We were all guilty. Our prejudice said Trump cannot win. We just did not look hard at Hillary. She thought she was winning. She acted like she was winning. She was running a losing campaign and we all got sucked in because we could not believe in Trump.
Who could believe in a guy who objectifies women, alienates Latinos, puts down blacks and lies like a fascist. From day one, we tried to ignore him. He is no politician, he lacked a fund-raising organization, he had no state by state teams of workers, he knew little about domestic policy and less about foreign affairs. He was just a side show. At first.
And he had a stupid slogan. He said that he was going to make America great again. You saw it on signs and hats and bumper stickers everywhere. He kept saying it from the beginning right through to the end of the campaign. He obviously could not come up with a better slogan, so he stuck to it.
Do you remember what Hillary Clinton’s slogan was?
And then she made a mistake: she referred to some of Trump’s supporters as ‘deplorables.’ That was when the pundits became mired in the possibilities. We had seen the bikers, the red necks, the gun crazies and the angry coming to Trump and we saw them as a disorganized rabble. Nobody expects a mob such as that to even find a voting booth.
What we were not willing to see were the holy rollers and social conservatives who were voting for the Anti-Christ because they had nowhere else to go. We were not counting the exurbanite and rural voters. These were the people who were swallowing the garbage about ‘dishonest Hillary.’ Like any good lie, it just had to be said often enough to become a truth. Otherwise sane people were telling us that Hillary Clinton should be locked up. For what? When did the law suddenly forbid using your own choice of e-mail server?
Trump was just being a good con man. It is how he built his wealth. His loud lying, cheating and stealing are simple tools to accomplish his objectives. It will be very interesting to see how these skills serve him in the White House.
But we do not need a tag day for Hillary Clinton. She let us down. She failed to understand the message of Bernie Sanders. She did not understand that it was not enough to appear smarter and cooler in the television debates. She did not understand how to fight a street fighter. Like many of us, she tried to handle him as though he was a politician.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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