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Thoughts on the Transition

I did not think Trump would win the primaries or the election and I was wildly wrong.  I guess there is a chance that I am wrong about some of my fears about his policies as president.  So, for the time being I am willing to wait and see and have little to comment on cabinet selections.  I feel like I have a bit of a vacation from focusing on policy.

I had cursed the Republicans for running the only candidate that could lose to Clinton.  Now the Democrats lost to the one guy they thought they would have the easiest time defeating.  How inept of a campaign does one have to run to lose to Trump?

I would think that keeping Pelosi in power after the disaster she unleashed on the Democrats from the 2010 midterms forward would be a nonstarter.  I would be wrong again.

Trying to mollify the old guard with the consolation of winning the popular vote is just another form of denial.  If we had a popular vote the candidates would have run differently and the voter turnout would have been different. Republicans in California who stayed home with no chance of impacting the electoral count would have come out in droves.  Her popular vote victory can be attributed to her edge in California alone.  Her supporters claim she won a race that never occurred. The electoral college is not going to go away, nor should it.

The more that power is centrally focused, the more important is the electoral college. A national popular vote would be more tolerable if power was more dispersed to the localities as the founders and framers intended.

There are three legs to the Democratic losses. (Even though we were wrong on everything about the Trump victory, we still claim insight into how it happened.) First was Hillary’s terrible candidacy and terribly run campaign. Second was the deterioration of the party’s power at the state level. They have no back bench or youthful energy.  They are the party of old shrill white people.

The third cause was the accumulation of contempt.  The Democrats are the party that cried wolf. When they cry racism now nobody listens.  Every display of contempt toward the winning candidate and his family only serves to confirm the choice of many of his reluctant voters. If the Democrats want to lose even more seats in the House and Senate in the next midterm then by all means keep Clinton, Pelosi, and Warren as the face of the Party, and then to alienate even more moderates, make Keith Ellison the party chairman. Make fun of the first lady and display your moral superiority in every possible forum.

Their only hope if they pursue this course is if Trump screws up badly. While this remains a distinct possibility, they may want to develop an alternate strategy just in case they remain as wrong about Trump as they have so far.

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