Former California GOP officials call on state Republicans to renounce
Trump's rhetoric and 'nationalism metastasizing in the party'
Nationalism is a fundamental aspect of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln ran on a platform of keeping the United States of America ... United!
Five former political directors of the California Republican Party have
called on state GOP leadership to renounce nationalist speech used by President
Trump as well as candidates who embrace “messages of hatred, division and
rhetoric that divides us by race.”
Where they hell where these other directors five years ago? Ten years ago?
A letter sent Friday to the party’s board of directors blamed Trump for
the GOP’s stinging losses on election day in California. It said the California
GOP must return to its conservative roots to have any hope of reviving the
Republican Party in the state.
Trump is the most conservative in action, demonstrating an astonishing pragmatism that works in conjuction with it. The people who scream and yell about dumping Trump are not even conservative!
“This election proved that choosing Nationalism over Conservatism is a
losing proposition. President Trump’s nationalist rhetoric has alienated far
more than the diverse electorate that turned out to oppose him on election
night — Republicans abandoned Republicans in historic numbers as well,” the
letter said. “It is our hope that you will publicly renounce the nationalism
metastasizing in the party, advance the cause of conservatism and return the
greatness to our Grand Old Party.”
The letter was signed by Mike Madrid, Debbie McCall, Jimmy Camp, Jarryd
Gonzales and Matt Robbins, all of whom served stints as party political
director since the late 1990s.
These old hag RINOs are useless. Who are these people, again?
A spokesman for the California Republican Party on Saturday declined to
comment on the letter.
There is really nothing to talk about at this point. Thjey want to get rid of Trump, but Trump is the only Presidential candidate who has front-lined the illegal immigration issue that is overrunning the country. The crass trop bras who have been running the California Republican Party want to make excuses and embrace controlled failure, nothing more.
They want to keep talking about demographics, when they should get off their asses and start reaching out to these very demographic groups which need to be swayed.
I don't know ... how about treating people like ... respectable individuals? That has often worked in the past. Why not pick up the pace? Let's reach out and make our case, rather than shrinking back and doing nothing? Mark Meuser's idea makes sense: let's reach out to voters, not to donors. What's the point of bringing in big money when we are not connecting with what voters care about?
Big donors want to lose gracefully so that they can sit at the "kool kids' table."
Not buying it. We need more Trump and better money. Ballot harvesting is the way to go, and all other legal avenues available to us in the state party.
Democrats won big because they spent big. They won big because they harvested votes, and they have lots of voter fraud behind them. Democrats win because they fight hard for what they believe.
He was a great spokesman when he served as the House Minority Leader.
As Speaker of the House, he had more slips and fails than successes.
He spent too much time being Barack Obama's friend.
He refused to double-down and fight. When Congress went into shut-down mode, he was not working hard enough to ensure that the Democrats would do what they needed to do. He has a number of weak Democrats which he could exploit because of their swing district status.
Yet he refused.
Two months later, Boehner would announce to the public on Jay Leno's program that the shut-down was our fault, and that he should not have done it.
Worse than that, he was a cheerleader for amnesty, or as he blithely liked to call it, "immigration reform".
Ugh!
The American people of all backgrounds do not want amnesty. They want the rule of law enforced. Why is this a matter that is so confusing and difficult for lawmakers to understand?
So, when I heard the news that Boehner was stepping down following Mark Meadows (R-NC) discharge petition, I was all kinds of happy!
And now, Boehner has had to adjust to life outside of the Beltway.
Politico has some interesting reporting, which can be quite informative.
What has Boehner since he was bounced out of office?
NAPLES, Fla. — John Boehner has been doing a “lot of
laundry” since he left Congress. He’s been ironing a lot, too, and vacuuming
his floors. Plenty of time to do all kinds of little things, he says.
This is one fascinating aspect of the American system. No political figure can claim their royalty status forever. Once they walk out of Congress (or our forced out or thrown out!), it's over.
They got back to civilian life and relative obscurity. Such was the genius of the Framers and our Constitutional Framework. No one becomes a demi-god or a civilian king.
“My apartment looks like it’s brand new,” he told POLITICO
here in his first interview since he departed Congress.
