Hillary couldn't make that argument because it would've drawn more attention to her most damning flaw: The fact that she's a textbook demagogue who was on the wrong side of every progressive issue until she found it politically expedient to "evolve".
That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to C-SPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season.
In the (probably apocryphal) words of Keynes:
> When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?
It's not a sign of vice either; I'm sure he's been believing that the Earth is round for 24+ years, and that's fine. What matters is accuracy, and updating in the face of new evidence, not consistency. Consistency in the face of new evidence is called faith.
Having the same opinion in and of itself is not a virtue, but having wisdom and foresight and conviction and true ground level initiative all at once is far more than just virtuous.
You speak of faith and belief a lot. Bernie is like a wise theological scholar. Personally I think he's wrong about quite a few things, but I recognize the strong morals and ethics, the personal virtue, the deep rational thought, the coherent inter relatedness behind his system. He's a personification of sometimes wise people are wrong, but they still remain wise. He's not for me personally, I like other folks, but I'm proud he's an American and if he were the leader I could respect him despite disagreement. And his female opponent is like a televangelist seeking ratings and pledge drives, a faith healer, a fake messiah. And people somehow wonder how she lost. Doesn't her show have the highest ratings? Doesn't she make the best promises in her sermons? Don't our holiest people fall all over themselves to celebrate and show off their own holiness in supporting her? How could a charlatan like her not win, indeed?
It is if they were good opinions the whole damn time. Being for marriage equality for 24 years is a virtue. Being for an improved social safety net for 24 years is a virtue. Being for universal healthcare for 24 years is a virtue.
By European standards, most of the European centre-right is fine with most of what Bernie supports...
And then we wake up to Trump.
EDIT - Even though I think Trump is an existential threat to the USA, so have many of our leaders. Maybe 'us' wouldn't be the US if we weren't just a bit crazy. I must accept that I might be wrong about Trump be universally bad and see what happens.
You are deliberately misinterpreting the statement. Of course having the same opinion for 24 years by itself is not a virtue! The point is: he has had the same public stance on things that matter : gay marriage, healthcare, etc. In today's climate, when politicians change their views based on the most recent polling, this is indeed a virtue.
How do you know that? Can you really not imagine that someone can misinterpret something without malicious intention?
Can you believe that I agree with OP that Bernie was the better candidate, yet still disagree about a particular argument?
"I believe in universal human rights" is a virtue that I think it is perfectly acceptable to have to 24 years (or more!)
That was not what GP was saying at all. He was saying that Bernie has always stood for what he believes is the right thing to do, whereas Hillary would pick a stance based on its political value.
“But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position.”
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927
Her motives are clear.
Like, what if someone shows up and shows that Trump has had the same opinions all along? Is that a positive for him?
If the ideas are shitty, it doesn't matter how consistent or inconsistent they are. If they're good, I don't care if the person only adopted them 3 years ago, as long as they did for the right reasons, (e.g. not political expediency, I agree.)
I agree that the fact that he's held the same opinions for a long time is evidence that Berns doesn't act out of political expediency, but to me that point is far overshadowed by whether the ideas are any good.
>but to me that point is far overshadowed by whether the ideas are any good
Mind telling me where his ideas are bad? Most of his beliefs are both long held, progressive, and in my opinion, largely agreeable.
But being right for 24 years is.
She adopted his ideas one by one and then tried to pretend they'd been hers all along. Unfortunately (for her), Democrats aren't that gullible. It was clear that she was only saying what voters wanted to hear, while Bernie truly believed everything he'd been saying for that past 25+ years.
Case in point: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2631
All I'm saying is, you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing, you have to look at the idea and history in detail, and show that it was a good idea all along.
(I'm not objecting to the object-level argument that Clinton does whatever is politically expedient, I'm objecting to the line of argument that it's good for a politician to hold an opinion for a long time, without also showing that the idea is good, and that it was good all along.)
You're missing the point completely.
I'm not praising Sanders' stubbornness, I'm praising his foresight and vastly superior judgment. He knew what this country needed to do 20 years before Hillary, and he was willing to vehemently defend his opinions despite the overwhelming opposition. The fact that you're trying to turn this into some kind of debate about consistency vs. facts is frankly baffling. It's clear that he was right all along and she was late to the party on every issue that liberals and progressives care about.
And do you really believe she changed her opinion on those issues where she claimed to have "evolved"? I sure don't. We know she still wants TPP to pass, we know she still secretly supports DOMA, we know she had no interest in reigning in Wall Street, we know she (and Chelsea) were halfheartedly pretending to support medical marijuana, etc. etc.. The Hillary Clinton presented to the public was a fictional character designed for one purpose: To win the presidency.
