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Clear, Simple and Wrong Take 2
Nov. 9th, 2016 06:50 amI went to bed at around 11:30 my time last night, when it became clear Clinton had lost Pennsylvania and nobody would call it until all the precincts were in. I wake up to see she lost, and a man I consider an incompetent boob is President-elect. I'm not happy, but if the country survived James Buchanan it will survive Donald Trump. (A low bar to clear, for sure.)
Kudos to the website FiveThirtyEight for being least wrong. The race was close, closer than we knew. Also, Scott Adams was right - Trump is a "master persuader." How else would a self-proclaimed billionaire who thinks Brooklyn is a small town and has a record of screwing common people win the Presidency as the savior of small town white people?
This, like Brexit, was a dying of the light vote. Small town whites came out in droves to protest what was happening to their way of life. (It was what Romney thought would happen in 2012.) I feel their pain every time I talk to my parents about the meth lab in their small Illinois town. But much like Prohibition, here the voters have picked a clear, simple and wrong answer to their woes.
The problems with small-town America and Great Britain are serious, and many are structural. Trump has no more idea how to fix them than to build a starship. His go-to toolbox, "small government," will make matters worse.
Kudos to the website FiveThirtyEight for being least wrong. The race was close, closer than we knew. Also, Scott Adams was right - Trump is a "master persuader." How else would a self-proclaimed billionaire who thinks Brooklyn is a small town and has a record of screwing common people win the Presidency as the savior of small town white people?
This, like Brexit, was a dying of the light vote. Small town whites came out in droves to protest what was happening to their way of life. (It was what Romney thought would happen in 2012.) I feel their pain every time I talk to my parents about the meth lab in their small Illinois town. But much like Prohibition, here the voters have picked a clear, simple and wrong answer to their woes.
The problems with small-town America and Great Britain are serious, and many are structural. Trump has no more idea how to fix them than to build a starship. His go-to toolbox, "small government," will make matters worse.