This is life after power.
This statement is misleading. True power rests with the individual citizen, and it should not rest with the federal or state governments. They are not serve as our servants, not our masters.
Boehner first won public office in 1981, when he was elected
Union Township trustee in West Chester, Ohio. He was quickly elected to a seat
in the Statehouse in Columbus, and six years later left for Washington, where
he served until the end of October. Then, after 34 years, it all vanished. The
staff. The massive office. The rigid schedule.
John Boehner has a new reality. He’s now just John Boehner.
Let us never forget that Politico is left-leaning, and they treat political power as an ultimate.
“It’s weird,” Boehner said, standing in the Naples Beach
Hotel. Minutes later, he would give his first speech as a private citizen in
three decades.
“No job, no office, hardly any staff,” Boehner said of life
these days. “I’m used to going all the time. Then you’re not going all the
time.”
That sounds like a dream for lots of people. They wish that they could retire after an incredible career of any kind. How much does Boehner get because of his pension as a Congressman and then Speaker of the House?
“It’s,” Boehner said with a pause, “different.”
The man who bounced around the country in motorcades
supported by a staff of dozens is suddenly facing a strange new reality.
“I haven’t lived anywhere in 20 years except in hotel
rooms,” Boehner said in his first speech since resigning from Congress, an
upbeat, hourlong talk to the Forum Club of Southwest Florida. “You spend 200
nights a year traveling around the country, I don’t know, where do you live? I
haven’t driven a car for nine years. I did a couple of weeks ago. I have a
valid driver’s license. I was very careful. But, you know, I need a car. So do
I get a car in Ohio? Do I get a car here? Do I get a car in D.C.? I don’t know.
Much less try to figure out what I’m actually going to do.”
Living in hotel rooms? You mean like the Mexican billionaire and other rich elites? I have worked with and talked with other professionals who spend most of their working lives on the road and in careers. It's not fun, they tell me. They would like to be more stable, in a home location.
It’s quite the transition. Boehner has been a major player
in Washington for more than 20 years, serving as President Barack Obama’s foil
for the past five. But to hear Boehner now, he’s just a man trying to find his
way.
“I honestly can’t wait to see what the next chapter of this
life of mine is going to look like,” Boehner admitted to the audience here.
Who cares?
He’s assembled a small staff to figure it out. Boehner has
hired Squire Patton Boggs’ partner Dave Schnittger, a longtime trusted aide, to
handle news media calls and deal with whatever else comes up. He has another
staffer to look after his political matters, and an aide to keep track of
appointments and other issues. Boehner has millions of dollars in campaign cash
to deal with, bills to pay and Republican organizations salivating for his
support. Robert Barnett, the D.C. power lawyer, will handle the possible book
deal. And Boehner is beginning, quite slowly, to sift through offers to give
paid speeches.
Oh, poor baby does not know what to do with himself and his life? He gets to give speeches, and get paid big money to give them. Wow, it's a hard-knock life, isn't it! (*single tear*)
Boehner is splitting his time between his condominium in
nearby Marco Island, Florida, his home in the Cincinnati area and Washington.
On a recent afternoon, he was spotted shopping at the Harris Teeter in Navy
Yard in D.C., pushing his own cart as he grabbed groceries.
Well, that's a welcome sight. I wonder ... how do Congressmen feed themselves when they are in Washington?
Not everything has changed, however. On Friday, with the
temperature reaching 90 degrees, Boehner wore a dark blue suit and light blue
tie — his preferred Capitol couture — and swirled a glass of red wine at a
reception before a noon lunch. Capitol Police officers still trail Boehner, but
the detail is shrinking. Instead of a crew of five or more police officers,
just a couple stood by the former speaker as he shook hands and chatted at a
hotel here alongside a browning golf course.
Fair enough. There is good reason to maintain detail of a certain kind around former lawmakers who held such pre-eminence as Boehner.
Asked in the interview with Politico whether he is keeping
an eye on Congress, Boehner said initially said “no” before reversing himself:
“Well, kind of, but you know.” He hasn’t gotten accustomed to the fact that
he’s a private citizen. He still refers to Republican members of Congress as
his “colleagues,” and the speakership as “my job.”