It didn't work, and the reason is clear: We're not as ignorant or gullible as they'd hoped: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599#efmARhAWn
You're right, I got sidetracked by this:
> has been saying the exact same things for years
I keep forgetting not to try debating what is or isn't a good argument, in the abstract, in politics threads.
What he said makes complete sense in the context he presented it in, and is valid.
You're arguing how what he said would be bad in an entirely different context, which is irrelevant.
If that's the critique you hear when comparing Sanders to Clinton, you're not listening very well.
To restate, Sanders didn't just tout the same idea. He's fought for the same core principles throughout his whole career, even when in the clear minority. Overtime, the rest of our culture came around to those ideas (bringing Clinton with it).
His virtue isn't his tenacity. It's his progressive thinking.
> the exact same thing
for years.
I'm not American, I havn't looked into Berns' history in details.
She has demonstrated over her career that she will vote for whatever is popular, lean on "think of the children" issues, and only vote progressively to catch up with the times. In a time where Congressional approval is so low, the American people couldn't stomach electing the epitome of a career politician who seems to have so many skeletons in her closet the door is about to burst (real or imaginary, the impression is there).
We ended up with Trump, which I am absolutely not thrilled about, but at least this will send the Democrats back to the drawing board to come up with something better than "Less Evil." I just pray to the FSM that the Republican House, Senate, Cabinet, and Supreme Court don't turn our great nation into a chop shop in the next 2 / 4 years. We are in for a bumpy ride.
Would you rather have an ethically malleable liberal than a principled conservative? In most cases I would rather have the principled politician because they will have some kind of goal to benefit some segment of Americans. Can we really say that any ethically malleable politician, of any flavor, will always help some segment of Americans?
Then as a counter to all this. Nixon did found the EPA.
I think malleable politicians are malleable because they try to benefit the largest section of the population that they can. Conservatives, lately, have focused on benefiting a very small segment of the population directly, expecting the benefits to trickle down.
However, the trickle down has not worked. I know very little about economics, but, I remember, headlines in newspapers eight years ago were mainly about unemployment, and the growth of the National debt. The euro was $1.30 (now it buoys around $1.10).
I think the American economy is much better now than it was eight years ago, and a larger section of the population has benefited from that, than when principled conservatives were in the government. (And this is just from an economic point of view, which is a small part of the benefits).
Basically, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applied to politics.
e.g. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a crappy policy compared with letting gay people serve openly, but it's an improvement on the status quo at that time which was setting up sting operations to catch out gay servicemen and throw them out of the army.
I guess I'm condoning her fighting for something she doesn't truly believe is right, as long as it's better than what's currently the case. Does that make me bad? Does it make her bad?
Really, she hasn't achieved much good for the world if any. She is good at being a power person in Washington though.
I'm not pro Trump, by the way.
Then there's Cuba. Not a big deal in global terms, but a watershed in America's history. Although the payoffs for these mainly accrue to Kerry, it was Hilary who made them happen.
Benghazi was a political dog and pony show, that she is completely blameless of.
Libya and Gaddafi were a humanitarian disaster that rests squarely on her shoulders.
You don't have to qualify your statements anymore. The veil of illusion has come down and the sock puppet masters have ended their contracts, so you won't be attacked unfairly for pointing out the truth.
Basically, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applied to politics.
A valid point, in spirit.
But the basic problem with the Clintonian philosophy (a term which was coined during Bill's tenure, actually) is that they both took "triangulation" to such an extreme (and made so many 180-degree flip-flops on basic issues, which really should have been principle gut calls -- Hillary's gay rights being a classic example) that the end, you could never get a fix on, let alone believe them what they stood for. It's like nailing jello to a wall, basically.
To be truly successful in politics -- the stance to take (which I hope this election proves) is not "triangulation at all costs" (a.k.a. Standard Clintonianism). Nor is it "perfection at all costs". But it does require a keen sense of judgement to know when, exactly, to make a proper gut call between the two -- and stand up for the right thing, and say the right thing. Even if it seems the majority is against you, or no one is listening to your speeches on C-PAN.
That, and a sense for not letting one's self be "played" (in the sense that Hillary appears to have genuinely believed both the Bush's administration line about the imminent threat of WMD in Iraq, and his private assurances -- albeit not encoded in the resolution that she tragically voted for -- that he wouldn't invade unless all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted; or in the sense that both of the Clintons allowed themselves to be played, for decades, by the Christian Right).
I disagree with, but respect, Sanders, Stein, Warren, Feingold (and some other lefties). Hillary equals revulsion, repulsion. I can't be talked from "respect" to "vote" with someone I can't even respect first.
The D party worked very hard on converting "respect" people to "vote" people. I think they achieved 100% success. The problem is most of the country can never respect her, and there was zero effort put into making her respectable (perhaps it was recognized as impossible?)
