Election 2016 --Welcome to the Barnyard
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Winston Churchill...
The world now has the opportunity to prove Churchill's famous dictum. For many, the loss of the White House to Donald Trump outlines the failure of representative government revealing some serious flaws in the way we do democracy. An opportunist businessman, a demagogue with no political experience and no program to offer the country, has been placed on the throne by a confused and angry electorate eager to give the finger to anything resembling the establishment.
The unexpected victory had surprised everyone. Like many, I needed some time to process the nightmare: Donald Trump, who managed to manipulate the press with daily stories of his life as a presidential candidate, had actually been elected! It couldn't have happened! What about all the calculations, all the projections, all the math? I soon realized that I had awakened to a different country, one that had seemingly lost its moral compass, stuck in the flowing slime of campaign politics.
Allowing individuals to run for such an important office as the American head of state, without requiring that candidates are respectful of the nation's intellectual and moral standards, has to change. Integrity, wisdom, rational thought, empathy, the ability to process complex ideas and consider the opinions of others, should be the bottom line.
We had none of this from Donald Trump. Indeed, he deliberately cultivated the electorate's boredom in order to use it as a comedic cudgel to hammer home a truly vicious right-wing liturgy.
Last night, on the cusp of electing the first woman as president, the United States threw its gears into reverse. The tearful mea culpas have been flooding the airwaves ever since with the voices of pundits trying to figure out how they all got it so wrong. The Democrat's problem was that they were so fixated on the prospect of seeing a woman in the White House, they neglected to attend to the key votes coming from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the reliable Blue states that they took for granted.
Many people are disappointed at what is clearly a rejection of the legislative victories of the Obama administration. It can easily be argued that once again the country voted against its own interests, in order to give its consent to the reign of a master salesman, and a functional idiot.
I expect that the results of the 2016 election will prove an essential, though discomforting truth: Achieving success in the electoral process in America isn't about having a set of policies or a body of laws designed to improve the quality of life. It's all about which candidate voters can bond with, and most importantly, who they would prefer to look at on their television screens.
The unexpected victory had surprised everyone. Like many, I needed some time to process the nightmare: Donald Trump, who managed to manipulate the press with daily stories of his life as a presidential candidate, had actually been elected! It couldn't have happened! What about all the calculations, all the projections, all the math? I soon realized that I had awakened to a different country, one that had seemingly lost its moral compass, stuck in the flowing slime of campaign politics.
Allowing individuals to run for such an important office as the American head of state, without requiring that candidates are respectful of the nation's intellectual and moral standards, has to change. Integrity, wisdom, rational thought, empathy, the ability to process complex ideas and consider the opinions of others, should be the bottom line.
We had none of this from Donald Trump. Indeed, he deliberately cultivated the electorate's boredom in order to use it as a comedic cudgel to hammer home a truly vicious right-wing liturgy.
Last night, on the cusp of electing the first woman as president, the United States threw its gears into reverse. The tearful mea culpas have been flooding the airwaves ever since with the voices of pundits trying to figure out how they all got it so wrong. The Democrat's problem was that they were so fixated on the prospect of seeing a woman in the White House, they neglected to attend to the key votes coming from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the reliable Blue states that they took for granted.
Many people are disappointed at what is clearly a rejection of the legislative victories of the Obama administration. It can easily be argued that once again the country voted against its own interests, in order to give its consent to the reign of a master salesman, and a functional idiot.
I expect that the results of the 2016 election will prove an essential, though discomforting truth: Achieving success in the electoral process in America isn't about having a set of policies or a body of laws designed to improve the quality of life. It's all about which candidate voters can bond with, and most importantly, who they would prefer to look at on their television screens.
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