"Private citizen" is the highest calling in the land. No one should reject that title.
But he is certainly entering a new phase, and the speech
here was the first of many in the coming years that will make the millionaire
Boehner even wealthier.
"Millionaire Boehner" -- and how did he get so wealthy?
His hourlong talk — a roughly 15-minute speech and 40-minute
Q&A — was part variety show and part history lesson, with a dash of
machismo. Since Boehner left Washington, he’s almost completely dropped his
guard. He said it “saddens” him he was never able to complete a comprehensive
reform of the nation’s immigration laws “because the country needs it.” That
comment would’ve ignited fury just months ago.
ARGH! This arrogance shows everything that is wrong with Washington. He did not learn the lesson. He was so tone-deaf to the what the country needed, and what the voters really wanted. They wanted enforcement, not reform. They wanted a big beautiful wall, not
He also veered into the personal. He joked to the crowd of
hundreds here that his wife recently told friends that she’s been able to stay
married to him for 42 years because “he’s only been around 10” years.
The rest of us in Washington and around the country could not stand him.
Mike Pence (now the Vice President) waned to run for minority leader after (now disgraced) Dennis Hastert stepped down. What would have happened if the roles had been reversed?
He called the House Republican Conference a “band of
renegades,” but said newly elected Speaker Paul Ryan has a “real opportunity”
to lead them. As for Boehner, he’s the “same jackass that walked into
[Congress] 25 years ago,” he said.
The arrogance is just too hard to ignore, Once again, everything that is wrong with Washington, you can find this abrupt and arrogant attitude. How much more wine does he plan on drinking in this interview, I wonder?
Speaker Paul Ryan has endured similar blow-back to what Boehner endured. Apparently, the leadership in the House tightened up the rules in order to prevent another discharge petition from emerging.
Boehner also offered the crowd some behind-the-scenes
glimpses of his past life. When members of Congress came to him to ask for
favors, Boehner said he would “lean back and take a puff of my cigarette and
say, ‘That’s just not going to happen.’”
“At the end of the day, when you’re open and honest with
people, at the end of the day they respect you far more,” Boehner said.
This statement is the biggest crock of them all. This man was routinely undermining the grassroots. He was dead-set on getting amnesty of some kind passed.
Notice in this video how he mocked his conservative peers in the House of Representatives, who refused to go along with immigration "reform":
I think this was the last straw for many Republicans, not just in the House Conference, but across the country. The men and women elected to the House Majority were not sent there to open up the nation's orders, but to protect American interests.
Boehner seemed so intent on ignoring that.
Early signs are that Boehner won’t be the political animal
in retirement that some expected. In the past, Boehner took credit for urging
Jeb Bush to run for president. But asked now, he seemed to have no use for the
2016 contest, refusing to weigh in on the GOP field. He said he watched the
recent debate for “as long as I could.”
Well, that says it all, doesn't it. Boehner may have left Washington Establishment, but Washington Establishment did not leave him. That's more of the problem. There really is something in the water in that town. Draining the swamp will prove very difficult, especially for those
Boehner even admitted he previously misled reporters when he
said he watched the presidential debates in 2012. What he really wanted to say:
“I listen to that all day long, why would I want to listen to it all night
long?”
In his most direct terms so far, Boehner spoke of the group
of lawmakers that pushed him out of the speakership. He said during the speech
that he fought with them over tactics, not strategy. Many of his GOP colleagues
are perfectionists in a system of government that doesn’t allow for perfection,
Boehner said.
Tactics and strategy are the same thing! The fact that the former Speaker cannot tell the difference is a big part of the problem. Strategy and tactics are the same, and they need to be coordinated toward doing what is best for the country!
The governing class routinely resists a fight. They have more of an appetite for passing legislation rather than doing the best to uphold the rule of law. On some issues, there is no room for compromise. None. The federal government continues to spend money that the country simply does not have. Entitlement reform is a must. Enforcement of our borders is a priority, and there should be no deal-making in the process to make it happen.
