November 2016: The New Normal

On Wednesday, the day after Election Day, in New York City (where both candidates gave their post-election speeches), the sky was cloudy and dark. The next day, it was sunny and warm for a November day.

As I watched the results come in on Tuesday night and gradually realized that it was not just a close election that would take a while before we saw the seemingly inevitable win for Hillary Clinton, but that Donald Trump had won decisively, I felt physically ill. I couldn't process the news. Calling the election an "upset" seemed to have a cruel double meaning. How could my country have elected a leader so odious and unqualified?

Encountering people on the street on Wednesday felt awkward, all of us aware of our national embarrassment. We heard reports of hate crimes committed by Trump supporters (some of which turned out to be hoaxes) and fears that America would descend into an authoritarian dystopia where overt bigotry runs rampant. Democrats and Republicans who had opposed Trump started thinking of charities to donate to and volunteer work to do, as if to offset the election results.

On the same day, we heard Hillary Clinton and President Obama speak about the news in an optimistic, level-headed way. The next day, the current and future presidents met for the first time and started working on the transition to the Trump administration. This is the new normal.

Accepting this will not mean acquiescing to everything, or even most things, that President Trump says or does. We should subject him to merciless scrutiny and criticism, just as we should with any other president. In fact, that will be possible only if we accept that he is legitimately the 45th President of the United States, and the time for protesting Trump's holding this office has passed. If you drown out any discussion of the specifics of his presidency with the familiar refrains that he's abnormal, racist, sexist, etc., you'll remove yourself from the realm of productive debates about the president.

Amid all the national squabbling about Trump that's been going on since June 16, 2015, a few indisputable facts stand out:

Trump said he'd run for president, and it was widely derided as something that would never happen, or, once he officially announced, as a short-lived publicity stunt.

Trump was right.

Trump said he'd win the Republican nomination, and virtually everyone said that wouldn't happen: he had a "hard ceiling" of support far below 50%, and eventually the rest of the field would narrow down to one main challenger who'd emerge as a consensus nominee.

Trump was right.

Trump said he'd win the presidency, and virtually every pundit said this was highly unlikely for any number of reasons: Clinton was ahead in the polls; she was the only one with a serious ground game; Trump had generally bombed the debates; his unfavorable rating was the highest of any presidential candidate in American history and especially bad with women and Hispanics; and it simply seemed implausible that such a person could ever be elected president.

Trump was right.

And he didn't win the election by just one state, as the most recent Republican president did twice. Trump apparently won Michigan, which was considered a blue state, and he won Pennsylvania, which was considered technically a swing state but with the footnote that no Republican candidate had won it since the '80s.

Trump has been wrong about many things. But on his ability to achieve his presidential goals, he's been more right than just about anyone else.

Of course, you might not want him to achieve his goals for his presidency.

But look at his long list of plans for his first 100 days in office. Some I disagree with, like tax cuts. Some are reiterations of unrealistic campaign themes, like getting Mexico to pay for a wall. Some I can't judge yet, like a vague promise to reduce corruption in Washington.

But some . . . actually seem like they just might be good ideas, like more school choice and streamlining the FDA's approval of medications.

And none of them involve turning America into a fascist dictatorship, forcibly removing citizens from the country, systematically violating due process, instituting apartheid, or squelching free speech.

It would be naive to expect any president to succeed in implementing all the best-sounding parts of their agenda. But if Trump is claiming he'll accomplish a number of things that sound like decent ideas, he might turn out to be right.

Let's wait and see. Let's give him a chance. And let's react to the particular things he does or doesn't do when he's in office, instead of unproductively agonizing over the general notion of him as president . . . as strange and troubling as that might be.

Being a pundit on Election Day

"Election Days are tough. Everyone wants to read at the precise moment when you have nothing to write." — Mickey Kaus (on Twitter)

What people are Googling on Election Day 2010

I recently blogged Sara Robinson's piece in The New Republic in which she argued:

Every American over the age of ten knows what the GOP and the conservative movement stand for. Sing it with me now: low taxes, small government, strong defense, traditional families. See? You know the tune, and the harmony line, too.

