Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

national news, political news

Clintons to attend Trump inaugural … who’da thunk it?

Bygones won’t necessarily be bygones come Jan. 20 for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

But they’re going to attend the inauguration of the fellow who pulled off arguably the most stunning presidential election upset of the past century … and it involved one of the Clintons.

The Clintons are going to attend Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as president — even though Hillary Clinton fell victim to that shocking upset at Trump’s hands.

Words nearly escape me as I seek to describe the nature of the Trump-Clinton campaign for the presidency. “Rough,” “brutal,” “angry” seem far too timid of descriptive terms.

I’ll leave it to others to attach the appropriate adjective.

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/312542-clintons-to-attend-trumps-inauguration

I am glad, though, to know that the Clintons will attend this event and pay their respects to the office that Bill Clinton once occupied and that Hillary Clinton thought she would assume. Their individual and collective respect for the 45th president, though, likely remains a topic of some speculation.

The only living former president who won’t attend will be George H.W. Bush; he cites health concerns that will keep him away. Former Presidents Carter and George W. Bush will attend, along with Bill Clinton.

A lot of eyes, of course, will be focused on Hillary Clinton. In a normal election year, the spotlight would be on her. As we all learned — many of us to our dismay — this was far from a normal presidential campaign.

Suffice to say that Hillary Clinton’s decision to join her husband at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration speaks loudly and clearly to her own character and grace.

International news, national news, political news

This inquiring mind wants to know: What did Russians do?

I don’t doubt that Russian geeks hacked into our nation’s computer grid somehow and did something to influence the U.S. presidential election.

Unlike the president-elect, I am inclined to believe the analyses put forth by some of the best intelligence minds on the planet.

What I remain unclear about, though, is the nature of what the geeks did. What did they do — and I need a precise, detailed  explanation — to possibly tilt the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor.

* Did they put out fake messages that threatened voters in heavily Democratic precincts, decreasing voter turnout?

* Or, did they somehow make ballots cast for Hillary Clinton be logged as votes for Trump?

* Did the Russians float fake news stories about Hillary, telling voters that she is the child of Satan and that a vote for her would be a vote to send the nation straight on the express track to hell?

President Obama vows retaliation against the Russians. It could come as early as Thursday, according to some actual news reports.

But this inquiring mind — the one in my noggin — is anxious to the max to know what precisely the Russians might have done to influence our vote. Was it decisive?

Did we actually elect the wrong person as our next president?

Oh … wait!

national news, political news

Here’s the most meaningless debate imaginable

Well now … let’s commence the most meaningless political discussion possible, shall we?

Who would have won if Barack H. Obama had been the candidate opposing Donald J. Trump in this year’s presidential election.

The president of the United States says he’d win. The president-elect — big surprise here — disagrees.

The meaninglessness lies in the indisputable fact that we’ll never know the answer. The U.S. Constitution bars the president from seeking a third term, thanks to its 22nd Amendment.

But as long as the president has introduced this silly argument, I’d like to carry it a bit further.

I believe he would have won. Why? He’s got a ton of political moxie. He would have surrounded himself with he best political strategists possible. He would not have taken anything or any voter group for granted. Obama would not have “played it safe,” as he said Hillary Clinton did. He would have made mincemeat of Trump in any number of televised joint appearances.

There. That’s my view.

However, it’s only my speculation, just as it is anyone’s speculation — including Barack Obama himself — about how an Obama-Trump contest would have ended.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/obama-vs-trump-dispute-erupts-over-who-would-have-won/ar-BBxAD1A?li=BBnb7Kz

Here, though, is a bit of reality to toss into the mix.

Consider the context of the 2012 presidential election. Obama’s presidency was considered by many experts to be on the ropes as he prepared to run against the Republican nominee, who turned out to be Mitt Romney, another formidable and successful businessman — who also had political experience as a one-term governor of Massachusetts.

The economy wasn’t performing all that well. The Affordable Care Act was being vilified as a failure. The Republicans saw a huge opening for their nominee as the campaign commenced.

Oh, but what happened? Obama used his crack political team to target selected audiences in various regions of the country and hammered Romney relentlessly over comments the GOP rival had made. Recall the “47 percent” gaffe.

Obama ended up winning the election by a comfortable margin: 5 million ballots and 332-206 Electoral College votes.

Would he have defeated Trump? I believe so.

However, it’s a silly debate to have.

President Obama is leaving office in less than a month. Donald J. Trump is the man of the hour.

national news, political news

Go with a brand new face, Democrats

A poll offers some clear instructions for Democrats interested in coming back from the shock of watching Donald J. Trump elected president of the United States.

Go with someone shiny and brand new to the national scene, Democrats.

No more Clintons should run for high office, namely the presidency.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/theres-a-clear-democratic-front-runner-for-2020/ar-BBxq70O?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

USA Today/Suffolk University has released a poll that says Democrats need someone new. It doesn’t specify an individual. Just go with someone new to the national scene.

If you think about it, Republicans might have had the right idea by going with someone “new” as their presidential nominee in 2016. Donald J. Trump wasn’t exactly new to the limelight. He’s been basking in it for 30-plus years.

