompts one. Will Democrats respond in a way that puts them in the best possible position to deliver it?
That hinges on whether they can look as hard at the errors in their party as at the ugliness in America.
Today in 1925, RCA took over the 25-station AT&T network plus WEAF radio in New York, making today the birthday of the original NBC radio network:
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones made their U.S. TV debut on ABC’s “Hullabaloo”:
Today in 1966, the Doors agreed to release “Break on Through” as their first single, removing the word “high” to get radio airplay:
The number one single today in 1980:
US News reports:
On Thursday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, held a conference call with devastated staffers that put the rosiest possible frame on a calamitous picture.
The message to the dozens of mostly young, sleep-deprived and shell-shocked aides: We did everything we could have. We wouldn’t have changed a thing. You should still be proud.Inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which sits half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol, eyes rolled and heads shook in frustration and disbelief.
Clinton’s loss at the hands of Donald Trump amounted to the most surprising outcome in the history of modern electoral politics. Of course things could’ve been done differently. And ignoring that fact wasn’t going to make the searing defeat any easier.
“We are pissed at them and state parties are pissed at them because they lost due to arrogance,” a top DNC staffer tells U.S. News, sharing the candid sentiment suffusing the high levels of the committee in exchange for anonymity.
It’s no surprise that the hierarchy of the Clinton campaign leadership was insular and self-assured. But DNC staffers say the team’s presumptuous, know-it-all attitude caused it to ignore early warning signs of electoral trouble inside the states, and demoralized DNC staff who felt largely marginalized or altogether neglected for most of the campaign.
There is always some level of tension between the sprawling bureaucracy of the party committee and the nominee’s campaign apparatus. But in the wake of Clinton’s loss, when intraparty finger-pointing is inevitable, some DNC staffers describe the relationship between the two entities as uniquely ineffectual, even after the displacement of unpopular chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And they attribute it to one fundamental reason: Clinton’s campaign leaders always thought they knew best. The DNC was to do what it was told: Essentially, be seen and not heard.
On election night, DNC number crunchers’ first saw signs of trouble when tallies from Virginia began to roll in. Here was a state the Clinton camp expected to carry by nearly 10 points, and the early returns showed that wasn’t going to happen. She won it by 5, but the slimmer-than-expected margin made DNC staffers nervous, especially because they had warned the Clinton camp not to pull staff and resources from there. The campaign did anyway, slashing its advertising investment in August. Sure, they survived inside the commonwealth, but inside the DNC, the late call of Virginia for Clinton was a distressing warning of things to come.
If their projected margin in Virginia was cut in half, where else was their forecast wrong?
Florida was always expected to be a slog. But a shiver went down the DNC’s collective spine when a call came in from Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, saying, “We’ve got a problem.”
The Clinton campaign was exceeding President Barack Obama’s margins in Democratic counties near Miami. But everything north and west of that showed signs of trouble. Trump’s margins outside South Florida shocked Democrats, in that he outperformed 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
“It turns out this was not a turnout problem for Clinton,” one Democratic strategist says. “This was a turnout dream for Trump.”
Taking deep breaths at the DNC, staffers attempted to calm themselves by noting Clinton didn’t have to have Florida, while Trump did. Still, the night was moving in the wrong direction.
The staggering moment top DNC staff knew it was over for Clinton was not due to a presidential call, but a down-ballot contest. It was 11:22 p.m. Eastern time when The Associated Press projected the Wisconsin Senate race, a seat deemed a safe pickup for Democrats for most of the year.
Instead, first-term incumbent Ron Johnson had not only survived, he won with a more than 3-point margin over Democratic challenger Russ Feingold.
“That’s the moment we knew it was over,” the DNC source says.
Kory Kozloski, executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, had phoned DNC Chief Operating Officer Lindsey Reynolds to assure her, “Don’t worry, we’ll be your firewall.”
But when Feingold fell, Reynolds became exasperated, blurting out an expletive, according to a source.
“Really, f—–? Where’s our firewall now?” she said.
