Trump, or better or for worse, a rare chance to learn something about democracy's value

...“Reality has a way of asserting itself,” ...

“I also think that he (president-elect Donald Trump) is coming to this office with fewer set hard-and-fast policy prescriptions than a lot of other presidents might be arriving with. I don't think he is ideological. I think ultimately he’s pragmatic in that way.”

-- President Barack Obama, November, 2016

The weight of responsibilities of the office of president of the United States, the difficulties and challenges of the problems which come with the office, are enormous no matter what the incoming president's talents and experience. There are life experiences which can have helped prepare a new president for his or her challenges but Donald Trump does not seem to have had many of them.

This job is going to tax him as he's never been taxed before. It is certain to work changes on him in ways large and small. Many of the things he believes to be certain he'll be forced for the first time in his life to doubt or to reject as mistaken.

These experiences—which are common to his predecessors in the office—might work helpful changes in him or they might make his current characteristics worse under the strains and pressures of the job or they might do some of both of these.

For example, whatever his natural tendency to take a closed-minded view of things, the job shall test and challenge that with stubborn evidence which contradicts his preconceived notions on many points. He can either resist or accept the effects of the contrary evidence and find his outlook modified.

Unlike the contrary case, had Hillary Clinton been elected, Donald Trump's election to the office of president of the United States takes us into uncharted territory. For all the fatuous hype of Clinton “breaking barriers,” “glass-ceilings,” etc., her presidency should have presented exactly nothing really novel that is of actual importance. A president's sex, we should now have been long aware, is simply irrelevant and mainly interesting and useful as a “shiny object” with which to distract and fool the stupid and the idiotic who can be led to believe that electing a woman means something signficant in and of itself simply because no woman has yet held this office. If you believe that, I have really nothing to say to you because your political stupidity is beyond help.

On the other hand, while there have been other rich presidents, other presidents whose wealth was inherited, other presidents who had not-very-impressive formal educations—who weren't weren't “A”-students or graduates “Summa cum laude”—there has never been anyone quite like Donald Trump elected to the office since it became the private reserve of a highly select mandrinate who've all come through a more or less similar route which mixes wealth, private social connections to the social “elite”—often including the realms of finance, mass media, education or business and manufacturing—that is, since roughly the tenure of Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are the presidents who, had they not been governors of. Respectively, California and Texas, before being elected president, would be the predecessors most like Trump.

But Trump arrives with no gubernatorial experience to aid his transition into the work of government executive.

For what is the first time in modern times, we're allowed to see a genuine democratic experiment unfold. It's an experiment which holds many serious risks. But with those risks come opportunities to discover whether certain long-held assumptions are actually true in fact. Chief among these is the assumption that only a certain kind of person who is a bona fide member of the approved Mandrinate mentioned above—what others have more recently compared to the Soviet Union's old “Nomenklatura”—can in fact grow and learn and develop in this office into effective executives of the national government. We don't know the answer because, until now, we've never allowed this matter to be tested. I regard it as a supremely important test and beyond all question well worth the price of the loss of Hillary Clinton—fake liberal, phony progressive and essentially a puffed-up resume looking for the next undeserved plum spot.

Many, many commenting in these threads are simply hopelessly blinded from seeing these things by their ideological straight-jackets . They counselled electing Clinton because they lacked the imagination to recognize that, with all his faults and all the risks which his election brings, Trump's presidency also presents a truly rare opportunity for both the privileged and the ordinary publics to learn something new and valuable about political affairs and in the process perhaps make this nation politically better as a result—even if, by many, most or all expected measures, Trump's presidency is not a smashing success.

Should Trump do surprisingly better than his his harshest critics predict, that shall be something important for us to see and experience.

Clinton's election should have left us uselessly stuck in a self-destructive rut, or, worse, "in a hole and still digging furiously."

Trump has a long list of characteristics which are extremely regretable. It's a shame that he had to be a full-fledged member of the rich elite. But our undemocratic system still admits only the rich or those who prove sufficiently that they'll be their reliable servants--as Obama has been. To get beyond this to any "next stage," we had to and have to start from where we are--stuck with only the very wealthy as potential candidates. What we're now going to test in a real-world experiment is whether a person who does not fit the mold of the Mandrinate experts' forms and fashions can show himself sufficiently effective as president to bring that tired assumption down from its pedastal.

Posted elsewhere, but relevant here...

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2016/11/16/dig-whistling-past-the-white-house/

Joe Biden talks nonsense about the recent election :

The Hill

Biden: Clinton never figured out why she was running

By Jordan Fabian - 12/22/16 06:33 PM EST
__________

"Vice President Biden believes Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in part because she never figured why she was running for the nation’s highest office.

“I don’t think she ever really figured it out,” Biden told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Thursday. “And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.”

As evidence, the vice president pointed to similar concerns raised privately by Clinton allies in hacked emails that were published by Wikileaks in the midst of the campaign.

But he said it was unfair to solely blame Clinton for her loss. He said Clinton saw a noble purpose in her campaign, feeling an obligation to help pave the way for women in politics just as President Obama did for black people.

“She thought she had no choice but to run,” he said. “That, as the first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency, I think it was a real burden on her.”>*

Still, Biden’s comments contain some of the most direct criticism of Clinton’s campaign from a high-ranking member of the Obama White House.

The vice president stumped for Clinton dozens of times throughout the course of the campaign.

But Biden said he had a sneaking feeling that Donald Trump could pull off a victory by the way he energized crowds in white, working-class areas, like near Biden's birthplace of Scranton, Pa.

“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden recalled thinking. “They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”

He said the Democratic Party as a whole suffered because "we were not letting an awful lot of people — high school-educated, mostly Caucasian, but also people of color — know that we understood their problems.”

... ...