He burst onto the political scene when he rode down that escalator at Trump Tower and then made his first presidential campaign promise: he’ll “build a wall” to keep those illegal immigrants from coming in.

Trump was a familiar entertainment face, but was new to politics.

He’s not so new to politics these days as he prepares to become president.

Democrats are facing a serious quandary as they ponder their choices for 2020 and, believe it, they are pondering them at this very moment.

One individual did fare pretty well in this poll of Democrats. It is Joe Biden, the current vice president who’ll be 78 years of age on Jan. 20, 2021 when we inaugurate someone after the 2020 election. Personally, I wanted Vice President Biden to run this time around. He didn’t go for it. I fear it’s too late for him next time.

Poll respondents apparently think so, too.

Democrats had better start beating the bushes for their next presidential nominee. The poll results suggest they need to find a fresh face.

I mean, if Hillary Rodham Clinton — a former U.S. first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state — can lose to someone as unqualified and unfit for the presidency as the guy who beat her, then it’s time to start with a clean slate.

Get busy, Democrats.

national news, political news

Yes, Trump’s presidency will be legit, unless …

I want to get something off my chest about Donald J. Trump’s pending presidency.

He will be the duly elected, legitimate president of the United States of America. The popular vote totals don’t matter. It won’t matter one damn bit to me — really and truly — that he got 46.1 percent of the vote compared to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s  total of 48 percent.

He will be as legit as Bill Clinton’s presidency was in 1992, when he won with 43 percent of the popular vote in that three-way race against George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. His presidency will be as legit as Richard Nixon’s was in 1968, when he won also with 43 percent in another three-way contest with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.

I get that many on the left will say otherwise, just as many on the right tried to dismiss President Clinton’s 1992 victory as a fluke, given the presence of Perot on the ballot. It wasn’t. Nor was Trump’s victory.

The popular vote is not the issue that threatens Trump’s presidential legitimacy. It’s the other stuff involving the Russian hackers and whether they actually had a tangible impact on the election result.

Congress needs to get to the root of what happened there. The CIA needs to reveal — to the extent that it can without compromising its own intelligence-gathering capability — what it knows about Russian involvement.

I hope for the sake of the country that we learn the Russians did not actually affect the outcome. I have a serious fear, though, that we might learn something sinister.

But let’s steer away from this vote-total argument.

Trump won where it counted, in accordance with how the U.S. Constitution sets forth the election of presidents.

national news, political news

Historians have huge task ahead with this election

Is it too early to wonder aloud about how historians are going to chronicle the major story of 2016?

I don’t think so.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since the TV networks declared that Donald J. Trump — the former reality TV celebrity, billionaire, serial philanderer, beauty pageant owner — had just been elected president of the United States of America.

The world is full of historians who’ve made names for themselves telling us about the political exploits of previous presidents. The history lessons they’ve provided about our nation’s political leaders have been steeped in fairly traditional themes: lower-level political offices, business success, inherited wealth, abiding political philosophies.

Trump’s story tracks along vastly different lines.

He has zero public service experience; he violated virtually rule of standard political decorum; he had never sought public office; he lied through his teeth almost daily; he admitted to doing terrible things to women; he denigrated a war hero; he criticized a Gold Star family; he mocked a reporter with a serious physical disability.

However, he won! He was elected president without ever telling us precisely how he intends to bring jobs back, how he intends to destroy our enemies abroad, how he plans to pay for a mammoth infrastructure improvement plan.

Trump defeated a candidate who virtually every single political observer in America believed would win in a walk. He was outspent and out-organized … or so we all thought!

Historians will be scratching their heads. They’ll have to crack their knuckles and get their fingers limbered up as they prepare to write their first, second and third drafts of history.

The most puzzling element of this history-writing endeavor might be in determining how Trump managed to whip up anger among Americans who live in a country that is demonstrably better off than when the current president, Barack Hussein Obama, took office in January 2009.

Moreover, President Obama then sought to put his relatively high standing among Americans to the advantage of his preferred candidate — fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. He campaigned hard to Hillary; Michelle Obama delivered stunning speeches in support of Clinton while providing blistering critiques of Trump’s admitted misbehavior with women.

None of it mattered. None of it stuck. It didn’t gain traction.

I do not envy the task that awaits historians.

Good luck to you all. Many of us out here will be awaiting your conclusions.

national news, political news

Here’s a final shot at the popular vote issue

1 Comment

This likely will be the final entry on my blog about the popular vote result of the 2016 presidential election. I believe I need to make this point.

Some of my social media acquaintances have been yapping about a peculiar aspect of the popular vote, which Hillary Rodham Clinton captured over Donald J. Trump, who won enough electoral votes to be elected president of the United States.

They’ve been saying that “if you take away California,” Trump would have won the popular vote by 1.4 million ballots.

My reaction: huh? You can’t do that.

Clinton won California’s 55 electoral votes by winning more than 4 million votes in that state. It helped pad her national vote, which ended up around 2.8 million ballots cast for her than for Trump.