There's something fundamentally wrong internally with the D party when the ground seems to be crawling with respectable (possibly votable!) candidates but instead we get a movie caricature of Lex Luther combined with a slightly more chicken hawk bloodthirsty Joker from a sequel rejected in the 90s. There's something just horribly fundamentally wrong with how people gain political power inside the D party, resulting in the wrong leaders at the wrong times.
But to not put a polarizing, inexperienced politician like Trump away easily is what makes the commentators (and me) think there are larger trends at work.
She had all the cards.
Also, keep in mind that most of the electorate votes against party lines, even if the party were to nominate Satan. She completely failed the margins.
Hillary didn't need any help destroying her reputation.
As a matter of public record, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in her FBI interview that she could not recall briefings at the State department pertaining to handling classified information, nor could she give an example of how information might be classified.
Now this is either a lie, or a self-admission that disqualifies a person to hold the position of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, privy to the most sensitive information in the government.
How can you fault a voter who observes these facts and casts their vote for someone else?
Or, to adapt from Donald Rumsfeld, you go into an election with the electorate you have, not the electorate you wish you had.
There could have been a vast conspiracy to frame the Unibomber or Al Capone or John Dillinger or Nixon. No one can explain why them. Therefore I think it infinitely more likely they were just crooks.
Because she has been in politics for for 30 something years, been on the national stage for 20 something years, and has been "the next president" for roughly 10 years. This wasn't one hit job, this was decades of concentrated work that eventually broke the camel's back.
How is "I'll do exactly what the establishment tells me to do, just like the last couple figureheads, except in a $10K Chairman Mao pantsuit" a challenge to much of anyone?
The country has a not so comfy history with black folks, yet men and women have lived together for eternity, so why didn't Obama get it perhaps 100 or 10000 times worse? Surely you're not a racism denialist? Perhaps no one accused Obama of being a criminal because... he isn't? I mean I never voted for him but I can respect him, he's a wise constitutional scholar who probably deserves a supreme court appointment to an empty liberal seat when this is all over. I disagree with him on many issues but he's no crook and he's reasonably wise. He got teased, essentially, about a technicality of being born in a foreign country and being muslim which frankly don't matter and never turned out to be a problem and never went past offending people on twitter.
Palin was hated in the mainstream media, but it was just a generic Quayle style two minutes hate. How come no one provided any evidence of her crimes? Perhaps... there were none? Could there possibly be any hatred hotter than the DNC controlled MSM's hatred toward Palin, yet there's nothing but sophistry against her because she's clean? I wouldn't describe Palin as being a bright bulb or a beacon of wisdom yet I voted for her, she's not that bad.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Public_Safety_Commissio...
I like your optimism, but do you remember what first brought our new president elect into the political sphere? It certainly wasn't to praise Obama for his clean and scandal free record.
I guess nobody around her who had an inkling dared to raise their hand. Can't even imagine what they'd say "Ma'am, people don't believe what you are saying, can you be more genuine a bit?"...
Check out of some of the leaked emails. I'm not sure if they said it to her directly, but they regularly remarked on how insincere and artificial she came across as.
She just has almost no charisma or jovial presence, unlike Trump.
This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter
Ron Paul just kept repeating his position, regardless of how many puppy orphanages were on fire.
I am convinced that he did not possess the duplicity of most politicians.
She fought a near perfect 1970s campaign. She got every Columbia school of journalism grad eating out of her hand, total control and ally to the legacy main stream media. Newspapers. Radio. Every academic in the country shilling for her or they lose their position. She had nothing fundamentally new that a 60s radical wouldn't have recognized. There's simply no way she could have lost in 1976.
Of course its 2016 so Trump has approx 5 million NEETs on /POL/ shitposting insane memes about nazi frogs into every normies facebook feed on the planet while epic trolling social and legacy media and releasing all the proof of her corruption via email thru hacked servers on wikileaks. He was the only candidate talking about 2010s issues like the result of 1960s immigration reform or the marginalization and hatred of the white working class. He fought a pretty good 2016 campaign.
This being 2016 and not 1976 its no great surprise which strategy won.
The "R" side needs to take notes that the "D" are likely to make this mistake precisely once. The battles in 2020 and 2024 are not going to be baby boomers still stuck in the '70s losing to '10s millennials again.
Also she hates half the country and calls them deplorables. Somehow, oddly, her despising them didn't magically translate into votes. The sense of entitlement is strong with that one...
A lot of people who voted for her are Democrats -- people she thought she had already in her pockets.
Trump wasn't a top candidate, he wasn't the popular one, has said stupid stuff, and yet people disliked Hillary so much, they still voted for him.