“Nothing was good enough,” Boehner said, in a kind of
reflective comment he never would’ve made as speaker. “When we protected 99
percent of the American people from an increase in taxes, most of my
Republicans colleagues voted no. When we did the big money-saving bill, $2
trillion in 2011, half of my Republican colleagues voted no. Even when we passed
these changes to Medicare earlier this year and solved the payment system for
how we pay doctors for Medicare patients, which has been a problem for 15
years, and no one could solve it, [Nancy] Pelosi and I got it solved, and paid
for it from these long-term changes to Medicare.
How about massive entitlement reforms altogether? Where was he to try to force another repeal of Obamacare? Why won't Republicans collude better with the grassroots to put pressure on President Obama and the left-wing juggernaut of anti-American folly?
“And yet 40-something of my colleagues voted no, while
almost everyone else in Congress voted yes,” he continued. “Why? Because it
wasn’t good enough.”
The "colleagues" whom he despised were respecting the will of the voters and the grassroots conservative who brought Congress back into Republican hands. No one should blame them for holding Congress in light esteem following decades of taxation and spending with no long-term focus on making America great again.
“You just can’t do perfection in a system of government like
we have.”
Not necessarily perfection, but a rigid dedication to order. That is what is needed.
Boehner’s critique of congressional paralysis is familiar.
He said voters get information — right or wrong — very quickly, and it pushes
them to extreme poles. He likened the system to a pressure cooker and said,
“Paul Ryan has got to succeed in a very difficult environment.”
Congressional paralysis will continue to be the norm until Congress repeals Obamacare, gets rid of the amnesty bitter-clingers, and starts getting rid of its inordinate power acquired over decades of citizen inaction.
“I got to the point when I [had] to sneak into the White
House to see the president,” Boehner said. “Because if I went to the White
House to see the president, the right would get all worked up, wondering what I
was up to. The left gets all worked up, wondering what the president is up to.
‘What are these two going to do now?’”
Those reactions are healthy. There is nothing wrong with political distrust. Nothing at all
Boehner did say his decision to leave Congress was tied to
the Pope Francis’ late September visit. He recalled one moment, after a private
meeting, when the pope asked for a glass of water. Boehner thought the pontiff
was readying to baptize his young grandson. Instead, he just took a sip.
“It was the greatest head fake in history,” Boehner said.
What does a pope drinking water have to do with anything? With everything? John Boehner was forced out because of Meadow's discharge petition, which in turn was a result of leadership's brazen attempt to kick him off a committee chairmanship.
Boehner wanted an establishment brand of politics, the same ol' status uo, passing measures paven. WRONG.
Bringing the pope to the Capitol was the capstone of his
career, but Boehner’s legacy will be inextricably tied to another man: Obama.
Yes, and for that reason, too, he was pushed out. Obama even featured the former speaker as a friend of his in his private viewing room. All of this is wrong. Just plain wrong.
Boehner criticized Obama’s policies at length, from how the
president handled the 2009 stimulus, to the health care bill to the president’s
Middle East strategy. Two weeks before he resigned, Boehner said he had sharp
words for Obama. As Boehner was trying to craft a budget deal, he said he told
the president that he “didn’t call to listen to you lecture me.”
But after he announced his resignation, Boehner said he was
on the phone with Obama, and the president said, “Man, I’m going to miss you.”
“Yes you are, Mr. President,” Boehner recalled telling
Obama.
Now I know that I am going to be sick!
Politico reports some good stories, even though the online news source leans left most of the time.
I have learned some incredible background on political movements afflicting the Left, even though Politico is more interested in a "fair and balanced" approach, which means left of center.
The online journal wants to give this impression
It published a trashy smear piece against Dr. Ben Carson, for example, which it had to retract and change the title on.
The media is in dire straights right now, especially after the repeated exposure that they are just shills for the Democratic Party and the regressive left.
But this story from Politico was pure political god!
A lifelong progressive was so disgusted with her party, she voted for
Trump. Will Democrats care enough to win her back?
Wow!
Can you imagine a hard-core progressive Democrat who was so disgusted with her party ... that she voted for the Republican?
The Republican she voted for--Donald Trump--was the most outsider of outsider candidates. There were hard-core, long-time Republicans who had refused to vote for Trump, and there remained holdouts all the way to Election Day who refused to vote for him.