OK, now: What do Democrats and progressives stand for?

Take your time. It's a tough question.

Give up? So have most progressives. Even the movement's most deeply committed members often have a hard time answering this one.

And that's a problem.

I just checked StatCounter's log of search queries that brought people to this blog. Here are two of them:

what democrats stand for

what do liberals stand for

You might think the same person searched for both of those, since they're phrased so similarly. But no, one of them happened in Texas, the other in Florida.

Both people saw the heading of my blog post — "What do liberals / progressives / Democrats stand for?" — and clicked on the link.

StatCounter recorded both of those referrals today. Election Day.

And that's a problem.


Short URL for this post: goo.gl/nYHKp

3 thoughts on Election Day 2008 (with photos of the Obama family watching the results)

(All these photos are from Obama's election night Flickr set.)


1. Considering that I've been supporting Obama since he announced his campaign in early 2007, I was surprised that my own reaction on the night of Election Day was muted. I had to tell myself, "You should be really excited." 

Maybe this is because I assumed he'd win, so I'd already gradually absorbed the news. 

Maybe it felt wrong to be gleeful about how America is transcending its history of prejudice on a night when California, of all states, deprived people of their right to marry who they want regardless of gender.

Maybe it's that Obama has such a facility at making you feel like you really know him personally that seeing him win was like seeing your friend become president. Sure you'd be happy for them, but you'd also be nervous about all the things that might go wrong.

2. Naturally, conservatives are debating what caused McCain to lose. This conversation between Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat -- taped a few days before Election Day under the assumption that Obama would win -- is a particularly thoughtful example.

How can they possibly figure this out? Wouldn't you need to run numerous experiments to determine what really caused the outcome? But since the circumstances of this election are unique, there's no way to perform even an approximation of a controlled experiment.

If you want the GOP to stay tethered to the right, you'll say McCain lost because of his history as a centrist maverick, which cast a shadow over any of his attempts to position himself as more traditionally conservative. If you'd like the GOP to become more moderate, you'll say he lost because he played too much to the Republican base; he should have just been his old self. You can avoid critiquing McCain in either direction by blaming it on all sorts of other factors -- the Bush administration's incompetence, the financial crisis, Obama's dastardly scheme to get young people excited about participating in democracy...

How can you choose between these theories in an intellectually honest way? Exit polls? But even those are flawed and offer only hints about how voters actually made up their minds.

People love to feel like they know why things happen. But can you really assume this when minds are involved?

3. No one again will be able to seriously doubt that America is ready for a black president -- or a female president.

Oh, people will make the same old, tired complaints. They'll say it doesn't count because he's not a "real" black person, whatever that means. And they'll play up Hillary Clinton's defeat as a crushing blow for women.

So let's remember that Obama won a decisive victory including would-be deep-red states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. This happened despite massive race- and religion-based attacks on Obama that make the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988 seem dignified by comparison. (I'm including not just the official McCain campaign but also outsiders' campaigning that McCain tolerated.)

As for Hillary Clinton -- if you believe in treating women as adults who are the equals of men, then please give her enough respect to say she failed. She wasn't a passive, helpless victim. Out of the whole field of 20+ presidential candidates, who were mostly white men, she came in 2nd or 3rd overall. That's no injustice -- that's just the rough, adult world, where you try really hard and risk failure if you make too many mistakes. 

There are still groups that probably can't expect to have a fair shot at the presidency for a while -- gays, atheists, etc. But in the future, when a woman or a black person runs for president, we can fairly assume (without knowing to an absolute certainty) that the candidate himself or herself is the one who's responsible for the outcome, whether it's bad or good.

And this one's pretty good.

Obama !!!

Time to feel good about America again.