I looked through some emails, it was entertaining (even though CNN said it is illegal to look through them and only media was special and had to interpret them for us). There was very little in those emails of "Hey how does this help ordinary people, let's do something for them" or "You know, we should just tell the truth, let's not really spin this at all".
It is all about how do fool this block "Women, ok, she is a woman, that's easy". Black voters, those are easy... what should we do for them? Organized a rap concert, of course. Because that's not condescending... Let's call Jay-z so he can drop a few N-bombs at them, I hear they like that. She is like the awkward rich person trying to find common ground with peasant that she usually would never associates with and it just looks so fake and stupid... and now more people can see that.
I'm sure if we had wikileaks of the RNC during that time, it would have revealed much of the same type of insider corruption.
Those knife fights over party rules (especially 40 (b)) made it possible for Trump to get into the running for the nomination, according to many GOP observers. See [1] for an explanation of how.
These election results are a political pressure relief valve: significant swathes of the electorate have been systematically excluded and ignored, then they tried to organize in different ways. First culminating in Ron Paul's bid, then a different wave in Bernie Sanders' bid, and enough formed coalitions behind Trump this time around to cost both parties' establishments their desired outcomes. Ignoring such large groups of the electorate for much longer would have cost us much more in the future. There are very big chunks of the population in a lot of pain for going on decades now, and effectively ignoring that is no longer much of an option going forward.
I see China possibly facing a similar issue with their rural population at some point in the far future.
[1] https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-election/2016-republican...
I believe the Ron Paul rule was seen to block Ted Cruz rather than help Trump (semantics, I suppose).
This would allow for a lot of social services, but keep them more localized, so they can serve the population better and be held more accountable.
And it would avoid a lot of the problems with big government at the federal level.
Did it though? Did it? [1]
I mean, I know people have been redirecting Trump's flaws onto Hillary but this is just hilarious.
I'm a big fan of Bernie, but I'm not sure I want a politician with early 90s views of everything...
If you can't open it, it's an exchange between Gimli and Legolas from the LoTR movie.
Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): I never thought I'd be fighting side by side with a trumpster.
Legolas (with MAGA hat): What about side by side with a deplorable?
Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): Aye.
Gimli (wearing Hillary for Prison 2016 hat): I could do that.
Ordinarily if the choice is bad I'd vote third party, but I really didn't want Hillary in and I was pretty sure this wouldn't be the election when the third party wins it.
Well that's blatantly false.
That was Trump's entire campaign. All I've heard all year was "Benghazi", "emails" and "crooked", all of which were just rephrasing of the same thing, repeated in perpetuum. It most definitely worked.
He promised huge tax cuts, a reformed health care system which is more accessible and tariffs that brought back manufacturing jobs. He promised a lot of other things but I'm mentioning what attracted the working class towards him.
He only started attacking Hillary much later.
It's true, that's all you heard, but that's not all that he was saying and the part that you didn't hear ... that's why he won. Those who voted for him heard a different message, one specific to their economic circumstances. It's always the economy. And while the aggregate macro picture looks good, we are going through some major shifts underneath those numbers.
I've come to realize that all their statistics foo is just peddled propaganda in opaque packaging. Utterly worthless.
I couldn't disagree more. This campaign was all about emotion, not rationality. Apparently facts don't matter and that's very hard to deal with.
A large part of Hillary's campaign (both officially and via her supporters on social media) was actively shaming people into voting for "the woman" instead of "the bigot". Unsurprisingly that seems to have backfired, leaving many liberals flabbergasted how "Women for Trump" was ever a thing.
I would have been upset with either candidate winning but the entire candidacy showed the worst side of American election cycles: mudslinging, character assassination and trying to convince everyone the other guy is literally the devil. Trump's accusations of Clinton being "a liar" and "a criminal" (IOW a typical career politician) were pretty harmless compared to the hyperbole (deserved or not) hauled at him.
For whatever barriers Clinton faced due to her gender, she also wasn't held accountable early enough for a lot of legitimately bad things that she's done, which came back to hurt her in the end.
I'm sorry but that makes no sense to me. Now maybe it's my liberal tendencies talking but the things that have come out of his mouth are flat out dangerous for a person who has that much power (now). Not much of it was hyperbole because it didn't have to be. He was already after foreigners, women, "the washington elite", the internet etc. before any of the media got involved. He was addicted to the cycle coverage but he still said all of those things and you can't wish that away.
But I've never before seen a candidate -- and especially that candidate's supporters -- be so viciously attacked as Trump was in this election campaign. I know certain liberal groups think "tone policing" is fallacious but I don't agree with this and neither do half of the American voters apparently (please excuse the tired phrase).
