But before we can properly assess the future, we need to figure out how we got here, and what it says about us as Americans. I've long fancied myself a history buff, and leading up to the election, I thought that everything I knew about history told me that Donald Trump's election was an impossibility. I was wrong.
The history of our country is filled with strange paradoxes, some of which lead to devastating consequences, some of which are mere blips in our national story. Time will only tell what the election of Trump portends, but first, how did it happen?
While much of the focus has been on the various cultural and social issues at play (another post), I think we need to start with the dynamics of the Trump-Clinton campaign itself. Some have speculated that the result last Tuesday was the manifestation of a country filled with anger and, yes, more than a little hate, a statement that misogyny still persists in modern-day America to the extent that we preferred to elect a bully and a bigot over the first female major party nominee for president.
But at its core, was it also the simple manifestation of a terribly run campaign on the part of Hillary Clinton? Let's start there, because I think that fundamentally explains why Trump somehow ended up with 290 electoral votes on Tuesday night.
It must be said that Clinton made a series of devastating miscalculations during the course of her campaign, fusing the worst elements of the Dukakis-Gore-Kerry campaigns to the point that she snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
- Like Gore in 2000, she was never able to connect with a vast swath of the American electorate, coming across as an overly scripted, rehearsed elitist, a particularly bad formula in a year in which her opponent appealed directly to the frustrations of working-class whites. She came across as another Dukakis-like technocrat who sold competence over inspiration (remember how well that worked for him). Recent history has not been kind to candidates who lack the ability to rouse intense emotion (whether uplifting or hate-fueled) in the electorate (see Dole, McCain, Kerry, Romney).
- Like Kerry in 2004, she allowed herself to be Swiftboated with lies and half-truths. Although the experts and polls said she won all three debates, I was concerned about her unwillingness to directly address Trump's most over-the-top attacks on her character and record (claims that she destroyed 33,000 emails to thwart an FBI probe, had gotten rich off the Clinton Foundation, was really a shill for Wall Street who told rich bankers one thing and the rest of us something else, even that she had created ISIS!). Her strategy at every turn was to offer a vague denial of it all and then pivot back to Trump's offenses. By doing so, she unwittingly was telling the American people that they should vote for her because she was the lesser of two evils. When confronted with such a choice, Americans will often choose the person they perceive as the agent of change, no matter how distasteful he may be. If she had pushed back forcefully against the attacks on her character, and come clean with the American people on what really happened with the emails, the foundation and the Wall Street speeches, it's likely many Trump voters would have rallied to her side. By largely ignoring the "Lock her Up" chants, she gave them a degree of credibility.
- Finally, she simply spent too much time in the wrong states leading up to Election Day (and never should have taken all those days off the campaign trail to prepare for the debates, which ultimately had a fleeting effect on her poll numbers). She largely ignored the Rust Belt states that ultimately cost her the election (Michigan, Wisconsin and to a lesser degree Pennsylvania), thinking she had them in the bag, and instead traveled endlessly to Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. The Washington Post reported Sunday that Clinton's campaign spent more advertising money in Omaha, Nebraska, than in Wisconsin and Michigan combined in the weeks leading up to the election! As the Post observed, "strategic decisions can make all the difference in a close election." Clinton's strategy was terrible and spoke of arrogance. In retrospect, it's amazing that she didn't identify Trump's appeal to the working-class whites of these Rust Belt states and do more to try to reassure them that she was more interested in their plight than that of the Wall Street insiders who were paying her those enormous speaking fees.
In closing, I fear that one of the perils of our society is that we fail to learn from history and often repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately, that was also the story of Clinton's campaign. As uninspiring as Al Gore was, I thought back in 2000 that he would ultimately prevail thanks to the popularity of his predecessor and the general upward trajectory of the country. I made the same mistake of thinking the same about Clinton this year, though her predecessor wasn't as popular and the economy not as strong as was the case in 2000. Voters have decided in recent elections, though often by slim margins, to choose a risky agent of change over someone perceived as the staid status quo. Like Dukakis in 1988, she tried to make the election about competence rather than inspirational change; like Gore in 2000, she chose careful scripting over spontaneous authenticity; and like Kerry in 2004, she tried to make the election primarily about the dangers of her opponent rather than her own vision. And like all of them, she failed.
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