I have more respect for this defiant progressive than the cry-baby conservatives who put their pride in their own purity ahead of the better qualified candidate and the long-term well-being of this country.
Three weeks before Election Day, as she sat at her kitchen table to fill
out her ballot, Kim McKinney Cohen was angry and fed up. The Democratic Party,
to which she had been unswervingly loyal for four decades, had sabotaged her
chosen candidate, Bernie Sanders, and then lectured her about the need to vote
for a woman whose hawkishness and arrogance rubbed her the wrong way. When
Hillary Clinton said dismissively supporters of Donald Trump were “a basket of
deplorables,” Cohen had heard enough.
She became a Deplorable, too!
She was fed up with the arrogance of the Democratic political elite which had sold her short and treated her with complete disdain.
It's amazing to me that Politico points out without hesitation that the DNC D-C'd Bernie Sanders with cheating, lying, background nonsense and shenanigans with the media. I can't imagine how I would feel if the RNC had actively collaborated with Jeb Bush or even Donald Trump to snuff out Scott Walker or Ted Cruz, of those candidates had colluded with leadership to throw the election against Trump and for Hilllary.
I would be beyond livid. I don't think I would stay a Republican any longer!
“Well, then,” she sighed, "I guess I'm a deplorable.”
She took a black ink pen and carefully shaded in the rectangle next to
the name Donald J. Trump.
WOW! Just plain WOW!
With that she had defied every vote she had made since 1974. She defied
a president she had supported twice, officials of a party to which she had
devoted countless hours of volunteer labor and her fellow progressives, even
her husband, who accused her of aiding and abetting a racist. She ignored her
own belief that Trump was a “buffoon” and a “showman.” She never wore a “Make
America Great Again” hat or a “Women for Trump” button or carried a Trump sign,
because she never believed in anything he stood for. But hers wasn't a vote in
favor of someone; it was a vote against.
That's OK. Lots of people voted for Trump for one simple reason: they loathed Crooked Hillary:
A longtime home health care aide, Cohen has many characteristics of a
voter the Democratic Party typically relies on winning: African-American,
environmentally conscious, pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-gun control. But this
year she checked another box: pro-change. When it came down to it, she was
angrier at her own party's leaders than she was appalled by a man who cozied up
to white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups. She wanted to throw it back in
the face of her party.
The above line is pure libel, but at this point it makes no difference. Politico's pick--Crooked Hillary--crashed and burned in front of everyone for all to see!
Gotta love it!
“It was my primal scream,” Cohen says. “I wasn’t gonna take it
anymore.”
Me too! That's why I supported every outsider candidate I could. Walker, Jindal, Cruz ... and finally TRUMP!
She honestly never imagined Trump would win. And even though she finds
his choices for Cabinet and other top White House jobs “cringe-worthy,” Cohen
doesn't regret her radical act of defiance. She feels that by helping take the
Democrats to rock bottom, they’ve been “given a gift” to rebuild their party.
I believes that Trump would win, that one of the reliably blue states would flip for Trump ... Three of them flipped!
“I wanted it burned down ... so that we could build a new, hopefully
more equitable one that meets the needs of all, not only the super-rich,” she
said.
Euity is based on the rule of law, and freedom of association. I respect Mrs. Cohen's wishes, but not the means which she champions to get there.
Statistically, Cohen’s vote makes her an outlier. She is among the 10
percent of liberals, 8 percent of blacks and 42 percent of women who voted for
Trump, according to the New York Times exit polling data. She’s not a member of
the white working class, some already lukewarm Democrat who hoped Trump would bring
back jobs to the local coal mine or save the air-conditioning plant from moving
to Mexico. In fact, as an older black woman, Cohen belonged to a group that
sided overwhelmingly with Clinton. Most minority protest voters, according to
Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, went for third-party candidates, and they
were young, between the ages of 18 and 29.
Most protest votes went to Jill Stein. But Cohen did not vote for the Green candidate.
One has to wonder why?
“It’s not like there were a ton” of black liberals who voted for Trump,
Belcher said. “But [Cohen] was important because she contributed to Hillary’s
failure.” (In Cohen's case, this contribution may have been mostly symbolic;
her home state of Colorado was considered a swing state, but went for Clinton.)