Clinton’s high command – led by Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook and director of state campaigns Marlon Marshall – knew it was over before midnight Tuesday, even though Wisconsin wasn’t called for Trump by The Associated Press until 2:30 a.m. Eastern time and Clinton wouldn’t concede until shortly thereafter.
They released astounded staff from their positions at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn to head over to the Javits Convention Center at 11:55 p.m. In a sense, they were sending them to the mourning site with the rest of Clinton’s hard-core supporters.
Back at DNC headquarters, staffers were equally as depressed, but they also became angry, reeling through times they were not valued or downright insulted.
There was the time a state party executive director asked to speak directly to Marshall, and a reply came back from a junior staffer that the state party member wasn’t senior enough to merit that level of interaction.
There were the numerous pleas from state party leaders to get Clinton to specific states – like Michigan – earlier, and to devote more resources to state party operations, which provide the oil and expertise to get out the vote.
“But it was all about analytics with them,” the DNC source says. “They were too reliant on analytics and not enough on instinct and human intel from the ground.”
And there were the multiple factions of power swirling around Clinton: from Huma Abedin, her longtime aide, to Mook and Marshall, whom sources say lost some of Clinton’s trust through the grueling primary with Sen. Bernie Sanders, to older Clinton hands like Minyon Moore and Charlie Baker.
Adam Parkhomenko, the DNC’s national field director and a co-founder of the Ready for Hillary super PAC, served as a helpful intermediary between these different groups of aides and the DNC. But on many days, even near the end of the campaign, it was difficult to get a read on who held the real power with the candidate.
By early next year, there will be an entirely new set of Democratic National Committee leaders with many new staff. Former DNC chairman Howard Dean, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm have emerged as early prospects for the job to succeed Donna Brazile, who is set to step down from her interim role in early 2017.
It’s a chance at a fresh start, and ironically, the loss of the presidency will give the entity new life and relevance.
First, the DNC is tasked with mining the reams of data from the states they lost and drawing some difficult conclusions about the best path forward.
In the meantime, Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn is seeking those answers as well, and will want to see the DNC’s data.
But the DNC staffer says his boss has told him, “With the way they treated us, don’t feel like you need to respond to anything Brooklyn wants quickly.”
Will Rahn of CBS News:
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doingwhen he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!
That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.
Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.
That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.
As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further — fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup — which starts the cycle anew.
There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.
Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.
What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.
We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.
Such as: Their jobs.
Fordham University Prof. Charles Camosy:
The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as “educated” voters and those who are described as “working class” voters.
The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump. College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities.
As a college professor, I know that there are many ways in which college graduates simply know more about the world than those who do not have such degrees. This is especially true — with some exceptions, of course — when it comes to “hard facts” learned in science, history and sociology courses.But I also know that that those with college degrees — again, with some significant exceptions — don’t necessarily know philosophy or theology. And they have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses. In my experience, many professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.
Higher education in the United States, after all, is woefully monolithic in its range of worldviews. In 2014, some 60 percent of college professors identified as either “liberal” or “far-left,” an increase from 42 percent identifying as such in 1990. And while liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5-to-1, conservatives are considerably more common within the general public. The world of academia is, therefore, different in terms of political temperature than the rest of society, and what is common knowledge and conventional wisdom among America’s campus dwellers can’t be taken for granted outside the campus gates.
While some of the political differences between educated and working-class voters is based on a dispute over hard facts, the much broader and more foundational disagreements are about norms and values. They turn on first principles grounded in the very different intuitions and stories which animate very different political cultures. Such disagreements cannot be explained by the fact that college-educated voters know some facts which non-college educated voters do not. They are about something far more fundamental.Think about the sets of issues that are often at the core of the identity of the working-class folks who elected Trump: religion, personal liberty’s relationship with government, gender, marriage, sexuality, prenatal life and gun rights. Intuition and stories guide most working-class communities on these issues. With some exceptions, those professorial sorts who form the cultures of our colleges and universities have very different intuition and stories. And the result of this divide has been to produce an educated class with an isolated, insular political culture.
