Well, now along with turkey, many people are having a side dish of crow. What many of us thought was a cross between a horror movie and a joke has come to pass. One of the most venal, corrupt, dictatorial public figures in our country has conned a large number of people into voting him into the presidency. Notice that I say a large number, not a majority, because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote while Donald Trump won the Electoral College. It’s nice to win the popular, but the E.C. is a must. But while Trump won fair and square, he did not win a mandate. So if he tries to govern like he won a mandate, he is going to have problems.

We have never seen anything like this before. All other presidents in modern times have been very conscious and aware of optics and potential conflicts of interest, and dealt with them accordingly. There has never before been a need to make laws to rein presidents in in many ways. For example, his business conflicts. With a Nixonian flourish, Trump declares that a president cannot have conflicts of interest. He is stunning in his arrogance, and it’s hard to believe that this is what some of my friends and many others wanted. The president is a public employee. If he conducts private business on public time, he is ripping us off. And, who knows, maybe Trump is correct in saying that he isn’t doing anything illegal. It could be that, post-Trump, some law or laws might be passed to further restrict a president’s private dealings, as happened with the nepotism law passed after JFK named his brother Bobby as attorney general. But it is disgusting and infuriating. Imagine, a man takes the world’s top job and uses it to enrich himself. And his supporters are the ones who were shouting “lock her up” in reference to Hillary. The words “hypocrisy” and “colossal nerve” come to mind.

But getting back to the title of my blog. Joe Klein, in a recent article, said that Democrats were too focused on minority group identity politics at the expense of the vast white economic dislocation. As Klein stated, imagine how poor Appalachian whites might have felt hearing Black Lives Matter college students talk about white privilege. The Republicans are accused frequently of being exclusive, but the Democrats are also, in their own way. By pandering to BLM, LGBTQ activists, and mothers of black men shot by police, they are, in effect, shutting out heterosexual white men, and shaming them for being born Caucasian, as though they won the racial lottery and they should have nothing more to complain about. Bernie Sanders certainly carried an economic message, but it was too far to the left for many rural whites, and Bernie’s most attractive promises were pie-in-the-sky unrealistic.

With the wisdom that comes from hindsight, it seems that neither Hillary nor Bernie was a winning candidate. The country wasn’t ready for a woman president, and it was all too easy for Trump and Bernie to harness men and women’s latent misogyny against her. Can you imagine crowds shouting “lock him up”? I can’t. That level of disrespect can only be shown to a woman. Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg, either one of them might have been able to trump Trump. So if we had a male candidate who was able to project himself as a centrist populist, we might have had a chance. I personally don’t think O’Malley was too bad. I don’t really know why he didn’t catch on.

Another unfortunate fact of life for us Democrats is the Electoral College. It has outlived its usefulness, but I don’t believe the smaller states will ever allow it to be abolished. That’s why Hillary can win the popular vote in the cities where many people are well-educated and many minority groups reside, but due to the College, the votes of swing-state rural white voters much fewer in numbers can win the election. This is a fact, not something that can be wished away. So we have to work with it. No women yet, no socialists, no promoters of college-educated black activists, none of that. We have to be able to pass the smell test of these conservative white voters. So, in my opinion, we have to reach out to the disaffected, jobless Caucasian voters that Trump was able to successfully win over with his demagogue/strongman/racist/misogynist/populist message. Times have changed since the country elected Barack Obama. The Democrats need to cut down on the minority group-focused identity politics and reach out to the swing state white voters with a strong, centrist, populist economic message. Yes, there were many unfortunates who voted for Trump because of his misogyny and racist leanings, but there were many more who voted for him in spite of them. If we had a decent, morally upright person who was able to carry Trump’s message without the baggage, we might have won.

My friend and comrade-at-arms in the T&G blogosphere, Carlo, suggested in a recent blog that secession might be a solution to our intractable divisions. I agree. The only problem is that such a move is enormously complicated and controversial, and would probably not happen. So we are left with, essentially, two countries within one. The United States of America. It is a wonderful, aspirational five words, and throughout most of our history since the Civil War, it was more or less true. Now it is demonstrably false.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. So you would think, logically, that she won the election. No. Because we live in a republic, not a straight democracy. We have electors, who do what their title suggests: they elect. Our votes only offer guidance to the electors. That is why we have cities and states where Hillary won overwhelmingly, but the electors are chosen by state, not by population. Each state is allowed a minimum of three electors. However, population is factored in because the number of electors is affected by the number of congressional representatives, who are chosen based on population. So it isn’t as bad as having no relation to population, but it is bad enough because there is not enough electors to represent actual population. So you can have large cities who voted for Hillary overwhelmingly, while you have rural voters who voted for Trump overwhelmingly. The number of electors per state is based more on what each state is allowed than on population.