As Democrats fret over how to woo back the white working class, they’d
also be well served by taking a look at how many true believers like Kim Cohen
they lost, as well, and what it will take to make peace with them.
True believers like Kim Cohen left because their party was not true to them, and has given the party faithful nothing to believe in.
No surprise there, but of course Hillary Clinton and her coven of sycophants will continue to blame everyone and everything else except themselves, including their message, their messaging, and their messanger.
***
The roots of Cohen’s disenchantment with her party go back to the Iraq
War. She was incensed in May 2007 when Democrats caved to GOP demands to
continue funding the war with no deadline to withdraw troops. Cohen, at the
time a precinct captain in Boulder, Colorado, railed against the newly
installed Democratic majority. “By giving in to Bush, the Democratic Party
bosses have demonstrated their disdain for their base,” Cohen, her hair in
dreadlocks, shouted into a microphone. “Their attitude toward us, the voters,
seems to be: They don't have to worry about losing our support because we have
nowhere to go; it's a two-party system.”
Her anger with the Democratic Party mirrors the frustration of the Tea Party movement with the Republicans. They kept promising to cut the spending, to rein in unsustainable debt, yet cycle after cycle Republicans continued to spend and upend the budget in Washington DC.
Notice how the Democratically controlled Congress caved to George W. Bush on the troop surge. It's not just Republican lawmakers who give into the opposition party's demands.
She was mad at Democrats for backing Bush tax cuts and bailing out rich
bankers while struggling people lost their homes. Even her president, whose
historic election she had celebrated eight years ago through tears of joy,
seemed to have grown complacent and cautious. Republicans were still the enemy,
in her mind, but Democrats were betraying their own agenda.
Indeed!
Bernie’s campaign spoke directly to her, perhaps not so surprising for
someone who had supported Dennis Kucinich in 2004 (she was a convention delegate).
Twelve years later, she hopped on the popular socialist’s bandwagon. She gave
his campaign contributions totaling $262, which for her, with a chronically
ill, 41-year-old son living at home, was a hardship. But she believed Sanders
could repair economic inequality, curb corporate greed and weed out special
interests in Washington.
That sounds like an agenda which Donald Trump has pledged to accomplish. Cohen needs to give Trump a chance.
Cohen had never been particularly enamored of Hillary Clinton. She
didn’t like the way Clinton, when her husband first ran for president in 1992
and later, as first lady, handled her adulterous husband’s “bimbo eruptions.”
In fact, her exasperation with the Clintons led her to become a political
activist. After the bombshell news dropped in 1998 that President Bill Clinton
had carried on an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, Cohen
would spend hours glued to TV coverage of the unfolding scandal and ensuing
impeachment proceedings. Her husband finally told her, “ Quit yelling at the TV
and go do something about it!” (She left the house and came home later announcing
she’d enlisted to become a precinct captain.)
So, Bimbo Bubba got Cohen into activism. And the wife cheated the system in order to ensure her nomination--only to lose to Donald Trump in the general. What a heart-ache for a socialist. Democrats, liberals in general need to wake up and realize that their agenda is not in concert with reality. If they really want to end the arbitrary income inequality plaguing our society, then they need to advocate for free markets and free enterprise.
During Clinton’s campaign this year, Cohen was angrily reminded of a
comment from the former first lady in 1996, when she called young black
criminals “super predators.” And then came the midsummer WikiLeaks
revelations—courtesy of the Kremlin—that Democratic National Committee
officials undermined Sanders’ legitimacy as a candidate. They confirmed her
worst suspicions about the party and the woman who had locked up its
nomination. But the final straw was Clinton’s “deplorables” comment at a rally
in September. Hillary had again insulted working-class Americans, Cohen felt.
The thought crossed her mind: Maybe I’ll join them.
More slander. The Kremlin, Putin, Russian operatives did not hack the DNC's server. This is just sad. No wonder Cohen and Co. have given up on Crooked Hillary---she was a complete media meat puppet who did not care about the common man.
Trump does.
“I went all in for Bernie,” she said. “But the DNC burned him, so I
went off the plantation to become a deplorable.”