______________________
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/311591-biden-clinton-never-figured-ou...

* A "burden" ? What an insult to readers' intelligence!

The office of president of the United States carries weighty responsibilities, that is true. But no one is forced to assume those, forced to undertake them. The office is a privilege, an honor, to hold. Anyone who runs for the office while regarding her candidacy as some sort of "burden" upon her, any such person should get the hell out of the field of candidates--to say nothing of her refraining from going so far as using underhanded tactics to shove other willing candidates, better candidates, out of her "burdened" way. The fucking nerve!

_________

>2 BruceCoulson: Condescending piece of tripe. I wish I lived in a day where people could make a clear cogent argument, but this is the worst of it, people who get snide and nasty acting like they're all superior to everyone else and still can't argue something to save their life.

So, this two-term political passion-play which we've been stuck with as a substitute for serious political work at the federal government level is drawing to its miserable & puny close. Barack Obama chose to leave important things unsaid and undone until his virtual final hours in office.

And Democrats can't get over themselves, their sense of self-importance, entitlement and their bruised egos. It's obvious why Obama is so popular with those whose campaign failed to gain the office-objective of the presidency. Their message resembles that of the heart-surgeon who reports to his patient's waiting family that the operation was successful; unfortunately, the patient didn't survive it.

Gary Younge has a partially good article at certain points about how to size up the two wasted terms of Barack Obama.

The Guardian (London)
US politics
Opinion

How Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump

by Gary Younge

Don’t blame it all on racism. During the financial crash Obama sided with the bankers, not people losing their homes – making Trump’s victory possible

(photo not included here)
Barack Obama meets Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, November 2016

‘There is a connection between Donald Trump’s rise and what Barack Obama did – or rather didn’t do – economically.’ Obama and Trump in the Oval Office, November 2016. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Monday 16 January 2017 06.00 GMT
Last modified on Monday 16 January 2017 08.09 GMT

••• •••

"For the past eight years American liberals have gorged themselves on symbolism. A significant section of the population, including those most likely to support Barack Obama, have felt better about their country even as they have fared worse in it. The young, good-looking, intact, scandal-free black family in the White House embodied a hopeful future for America and beyond. Photogenic, with an understated chic, here were people of colour who looked even better in black and white. With personal stories of progress without privilege, they provided Camelot without the castle: evoking a sense of possibility in a period of economic stagnation, social immobility and political uncertainty.

"As Obama passes the keys and the codes to Donald Trump at the end of this week, so many liberals mourn the passing of what has been, remain in a state of disbelief for what has happened, and express deep anxiety about what is to come. It is a steep cliff – politically, rhetorically and aesthetically – from the mocha-complexioned consensual intellectual to the permatanned, “pussy-grabbing” vulgarian.

"But there is a connection between the 'new normal' and the old that must be understood if resistance in the Trump era is going to amount to more than Twitter memes driven by impotent rage and fuelled by flawed nostalgia. This transition is not simply a matter of sequence – one bad president following a good one – but consequence: one horrendous agenda made possible by the failure of its predecessor.

"It is easy for liberals to despise Trump. He is a thin-skinned charlatan, a self-proclaimed sexual harasser, a blusterer and a bigot. One need not exhaust any moral energy in making the case against his agenda. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to understand his appeal. Similarly, it is easy for liberals to love Obama. He’s measured, thoughtful, smart and eloquent – and did some good things despite strong opposition from Republicans. That is precisely what makes it so difficult for liberals to provide a principled and plausible critique of his presidency.

"One cannot blame Obama for Trump. It was the Republicans – craven to the mob within their base, which they have always courted but ultimately could not control – that nominated and, for now, indulges him. And yet it would be disingenuous to claim Trump rose from a vacuum that bore no relationship to the previous eight years.

••• ••• •••

"There is a deeper connection, however, between Trump’s rise and what Obama did – or rather didn’t do – economically. He entered the White House at a moment of economic crisis, with Democratic majorities in both Houses and bankers on the back foot. Faced with the choice of preserving the financial industry as it was or embracing far-reaching reforms that would have served the interests of those who voted for him, he chose the former.


"Just a couple of months into his first term he called a meeting of banking executives. “The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability,” one of them told Ron Suskind in his book Confidence Men. “At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.” People lost their homes while bankers kept their bonuses and banks kept their profits.

"In 2010 Damon Silvers of the independent congressional oversight panel told Treasury officials: “We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.” They chose the latter. Not surprisingly, this was not popular. Three years into Obama’s first term 58% of the country – including an overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents – wanted the government to help stop foreclosures. His Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, did the opposite, setting up a programme that would “foam the runway” for the banks.

"So when Hillary Clinton stood for Obama’s third term, the problem wasn’t just a lack of imagination: it was that the first two terms had not lived up to their promise.

"This time last year, fewer than four in 10 were happy with Obama’s economic policies. When asked last week to assess progress under Obama 56% of Americans said the country had lost ground or stood still on the economy, while 48% said it had lost ground on the gap between the rich and poor – against just 14% who said it gained ground. These were the Obama coalition – black and young and poor – who did not vote in November, making Trump’s victory possible. Those whose hopes are not being met: people more likely to go to the polls because they are inspired about a better future than because they fear a worse one.

••• ••• "there’s a difference between things that look different and make you feel good, and things that make a difference and actually do good. Symbols should not be dismissed as insubstantial; but nor should they be mistaken for substance."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/how-barack-obama-paved-way...

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© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Glad to announce that I have finally been able to articulate how I feel about the upcoming Trump regime. Utilizing what I believe to be a southern expression I think Trump will be "pissing on our leg and telling us it's raining" for his four years in office. I hope to be proven wrong and pompous superficial tweets will not substitute for improvements in health care etc. {instead of just suddenly putting 20 million people out of health care. }