I can only imagine if the reverse happened and Trump won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. Now I admit the opposition to Trump was none too happy, and there were protests, some of which got out of hand. But I posit that these events pale compared to what would be unleashed if Trump lost the electoral vote. Trump would be red-faced, in full cry, shouting about how the election was rigged against him. His supporters, many of whom are gun owners, would have gone wild. It would have been a horrifying scenario. But Hillary, true to form, was gracious in defeat, never for a moment suggesting that the election was rigged. So, you see, the tone is set on the top.

Which brings me back to my blog’s title. I live in a “blue” state, in which all the electors went to Hillary. Regardless of that, however, in this blue state there are many “red” people. They seem to be just as red as any red from anywhere else in the country. I am on Facebook, and due to the nature of Facebook, I have reconnected with many of my old classmates, some of whom I knew since I was six years old. I lost touch with most of them after high school, so there were many years in which things happened in our lives and shaped us as people. Now that we know each other as older adults, some of my erstwhile schoolmates bear little resemblance to the people I knew and respected in my youth. I am telling you, it is stunning. There is a man I knew from town, who sported long blond hair, and along with his inner circle, sold drugs from the center of town. He and his friends were always out front and visible. Always being harassed by the cops. Really cutting-edge cool. They were playing a real game, which could have resulted in prison time for them. They were arrested on occasion, but usually it was their customers. I remember I was in the Rexall drug store parking lot where a transaction had just taken place. The buyer left the lot and was immediately pulled over by the police. The blond man said: “He didn’t even make it out of the lot.” Now this man is a right winger of the worst kind. He posts on Facebook the most disgusting, racist, conspiratorial junk. It’s cognitive dissonance. It’s so hard for me to reconcile who he was to who he is. He is only one of many. Hey guy, I never knew ya. Thought I did though. See, me, I never changed. Apart from some hard, experience-based lessons, I am the same old guy I was in high school. Haven’t changed a bit. What happened to them?

In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what happened to them. We are oil and water. They despise my point of view just as much as I despise theirs. I have cut ties with a few of them that weren’t very strong to begin with. The others, I just tolerate and remember that, apart from their politics, they still have many good qualities. The election was won due to votes from people, many from rural areas, who live in swing states. People who I, and my friends and comrades-in-arms, have nothing in common with. Nothing. They might as well be from another planet. We don’t see the same things in front of us. We don’t believe the same truths, or disbelieve the same lies. As I said before, secession is extremely unlikely to happen. The only thing that could happen, aside from waiting for the older white conservatives to die off, is that one side of the divide would have to be discredited completely. Like the way an alcoholic has to hit bottom before he is ready for help, one side of our divide has to go all the way down. I can’t believe, in spite of the results of this election, that the side that practices what they preach, doesn’t sign off on lies or fantasies, believes in our country, supports our country over partisan concerns, the side that is interested in preserving our species in this era of global warming, I can’t believe that that side, my side, is going to lose. People make mistakes, but most people are well-intentioned. They don’t want to harm others. The alternative, my side going down, will mean the end of civil society, and ultimately, the end of our sorry reign over the earth. It won’t happen in my lifetime, but if the people- and planet-affirming side is defeated, it will prove that our species may have the power of reason, but we as a whole are as dumb as a bunch of rocks and we as a whole deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth. Bye-bye.

Well, it has happened. There were people who predicted this, like Professor Allen Lichtman of American University who hasn’t been wrong in 30 years. Speaking for myself, I didn’t believe the least qualified person ever to run for president would beat the most qualified person ever to run for president. It has taken pretty much all week for me to come to terms with it in my head. Now I’m okay. It was simply a matter of changing my state of mind from victor to underdog fighter. And fight we will. If I lived near an anti-Trump demonstration, I would put on my motorcycle face mask and jump right in. But I’m not traveling to Boston for it.

There is so much to think about, I would probably get carpal tunnel from trying to type it all down. I know that Jane Sanders has claimed that Bernie would have won if he was the Democratic nominee. Maybe, but I doubt it. Bernie was too old and too far to the left. Instead of Trump calling Hillary “crooked”, he would have been calling Bernie “comrade”. Sanders’ trips to the U.S.S.R. and Nicaragua, and his many pro-Socialism speeches would have been featured front and center. Not only that, but Michael Bloomberg was saying that he would jump in the race if Bernie won the nomination. So it’s easy to say “I told you so”, but I don’t buy it.