Throughout this campaign I've seen HRC supporters lump in abstainees and third party voters with Trump supporters in a way that only reminds me of George W Bush's "with us or against us" rhetoric. I've seen HRC supporters sever ties with family members who announced they would vote for Trump. I've seen them shame and ridicule anyone saying they would do anything other than vote for HRC. I've even seen them call for boycotts of companies run by alleged Trump supporters.
It's not that Trump isn't a disagreeable character, its that he has been singled out and denounced with every imaginable slur and every single accusation levelled at him was taken at face value.
I know this is not solely the work of Clinton's campaign and that the election unfortunately coincided with the BLM movement, various Islamist attacks in the West (including the massacre in Orlando) and the peak of SJW conflicts at American universities but this was a despicable crapshoot and you know it.
If a company's CEO or owner said the things Trump has said, I would call for boycotting the company until that person no longer ran it.
That has nothing to do with the Democratic party, nor his running for president (I'm not even allowed to vote): It's because Trump's ideas are today's equivalent to being opposed to interracial marriage back then.
While Clinton mastered the "experienced, competent" persona, what she actually did was mostly driven by her ambition to become the first female president.
Trump, who has been accused of being a bigot, has always been very liberal towards LGBT (see his interview for Rolling Stone from a few years ago), while Hillary had been strongly against gay marriage until it became very clear public opinion changed in favor of it.
I can see him being apathetic towards them: if they get married, that's not my problem, but if they get "conversion therapy," that's also not my problem.
Now, I'm not sure that bigotry is the right word for that. But it is something at least as monstrous.
(Also, as a tangent: let's please not confuse gay marriage with "LGBT" as a whole. Trump has come down firmly on the evangelicals' side about trans people and bathrooms. If we mean "LGB" or "gay marriage", we should say what we mean.)
I believe Trump's administration will focus on pressing trade/economics and foreign policy issues, not bathroom identification issues, which affect 0.3% of the population.
To people disappointed with his victory, the consoling fact should be that Trump is not a religious nut. Yes, he said things about Supreme Court/abortion - as a Republican, you have to, to win the primaries.
Also, while these issues directly affect 0.3% of the population, it is a subset of the 99.7% of the population that's calling for these bills. Perhaps enough of a subset that he'll continue wanting to please the religious supporters.
Compromise.
Does no one remember when Obama was against and would not support gay marriage?
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/09/11623172-the...
Also, and maybe I'm missing something because I'm not personally affected by this, but I think there's quite a difference between telling two adults they can't get married, and telling a child that they're going to be miserable and flawed their whole life if they don't figure out how to be straight, and we'll give you electric shocks to condition you out of being gay.
Or between telling two adults they can't get married, and telling an adult they can't use the bathroom. (Which is the effective result of the bathroom bills: a trans person is legally unwelcome in one restroom and socially unwelcome, to the point of causing legal trouble until a judge looks at their birth certificate, in another.) I would much prefer never to be able to get legally married than never to be able to use a public restroom.
There are plenty of anti-gay-marriage people, even evangelicals, who don't support "conversion therapy" and who don't believe that government should be regulating which bathroom you're using. I would be very willing to call someone liberal on LGBT issues despite picking, say, Obama of 2004 as their running mate.
Also that the media is totally disconnected with the ground reality, I know it is in my country, it is more in the US apparently.
People associate "democracy" with "fairness". With "representation". They associate it with "everybody's voice is heard". When 40+% of the people vote for something, and that something doesn't come through, that's 40+% of the voices being ignored. Don't disregard those simply because they didn't break the 51% barrier.
We can also agree that Trump played the entire electorate. He strategically chose to run as republican, he played the media like puppets to have a free platform to shout from, etc. Those things don't feel fair.
In fact, the entire election really seemed to be a pissing context at times. People also associate democracy with "elevated discourse" and I don't think anyone can claim this happened.
And of course, the US democratic system is really poor compared to other countries (France has one of the best, by comparison: two round voting and none of that electoral college nonsense). But that's another topic.
This brings to mind California and San Francisco's penchant for referendums.
If you can run a Republic with little hatred and division, a nifty opportunity opens up if the nomination process proposes wise and respectable candidates. For example I dislike Obamas ideas but I can respect the guy as someone who's not a crook and has a solid brain on his head and a bit of wisdom. So if the guy who agrees with me wins, I'm chill because we have a comfy echo chamber. If the other guy wins I'm a little bummed but I'm still chill because the have a who's wrong about some things, but wise enough to keep us out of complete disaster.
That's the tragedy of not running Bernie. He's respectable and wise and no crook. I voted for Trump and I'm glad he won, but if Bernie won, I'd be chill enough till next time.
Sort of like mate selection, where kids childishly try to find an appropriate gender photocopy of themselves, whereas once you're over a certain age, its more important to find a mate who's wise. Its OK if my wife likes my hobbies when we were young, but now that we're old its OK if she doesn't, because we respect each other and think each other are wise enough that it'll be OK.