WOW! Another Black voter who refuses to the Democratic Party as "the plantation." This report gets more and more interesting and invigorating the more that I read it.
Last summer, Bob, 86, wasn’t pleased that Kim’s live-in son, Dale, who
suffers from malignant hypertension, had begun watching Fox News regularly.
(Dale also wound up voting for Trump.) One night before bed he asked his wife,
who shared his aversion to the conservative news network, to put a stop to it.
“I went out there, I said, ‘Dale, Bob says you’re watching right-wing
media.’”
She said Dale shushed her and said, “Come on, sit down.” When Trump
famously asked black voters, “What the hell do you have to lose?” Kim Cohen
thought to herself, “Yeah, what the hell do I have to lose?”
Bob and Kim would argue about Trump, but he never tried to talk her out
of voting for him. (He wasn’t exactly fond of Clinton either; he wrote in
Bernie Sanders’ name on his ballot.) He says he understands how she was “pushed
to the wall by the cynicism” of her party’s establishment and why she views
them as “hypocritical opportunists.”
A proud feminist, Kim Cohen had fought all her life for equal rights
for women. But in the end, she decided, “I need a job more than I need a woman
in the White House.”
Interesting.
Locally, Kim Cohen’s protest vote didn’t change anything. Colorado
voted for Clinton anyway. And this raises the question of how seriously
Democratic Party leaders will take Cohen’s protest vote. They can write her off
as an aberration, some misguided radical; or they can take a hard look at this
African-American committed progressive, the quintessential Democratic base
voter, who couldn’t be swayed to vote for the fuzzy-messaged candidate at the
top of the ticket.
Democratic Party leaders will not take a hard look at themselves. They would have to admit that their party has been overtaken by communist and socialist interests, all of which are violently opposes to the fundamental values of this country. It should therefore come as no surprise that two-thirds of the state legislatures are controlled by Republicans.
The Politico article spells out what Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate:
But simply running a defensive campaign against Trump, rather than
crafting a message with broad appeal to voters anxious about income stagnation,
clearly failed to inspire voters like Cohen, whom the party assumed were in the
bag.
She was running out the clock the same way that Romney had done in 2012. She thought that the Establishment backing and the inevitable trends of modern politics would put her in the White House. The Democrats elected their first minority candidate then President. The next move was to elect the first woman.
But Bernie supporters, including Kim, were not swayed by the gender card. Lots of young voters slammed Hillary Clinton for demeaning their intelligence and expectations.
Doug Hattaway, a Democratic research and communications strategist,
advised Democrats after their disastrous showing in the 2014 midterm elections
that the party needed to shift from what he calls “transactional
messaging”—selling policy prescriptions to specific groups—to “aspirational
communications.”
Donald Trump offered inspirational communications, especially to counter the drudgery and damage caused by eight years of Barack Obama. While the Democratic Party tried to cajole the voting public to believe that all they needed to do was elect Hillary Clinton for a third term of Obama, the rest of the country wanted something better.
More than change, the voters wanted improvement. More than hope, they wanted restoration,
Final Reflection
Hillary Clinton was one of the worst Presidential candidates in modern times.
She lied repeatedly to the public.
She act ed as if she was above the law--frequently. She misused classified information.
Her husband helped run one of the most corrupt faux-charities in the world, and the Clinton Cash Foundation is facing more inquiries. She was arrogant, cold, fake, a female Democratic version of Mitt Romney.
She also spent money in red states where chances were slim and dim at best.
But it was not just Hillary Clinton who hurt Hillary Clinton. The Democratic National Committee, for at least the past four years, was tipping its hand to make sure that Clinton was the Democratic nominee. They invested everything they had to ensure that they elected the first woman President. The identity politics had so blinded and lulled the Democratic Party into hyper-partisan complacency, they never considered that they would lose the very base which they have relied on for the past twenty years. The "white" vote that rejected Romney and stayed home in 2012 came out and voted in large numbers for Donald Trump.
The cheating, lying, collusion, and total fraud exposed by Wikileaks also diminished the standing and integrity of the party in the eyes of the very voters whom the Democratic Party officials depended on.
