Harry Reid wasn’t in a kumbaya frame of mind, calling Trump “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote.”
.. in 2008 not comprehending that many voters viewed him as the escape hatch from Clinton Inc. It never would have occurred to anyone then — even the Clintons — that President Obama would be the one to brush away any aversions and objections, take us by the elbow, and firmly steer us back to Clinton Inc.
.. But Obama lost touch with his revolutionary side and settled comfortably into being an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.
.. He was cozy with Silicon Valley and dismissive of working-class voters anxious about globalization, shrugging that “We’re part of an interconnected global economy now, and there’s no going back from that.”
.. He was dismissive of Bernie Sanders and his voters, treating Sanders as a fairy tale, just as Bill Clinton treated him in 2008 when he was a senator with little record
.. Obama was the ultimate establishmentarian. As he told the Rutgers student paper in May, “We have to make incremental changes where we can, and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary.”
.. Hillary’s campaign message boiled down to “It’s my turn, dammit.”
Absorbing the Impossible
She did not understand why the president discouraged Joe Biden — someone she could have supported — from running.
.. “Hillary was the status quo and one of the most flawed candidates in history,” he said. “This is a complete repudiation of President Obama, the man who pushed Hillary and deemed Trump a clown.”
.. It is unthinkable to imagine the most overtly racist candidate — and head of the offensive birther movement — driving in the limousine to the inauguration with the first African-American president. What would they discuss? How Trump plans to repeal Obamacare? How Trump will appoint Supreme Court justices that will transform America into a drastically more conservative landscape over the next 20 years? How Trump plans to undo the Iran deal? When will Trump begin deporting Hispanics? When will Attorney General Rudy Giuliani pardon Chris Christie and put Hillary in jail?
.. Hillary’s closing line in the campaign was that she was the only thing standing between her and the abyss. But to my conservative family, Hillary was the abyss while Donald was the baseball bat to smash Washington.
.. When Trump beat 16 seasoned pols in the Republican primary, Kevin wrote, that should have sent a clear message that the public was fed up with political insiders
.. “After months of chatter about the implosion of the Republican Party, we are instead witnessing the obviation of the Democratic Party.”
The End Is Nigh
A man, filled with fear and insecurity, created a hatemongering character and followed it out the window. And a woman, filled with fear and insecurity, hunkered down and repeated bad patterns rather than reimagining herself in an open, bold way.
.. From Cohn, he learned about winning, without regard to right and wrong. And from Steinbrenner, he learned about indiscriminately grabbing the limelight.
.. “Donald was not a big night life person, except for Le Club,” said one former Steinbrenner staffer. “He was always very likable in those days. He had a big personality, but he was the youngest of the group. He was never arrogant or full of himself. He always was respectful and pleasant to everybody.”
.. Before he jumped into the presidential race, Trump was seen as bombastic, vulgar, a bit of a buffoon and a cave man, but there was also, as Tina Brown put it, “a cheeky brio.”
.. “he was set up as the Decider and a very discerning judge of character.”
.. If he had stuck with his judicious TV boss persona in a race that fused politics, social media and reality TV, who knows what would have happened?
.. But he created another character for the Republican primaries
.. “He saw the crowd’s adulation and it drove him. He started to get the biggest cheers for saying the most offensive things.
.. “He detached himself from himself. I don’t think he believes in the Muslim ban or half the things he’s saying. It was more, ‘If this gets applause, I do it,’ in a Pavlovian dog kind of way. He just got into this character.
.. And the irony of all this is, he didn’t have to. He could have run as an outsider with a populist message without all the evil and mean components.”
.. Hillary started as a young lawyer on the House Watergate committee, yet she never learned how paranoia can act as an acid on dreams. She couldn’t dismantle her wall of secrecy and defensiveness and level with the public and the press; instead, she built the wall higher and clung to attack dogs like David Brock and Sidney Blumenthal, needing to surround herself with people, no matter how dubious, who would walk the plank for her.
.. The Clintons have earned $230 million over the last 15 years, and if Hillary becomes the first woman president and Bill becomes the first first lad, they will reap many tens of millions more in book money and speeches afterward. So why buckrake on the eve of her campaign with Goldman Sachs speeches?
.. The problem with Donald Trump is: We don’t know which of the characters he has created he would bring to the Oval Office.
The trouble with Hillary Clinton is: We do know. Nobody gets less paranoid in the White House.
Let’s Hear From a Deplorable
“I’ve been waiting for him to grow up,’’ she told me tonight. “At the debate I saw how Hillary needled him and got under his skin and after all these months, if he hasn’t been able to control that, I don’t feel that he’d be able to control it in the White House.
.. She did not consider the “Access Hollywood” tape a deal-breaker about returning to Trump.
“I think it was disgusting but it was more bluster,’’ she said. “He wanted to seem like ‘the guy’ with Billy Bush. I still believe in my heart that half of what he says and does is just bravado to make him look bigger and better. Somewhere along the line, he got an inferiority complex. He’s all mixed up.
.. And when the video of Trump’s bizarre St. Louis press conference before the debate with several of the women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault hit the Internet, Peggy thought that was a “totally high school move” by Trump.
“I think it will cause women to feel sympathetic to Hillary,’’ Peggy said, shaking her head. “It will remind them of what she’s had to go through with Bill. Bill is not running for office. Maybe Hillary did enable at some point, but I think that was for survival.
.. When she pulled that Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, she really believed his lies, that he had never been involved.”
.. “I think he did really well,’’ Peggy said. “He has done what the Republicans criticized him for not doing in the first debate, attacking her on Libya and the emails.
.. I like the way he walked around to stay in the picture when Hillary was talking.
.. In the end, my conservative sister concluded: “I could see him as president.’’