Religion in most secular institutions, for instance, is at best thought of as an important sociological phenomenon to understand — but is very often criticized as an inherently violent, backward force in our culture, akin to belief in fairies and dragons. Professors are less religious than the population as a whole. Most campus cultures have strictly (if not formally) enforced dogmatic views about the nature of gender, sexual orientation, a woman’s right to choose abortion, guns and the role of the state as primary agent of social change. If anyone disagrees with these dogmatic positions they risk being marginalized as ignorant, bigoted, fanatical or some other dismissive label.Sometimes the college-educated find themselves so unable to understand a particular working-class point of view that they will respond to those perspectives with shocking condescension. Recall that President Obama, in the midst of the 2012 election cycle, suggested that job losses were the reason working-class voters were bitterly clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” The religious themselves, meanwhile, likely do not chalk their faith up to unhappy economic prospects, and they probably find it hard to connect with politicians who seem to assume such.
Thus today’s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage, gender and privilege. And that same culture leads such educated people to either label those with whom they disagree as bad people or reduce their stated views on these issues as actually being about something else, as in Obama’s case. Most college grads in this culture are simply never forced to engage with or seriously consider professors or texts which could provide a genuine, compelling alternative view.
For decades now, U.S. colleges and universities have quite rightly been trying to become more diverse when it comes to race and gender. But this election highlights the fact that our institutions of higher education should use similar methods to cultivate philosophical, theological and political diversity.These institutions should consider using quotas in hiring that help faculties and administrations more accurately reflect the wide range of norms and values present in the American people. There should be systemwide attempts to have texts assigned in classes written by people from intellectually underrepresented groups. There should be concerted efforts to protect political minorities from discrimination and marginalization, even if their views are unpopular or uncomfortable to consider.
The goal of such changes would not be to convince students that their political approaches are either correct or incorrect. The goal would instead be educational: to identify and understand the norms, values, first principles, intuitions and stories which have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education. This would better equip college graduates to engage with the world as it is, including with their fellow citizens.
The alternative, a reduction of all disagreement to racism, bigotry and ignorance — in addition to being wrong about its primary source — will simply make the disagreement far more personal, entrenched and vitriolic. And it won’t make liberal values more persuasive to the less educated, as Trump victory demonstrates.
It is time to do the hard work of forging the kind of understanding that moves beyond mere dismissal to actual argument. Today’s election results indicate that our colleges and universities are places where this hard work is particularly necessary.
Camosy explains not merely last week’s post-election protests, but why there has been less voter complaint than you might think about UW System cuts this decade. I can tell you from experience that UW System people really do not grasp that voters might not like their values getting not only short shrift, but derided in the UW System classrooms those voters’ tax dollars built by UW System faculty paid for by those tax dollars.
Meanwhile, Mathew Ingram looks at a different group:
If you’re looking for a word to describe the feeling in the nation’s newsrooms after a Donald Trump win, “shell-shocked” would probably be a good one. How is this possible when every poll and prediction site said that Hillary Clinton would win? How could everyone have gotten it so wrong?
The inescapable fact is that most of the mainstream media got it wrong because they simply couldn’t believe that Americans would elect someone like Donald Trump. Denial can be a powerful drug.
In part, that’s because much of the East Coast-based media establishment is arguably out of touch with the largely rural population that voted for Trump, the disenfranchised voters who looked past his cheesy exterior and his penchant for half-truths and heard a message of hope, however twisted.
As the editor of Cracked put it in a very perceptive essay: “If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called ‘Cost of Living.’”
But there’s more to it than just that. As I tried to explain in a previous post about Trump’s rise, he took advantage of a media landscape that has never been more broken, more fragmented and more open to misinformation, disinformation, and even outright hoaxes and lies.
In the end, all of the fact-checking, all the digging done by people like David Farenthold of the Washington Post, and all of the editorials and endorsements were like spitting into the wind.
One of the downsides of the fractured media landscape is that it’s easier than ever to sit in an echo chamber or filter bubble and preach to the converted. Newspaper readers believe what they want to believe, and so do those on Facebook—and never the twain shall meet.
The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British single today in 1981:
The number one British album today in 1981 was “Queen Greatest Hits”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 