This time around I don't think the right could trust Hillary so it was win at all costs. Meanwhile we "have to" social signal the opposite, but the left pretty much trusts Trump because lets face it, if you think he's an idiot or lunatic, make sure you mention your billion dollar self made net worth first to even qualify... lets face it, a guy who's worked successfully side by side with corporations and banks and unions and politicians for decades resulting in a billion bucks can certainly navigate a giant complex country pretty darn well; he's proven over a couple decades that he's wise enough that its gonna be OK, even if you disagree with everything he believes in and everything he's ever said. So I simply don't think the left wanted it as bad as the right.
It fundamentally comes down to you've got one candidate that wants to do to the entire USA what they did to New York, which is pretty darn cool, and another that wants to do to the entire USA what they did to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Benghazi, ... so obviously one side is a little more motivated than the other.
You are grossly misrepresenting the facts and policies of both candidates. It's hard to take any of the rest of your post seriously when it closes with that paragraph.
Unfortunately, we will probably never know, because he hasn't released his tax returns (which would at least have given us a partial picture).
The Economist tried to compare his financial performance with the S&P 500 [2] and is not impressed: on the longest timeframe (since 1986) he grossly underperforms the S&P 500.
Then there is the question of how he got his money. He seems to have left a long string of investors, banks, suppliers and partners that he essentially conned [3]. In the latter part of his carreer no American bank wanted to do business with him anymore (one of the reasons he switched to licensing his name instead of developing projects himself).
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's partner at Berkshire Hathaway, a staunch republican and a man of brilliant insights who knows a thing or two about business (he made his fortune by evaluating companies and their management) says this about Trump [4]: "Do I consider Donald Trump an ideal decision maker or manager of anything? And the answer is no. The last person almost I'd want as the president of the US".
If you voted for this man because of his business acumen, I'm afraid you are the latest in a long line of people he successfully conned.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/03/31/how-dona...
[2] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21693230-enigma-...
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/2016/08/12/donald-trumps-business-fa...
People associate "democracy" with "fairness". With
"representation". They associate it with "everybody's
voice is heard".
Fairness doesn't mean "I get my way". And unfortunately, it's binary. Your candidate wins or loses. A loss feels like being ignored, not representation of your 49%.
That's a feature of specific choices about the electoral system and system for government. One'such which are not universal among modern democracies and which empirically lead to lower satisfaction with government and less effectively representative government.
Or am I just misunderstanding the US vote completely?
Part of this is due to the fact, I think, that Hillary won the popular vote. In fact, the Dems have won the popular vote 3 elections in a row, and 4 of the last 5. But they only have Obama's 2 terms to show for it.
My guess is that is where some of the "broken democracy" language comes from.
If USA chose the president by popular vote, the campaigns would have been run differently, and some people especially in "sure" states could have had different voting behavior.
I do agree that the US Electoral College system feels obsolete and should be modernized.
It's also respect for the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), democratic processes, democratic institutions, respect for minorities, women, separation of church and state, accepting dissent, and a pluralism of opinions.
Trump is not very good at these.
And the voting itself may become an issue in itself - now with total control by Republicans, they can increase the voter suppression to keep old white men in power for a couple more decades.
The "RIP Democracy" bit is maybe a bit dramatic, but the concern for the already weak democracy is very real.
This election results, the way I see it, is a big middle finger to the political establishment. Again, this has happened in my own country's capital citiy's election, an outsider won majority. If he does anything +ve is not the question, politicians need to stop acting as the elite, that's the underlying problem.
The plurality winner of the popular vote was Hillary Clinton; Trump's victory is directly dependent on the ways America's Presidential election system defies democracy.
...then yes, your democracy might as well be dead.
Maybe they don't think Trump is going to leave office in eight years.
Facts do matter, and I think it's disingenuous to really argue that they don't, even to the American electorate. I think the overriding truth is that politics is about engagement, and it's a battle - just because you have the 'right' ideas doesn't mean you will win. You need to engage, encourage, and motivate people to vote for you - which the Clinton campaign could not do.
Obviously. I think the point being made though is that they seem to matter less than many people thought. Trump ran a campaign that was light on facts, and in many cases used misinformation in lieu of facts. The fact that this is less important than what, if it's true, amounts to a very slight level of corruption in the other candidate (I'm unsure why I should have considered the idea that money given to a charity would get you semi-favorable treatment with regard to an audience as the horrible thing it was presented as) is something I find upsetting.
I understand that people are upset with their governance, but the only thing that comes to mind when I think of this situation is "to cut off your nose to spite your face."