I get that Trump has been elected president. He won it fair and square. His team cobbled together a stunning electoral strategy that hardly anyone saw developing. He scored upsets in many of those “swing states” that had voted twice for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Thus, the outcome was determined.

But you can’t manipulate the popular vote margin by removing certain states from the equation. All 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, are calculated in the final vote total.

Period. End of argument.

The debate over whether to throw out the Electoral College will proceed. I’m still undecided on that issue. I like the idea of giving additional clout to smaller states. However, the margin of the loser’s popular vote total in 2016 does diminish whatever “mandate” the winner will seek to claim.

The argument over Clinton’s popular vote victory, though, need not get muddled and conflated with nonsensical scenarios, such as deleting one or two states’ votes from the total count.

We are, after all, the United States of America.

I’m done now with this issue.

national news, political news

It’s not a ‘landslide,’ Donald … really

trump_donald_getty_1

May I call you “Donald”?

My head is about to explode as I listen to the president-elect refer to his victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “historic landslide.”

Historic? Yes. Surely. No one saw this victory coming. No one predicted that Donald J. Trump would win this election, that he would become commander in chief of the world’s greatest military complex. No one predicted this showman/reality TV celebrity/real estate mogul/serial philanderer/admitted groper of women would actually get the keys to the White House.

It’s historic, man.

Landslide? Nope. Not even close to one.

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/311115-trump-touts-historic-electoral-college-victory

He is trailing Clinton by 2.8 million votes. He won enough electoral votes to become elected. He finished with 304 of them; Clinton’s total ends at 227. Interestingly, Clinton lost more “faithless electors” than Trump when the Electoral College cast its vote on Monday; that, too, is “historic.”

Trump cannot possibly actually believe he won in a landslide. He has seen the numbers. He must know about the nation’s great divide.

He keeps spouting this nonsense. I guess we just need to get used to it. There’ll be much more to come.

national news, political news

Enough of the excuses … Hillary lost!

clintonhillary_110716getty

I am growing weary of the constant blame-gaming that’s going on among those who wanted Hillary Rodham Clinton to become president of the United States.

By all means, I preferred her over the candidate who won. I’ve already stipulated as much — many times! — on this blog.

She didn’t win. She lost. Hillary was thought to be the prohibitive favorite to become the next president. She didn’t get there.

And yet, we keep hearing that FBI James Comey’s 11th-hour letter to Congress about those pesky e-mails doomed Clinton’s campaign. Now we hear that the Russian hackers might have tilted the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor.

On the first matter, there’s nothing anyone can prove about Comey’s last-minute intervention. On the second matter, there ought to be a special commission convened — independent of Congress — to examine what the Russkies did, how they did it and recommend ways to protect us from future hackers. Hey, we convened such a commission after the 9/11 attacks.

Former President Bill Clinton, one of New York’s presidential electors, chimed in today about Comey and the Russians.

A lot of things went wrong with the former president’s wife’s campaign. If anyone needs to take the hickey on this stunning loss, it ought to be folks such as Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook.

Hillary Clinton should have put herself miles ahead of Trump by the time Comey’s letter came out. She fell short.

Who gets the blame? Hillary Clinton and her team need to look inward.

national news, political news

‘Unpresidented’ event about to occur

suprun

OK, “unpresidented” isn’t a real word, even though the president-elect used it in a recent tweet.

Still, we are about to witness an unprecedented event on Monday: the once-routine vote of men and women in all 50 states to select the next president of the United States.

This one ain’t routine. Not by a long shot.

The 538 presidential electors are getting lots of pressure. Tons of it. Mountains of it. The integrity of this election has been called into question by allegations of Russian computer hackers tampering with its outcome.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/electors-under-siege-232774

Now we also have electors wondering if the right candidate won the electoral votes needed to become president. One Republican elector, Christopher Suprun of Texas (pictured with this post), believes Donald J. Trump is unqualified. He won’t vote for the guy who carried the Lone Star State. Suprun is now a “faithless elector,” which is legal in Texas.

There might be others.

Oh, man. This could be fascinating in the extreme.

I’ve been alive for 67 years. I have been politically dialed in to presidential elections since, oh, about 1968 … a most tumultuous year, to be sure. I cast my first vote for president in 1972 and I’ve voted every four years since.

My career in journalism enabled me to be an up-close observer of politics and government for 37 years.

Never have any of us seen anything quite like what we’re about to witness Monday. The nation will be watching with a fair amount of interest in what will happen in all the states.

The electors will vote at noon in each state. They’ll start voting along the East Coast and work their way west. The last electoral votes will be case by the electors in Hawaii.

Suffice to say that it’s far from a routine event.

Do you recall how often it’s been said how “unconventional” this presidential campaign has been? It’s been such at every step of the way.

From the candidacy of Donald Trump, to the GOP convention that nominated the first-time candidate for any political office, to the campaign that featured far more insults and innuendo than serious policy discussion, to Election Night when Trump won enough electoral votes to win, but who trails Hillary Rodham Clinton by 2.8 million popular votes.

Hey, the Electoral College vote we’re about to witness is just another step toward weirdness. Indeed, the public’s intense interest in the outcome is bizarre all by itself.