Having said that, however, this was an election season like no other that I have lived through in my baby boomer lifetime. A man whose lies dropped down on us like raindrops in a rainstorm, a profane, indecent, immoral con man who is so tight-fisted and lacking in basic human decency that he stiffed small business contractors who did work for him. That is our president-elect. And for all his talk about “crooked Hillary”, he is going to enter office with dozens of lawsuits pending against him. See, Donald Trump is a master of projection. Whatever he himself is guilty of, he will accuse his adversaries of the same exact thing. Like the schoolyard game “I know you are, but what am I”. The fact that a man like that would even have a chance bespeaks of the uniqueness of our time. And a man old enough to be a great-grandfather who was a self-identified socialist had a yuuuge following. Both Sanders and Trump are New Yorkers. Their brashness and ballsy attitude attest to that, and it helped them get out there and get attention. It really, in the end, didn’t matter that Hillary Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate ever. Like I said in a previous blog, this was a change election. And Hillary was all about the past. So her experience really was more of a liability than an asset.

And, for all Trump’s talk of the election being rigged, he was actually right about that. Only it was rigged in his favor. Julian Assange, the Russians, the FBI and James Comey all helped Trump win the election. He might have won anyway, but then again maybe not. And you have so many, I believe, gullible people, all too ready to believe the smears and character assassinations directed toward the Clintons for 30 years. Like Winston Churchill famously stated, the best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

So, to sum it up, we had a Republican recession, we had a Democratic recovery, and the voters in their collective wisdom gave the Republicans another bite at the apple. Nice going. The Democrats are too decent to pull the stunts obstructing Trump that were done to Obama, so anything that goes wrong is on Trump. And on his voters.

Okay, as things stand now, the day before the presidential election, things are going along pretty much as I thought they would, except for the October and November surprises, courtesy of James Comey, the FBI director. First, eleven days out, he stopped Hillary Clinton’s momentum by announcing that there might be new emails that may warrant prosecution. Then, nine days later, he reversed himself. However, the momentum has been stopped and there isn’t time left to re-ignite it. Not to mention that, for the first time ever, there has been widespread early voting, encompassing various stages between and before the “surprises”. But it now looks like Hillary is going to win, albeit with maybe less of a coattail effect than she might have had before the first “surprise”. And let us not forget the July surprise, when Comey held a press conference exonerating Clinton, but at the same time labeling her “extremely careless” in her handling of the emails. So, like I said, I thought that Hillary would prevail all along, and she more than likely will.

Having the executive office is a big deal. But there are two other branches of government that have a similarly big deal effect on anything the president wants to do. Of any consequence, anyway. President Obama pushed his executive authority pretty hard toward the end of his presidency, after he had finally got the message that the Republicans would be against him no matter what he did or didn’t do. Which, of course, they are, have been, and will be. And the same thing will be attempted on President Clinton. She has the advantage of being Caucasian, but that is pretty much cancelled out by the fact that she has been the right’s bete noir for many years. They will attempt to strangle her administration as they did with Obama’s. The advantage that Hillary has is that she knows this right from the get-go. She is not going to waste two-thirds of her presidency in a fruitless attempt to find common ground with an implacable enemy. And she is tough. Obama comes off a lot like a college professor, coolly intellectual and unemotional. Obama’s definition of being in a rage is to call something or somebody “unacceptable”. And frequently, even his most pointed barbs are delivered with an indulgent grin, as if to say “this is so absurd it’s funny” not “this is so absurd, I’m livid with rage”.

And Hillary has her allies, too. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are pretty powerful surrogates, although they could cause her trouble on her left flank. They could help her achieve at least some of her objectives. The Repubs want to stay the Supreme Court nominations until they have a Republican president. That might be quite a long time. Their actions are making it less likely that we will ever have another Repub prez. They were refusing to confirm lower court appointees as well, until the Democrats used the “nuclear” option of allowing a simple majority to override a filibuster of the appointment. I think it’s about time that the Democrats raised the stakes just a bit, by blasting the filibuster option to dust, disallowing it for Supreme Court nominations as well. The R’s have abused their right to filibuster. They need to lose that right. I am willing to take a chance on the same thing happening to the Democrats under a republican Administration.

There is going to have to be a reckoning with Trump’s supporters, as they are not simply going to disappear after he loses the election. A lot of their grievances are real and justified, but they are being harnessed by a demagogue. If Hillary can help the white disadvantaged who have lost their union manufacturing jobs and are struggling with depression and addiction, she might just earn their support. She needs to try, anyway. She will be blocked every step of the way by the republican conservatives in Congress, but, as even Donald Trump admitted in the last debate, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a fighter.