1. money given to her charity
2. charity or "charity"? - valid question, given large percentage of its income is spent on overhead
So? It's not like she's taking it out to buy herself houses and cars? At most, I think you could make a case that she's used the profile of the charity to boost her political career. If that's the case, and the charity gets income that it spends on worthy causes and she gets clout, well that's not the best outcome, but it's sure far from the worst.
> 2. charity or "charity"? - valid question, given large percentage of its income is spent on overhead
I'm fairly sure this has been thoroughly debunked. The amount of income to that charity that goes to overhead is average by all accounts I've seen that are reputable[1]. I've looked, because this has come up before. If you have a source that says otherwise that is not some random blog that references some other random blog[2], I would be happy to read it.
1: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/...
2: I'm way too tired of debunking what people consider a valid source once they've decided that all the mainstream media is biased and untrustworthy. It's hard to tell whether in some cases the errors are due to incompetence, negligence or with purpose. Undoubtedly a useful feature to some.
The soundbite you often hear is about X% spent on salaries and only Y% donated to charity. Which is true, but misleading because the Foundation actually pays people to administer medicine. It's not the type of charity that just hands the money to other groups.
[1]: https://www.clintonfoundation.org/sites/default/files/clinto... [2]: http://www.clintonhealthaccess.org
Facts matter, but emotion matters more. Foe example, some Trump supporters believe that parts of the US are now governed by Sharia law. The fact is wrong, but the underlying fear and racism is real and so much more powerful. The fact doesn't really matter.
Keep thinking that and you'll lose the next election as well. Amongst Trump supporters I know it was about jobs, the economy, the wars and a feeling that politicians no longer represented them.
I have no doubt there are some Trump supporters who are racist and sexist, but that doesn't win you the middle swing states and the rust belt (especially those states that voted Obama but went against Clinton)
Aren't unemployment and the economy doing better now than 8 years ago? My impression is Trump just fueled the emotion of pessimism (things are awful, they were great before), without neither the facts to back it (because he didn't care) nor a plan beyond the old "the more you cut taxes, the better the economy".
Even for the people that think the economy is important enough that the racism and sexism should be ignored, that's still playing to their emotion.
Jobs are also of a lower quality / less secure than in the past.
I think he probably will win a second term, if he wants to.
Until now I thought that wasn't a bad strategy against Trump as he had said and done so many repulsive things far far beyond what I would of thought the voting population would of tolerated.
For example, "grabbing women by the p*y" I would of thought would have alienated the entire female voting population.
For some reason, some women voters seemed to of tolerated this. It should of been easy win for Hilary.
This is a false equivalence- Hillary would have to say that she wanted to "walk up to ghaddafi and open-hand grab his testicles" for this to be a proper analogy.
The objectionable thing is that it indicates that Trump has, on multiple occasions, grabbed women's genitalia without their consent, purely because he's a celebrity and nobody stops him.
If Hillary had said that she had gotten Col. Ghaddafi "by the balls", I agree that nobody would have batted an eyelid because everybody would have understood that she was not discussing a situation in which she habitually sexually assaulted men and was able to get away with it because she was the Secretary of State.
Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were indeed critical to the election, though it was by a hair that Trump won.
The liberal vote was not very enthusiastic, whereas Trump pulled in people that were die-hard fans.
I don't believe that. It might be what you saw but that's because the media wouldn't cover anything substantive. She tried; it just got drowned out by all the smears (including those against Trump) and horse-race coverage.
I'm not convinced by this argument.
She definitely attacks Trump. She also calls for:
* investing in infrastructure
* solar energy
* expanding broadband access
* more technical education, with the strong implication that there are other reasonable paths beside the elite four year college path
* moratorium on student debt
* public health funding
I agree that Clinton never made a case for electing her other than being there for some reason. In general, the Republicans have the courage to take clear positions no matter right or wrong. Whereas the Democrats and especially Clinton are super wishy-washy.
I agree with you that the Democratic Party is horrible at communicating with voters.
"Obama got 65.9m votes in '12, Romney 60.9m. Clinton has 59.3m, Trump 59.1m. R vote didn't go up; Dem vote went down. 6.6m missing votes."
EDIT:
1. I viewed Sanders support of Clinton as forced/coerced, as in "We let you compete in the Democratic primary, now you owe us". EDIT 2: By agreeing to support Clinton, she adopted some of his left leaning policies (in show only though, such as not supporting fracking or the TPP).
2. Of course I voted down ballot.
EDIT 3: Getting really tired of these HN throttling limits.
But that's not what gets coverage.
This ... the voting public was told over and over what to think, told what was best for us. We decided for ourselves.
I can't help but think of the similarity to the 2012 election where rank-and-file middle-class conservative voters were being asked to support a Republican candidate who built his fortune firing Americans and off-shoring their jobs. They didn't vote for Obama, but they sure didn't vote for Romney either.
