Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Not the President we Want, nor the President we Need, but Perhaps the President we Deserve

Let's just get this out of the way right off the bat. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't think he was in any way a good candidate for the Presidency of the United States, nor did I support him in the primaries. I was hoping someone with more gravitas would win. Specifically, I was a Ted Cruz supporter and was rather upset when he lost. Upset enough, in fact, to pick fights with just about anyone who dared gloat over the fact that Cruz lost. Most of this happened in online comment threads, so nothing really came of it except a whole lot of mean words. I suppose I thought it would be cathartic after becoming so emotionally invested in the primaries. I hadn't, apparently, learned my lesson from 2012, where I had become so emotionally invested in the election (to the point where I really did believe that we were utterly screwed and there was no way back after Obama's second election victory.)

Let's get something else out of the way as well. I voted for Donald Trump despite the fact that I live in California. I voted for Donald Trump because, like many, I wanted something different after eight years of liberalism. I didn't even want the eight years of liberalism, truth be told. I voted Republican every election since I turned 18 (except 2004, when I was disgruntled over both candidates. I'm not proud of that, either.) The reason I personally voted for Donald Trump is because, quite frankly, I wasn't going to take another four to eight years of liberal superiority complexes looking down on me and my Conservative friends and family and calling us racists and/or sexists for daring to exist. But I, obviously, wasn't the only one who voted for Trump. Millions of people did. Let's take a look at why that is.

The general consensus among right leaning voters is pretty much what I stated above. People voted for Trump because they were tired of eight years of virtue signalling and condescending reminders of how racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic they were on any given night of the week. There was even a video by a British comedian detailing every single point  in that regard with hilariously crude accuracy. People were browbeaten into silence by the hyper PC attitudes of the left, and so they spoke the only way they could: With their vote. Look up the Bradley Effect and you'll find another example of just this sort of thing happening.

The thing is, guys, we deserve Trump as a candidate. However good or bad he might be as a president, his election is the result of eight years of anger and frustration that I and many others like me were feeling during that time. People don't like being called names. Everyone with half an ounce of common sense knows this. People don't like being lied to. Anyone with half an ounce of common sense knows that as well. Yet the media and the pundits, and Hillary Clinton's ground team seemed not to understand this, even after two straight election cycles where they might have kept the White House, but they lost everything else. We well-read folks like to call that a Phyrric Victory. Looking at it a couple of days later, though, Phyrrus of Epirus likely would call the entire eight year Democrat debacle what it is: a crushing defeat.

People are giving all sorts of reasons that Hillary lost, from blaming James Comey and his second investigation into the emails, to the ever popular "racist/sexist/homophobic" garbage that they resort to when they have nothing else to use, Comey's decision may have had an impact in a couple of states, but no way it had the same amount of impact in all of them. Traditionally blue states like Wisconsin have plenty of reasons not to vote blue after the last eight years, and it's my personal belief that the successes of Scott Walker as governor, not the least of which was fighting off a recall election with more votes than the initial election that got him in, had more of an impact than Comey did.

As for Pennsylvania, that's coal country. I'm willing to bet that Hillary's own words regarding putting coal miners out of a job had more to do with their decision than Comey's emails or any sort of racism or sexism.

Regardless of the outcome, Donald J. Trump is now, as of this writing, choosing his cabinet and preparing for four years of a job that reports say he never expected to actually be hired for. Wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened, though, even in our history. Look at Warren G. Harding, after all.


No comments:

Post a Comment