OTOH Hillary rallies were 90% Trump bashing distributed among different groups. - now all women!! - now all hispanics! - now [insert group name here]
You can't compare how both candidates ran their campaigns and it's hard to argue that HRC main campaign points were: 1. I'm a woman. 2. I'm not Trump.
I also believe that the Dems suppressed Bernie in order to have Hillary as their nominee. I don't think Trump had a chance against Bernie. I am hopeful that this will be a blow to the 2 party system where we're forced to vote for lesser evil.
But what I feel is problematic is that Trump was painted as some kind of Hitler, which is ludicrous if you spent a few hours watching some of his rallies. He says things he shouldn't say, and some might say he's an a-hole, but he certainly doesn't come across as a Hitler, a fascist or a Nazi.
Why is it so problematic for everyone? It increases the likelihood of violence, not just against Trump and his family, but against everyone showing public support for him.
In some way not only the people engaging in violence are to blame, but also the media and the campaigns, because when you somehow convince a large chunk of the population that a candidate is literally like Hitler then many will use violence believing it's justified in order to prevent a new Holocaust.
Also the Hitler comparison is used today too often. I believe we currently have 4 Hitlers according to the political establishment: Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Duterte
I voted for Obama in previous elections. But I also remember how he'd said denigrating things about people who "cling to guns or religion." I suspect people voted for Trump because they thought he didn't put on one face for one public and put on another one for a different public. (Which I doubt is the reality.)
Our media "elites" aren't elites anymore, and they're very out of touch with walk of life lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Denigration and painting with a broad brush are now accepted as the "reality" of politics, the news media, and social media. The "savvy" line to to accept and skirt such things. This is done by both the right and the left.
I believe we currently have 4 Hitlers according to the political establishment: Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Duterte
Fox News made various comparisons of Obama to Hitler.
In a book from the 90's, Eric Drexler proposed that a networked world would save society and make it easier to disseminate the truth. In 2016, one finds that instead the internet has given the loudest voices to the coarsest, most hateful, and stupidest among us. (And by this, I don't mean Trump, but rather online activists on both the right and left.)
But I'm a more of an optimist regarding the Internet and the availability of platforms to share information and express views.
While it is certainly true that some of the loudest voices are indeed the most hateful (Comments on HRC's and DJT's Twitter posts were unbelievable vicious) I also see that there is organically dissent organising on all kinds of issues which we didn't have to such a degree in the pre Internet era.
Of course dissenters also existed before the Internet, but it was much harder to reach an audience. And not all dissent is just hateful and stupid, a lot is legitimate.
But what I feel is problematic is that Trump was painted as some kind of Hitler, which is ludicrous if you spent a few hours watching some of his rallies.
The thing about Trump is that he's better classified as a "proto-" or "quasi-fascist", rather than anything of the old school, early 20th-century sort. For exactly the reasons you describe -- Middle America in 2016 doesn't particularly have an appetite for jackboots or Nuremberg-style rallies, and most likely never will.
But blatant anti-intellectualism, incessant emotionalism, button-pushing, and finger-pointing, combined with a healthy dose of naked bigotry and not-so-subtly implied threats of violence? "You betcha". Those are the seeds of fascist and authoritarian thinking. And they are at the very heart and core of what Trump and his people are about.
This was all manufactured by the DNC and it didn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if they're currently planning ways to disrupt Trumps inauguration or other events during the next 4 years to see if he snaps and they can use that as ammo for the next election.
At the end of the day it's politics and playing dirty is expected but now that one side has been exposed it's hard to brush it off thinking everybody does it.
I imagine how many people in the US are now fearing for their lives because the DNC made them believe that Trump will probably build forced labour camps. And how many of them are not just frightened but even read to use violence.
When I check my Facebook newsfeed it's full of posts from friends who seem to be very afraid about what has happened.
If something terrible happens then it might be that the DNC has created the illusion which justified the violence.
It's undoubtably true now that there was a very real populist anger towards the existing political order, and as a corollary, the political and economic elites. Instead of harnessing that energy and attempting to create a movement (see: Sanders, Bernie), the Democratic party anointed a candidate who is the definition of establishment.
The results are showing that Hillary lost, at least in large part, due to lower voter turnout, especially among liberal-leaning populations. With all else equal, Podesta, DWS, Neera Tanden, and the rest of the DNC cutup squad ignored the people and ran on the "man, Dangerous Donald, obviously you're not gonna vote for him!" platform. That, and shaming Bernie/Stein supporters about their support for a candidate who can't win - rather than explaining how Clinton's policies would be good. Well, the Democrats and 'moderates' didn't vote for Trump, but they sure didn't have a reason to vote for Clinton either.