Most women voted for Hillary Clinton. Most men voted for Donald Trump. A slightly higher proportion of men voted for Trump than women voted for Hillary. But I think what happened was that there was a significant increase in the number of men voting. Usually women vote more, I suspect this time more men voted. This is just a hunch, but it would help account for the fact that Trump got more votes even though more women voted for Hillary. His majority was provided by a big upsurge in white men, mostly baby boomers. I was just thinking this morning about what a baby boomer phenomenon Trump is, and baby boomers are at their peak voting strength right now. All us angry white guys born between 1945 and 1966. I was worrying about that this morning and looked at the polls again and said nahhh, I was just being paranoid.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Medical marijuana initiatives
(2010, I think.)
So when I got to the polling station here in L.A. yesterday to vote on the three marijuana initiatives I was so stoned I couldn’t remember which one I was supposed to vote for and which two against. All those long words, man, and that crazy legal lingo. I just stared at them for a long time. Like a real long time. I heard someone cough and turned round and there was like a line of people staring at me, wondering why I was taking so long. I kinda freaked out and just voted all three yes. Righteous. Voting for weed three times. Jah Rastafari. But as I left the booth every one was looking at me. I gave the ballot to the dude who gave me a flag sticker which I accidentally stuck on upside down. Detov I. Everyone was still looking at me weird. Well, not everyone, but the dude with the flag stickers, and the old ladies, the guys in line, and the pretty chick with the big, the one who told me I signed on the wrong line. They were all looking at me. They could all tell I voted yes for all three weed initiatives. Which ones were cops? Which ones were narcs? Which ones were gonna tell my prospective employers? I started shaking and asked for my ballot back. I wanted to change my vote to no on all three. The guy said I couldn’t. I got upset and said why not? It’s too late, he said. I started freaking out. You mean they know I voted for all three pot initiatives? Now everybody in the place were all looking at me, everyone, even the incredibly old people who could barely do anything. I couldn’t believe I said that out loud. I might as well have screamed look at me, I am so high!!!! And I was. I mean righteously high. Totally Bob Marley. Insane in the membrane. I split so fast, nearly ran out of there, cut across the lawn and walked home. Thank god I had a bowl full on me. I ducked behind a tree and fired up a good one, keeping an eye out for cops and old people. I exhaled slowly. It felt good. I waited till it grew dark and walked the several blocks back to my pad. Walking felt good. Felt natural. I felt one with the birds singing and the stars blinking and the car alarms. Jah Rastafari. Too bad I’d driven to the polling station.
It was a lot easier when pot was illegal.
Presidential election deja vu
Despite all the sturm and drang and media frenzy, this general election campaign has been predictable, following the same old patterns as most general campaigns–same states, same demographics, same predictable ebb and flow. Fundamental change occurs slowly, over generations, culminating in one stunning landslide–1932, 1980–though even those elections follow fairly predictable patterns after the conventions. The craziness happens in the primaries–1964, 1972, 1976, 2016– but in the post convention months leading to November, everything falls into the old patterns. You can look back at the final weeks of 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984, 1980 and all the way back to 1960, maybe even 1948, and unless there is a major third party–1968, 1992–the pattern is almost narcotically the same. Indeed, once best selling campaign histories have fallen out of fashion because the races are so identical. It’ll remain this way as long as there is the electoral college. You will never see things blown wide open until we finally dump that archaic machinery and replace it with the direct vote. In the meantime the last month of every presidential election will give veteran campaign watchers a stultifying sensation of deja vu. You already know how it will end, you’ve seen it before. It took an electoral vote tie in 2000 (courtesy Ralph Nader’s ideologically nihilistic campaign) to suddenly jar us out of the familiar and into the strange and scary. Now that was different. Too different.
Voting by mail
Last week:
Never did get my vote by mail packet. Wife did. I can’t tell if it was the Russians, or “clerical error”, or the deliberate Republican repression of big, dumb, epileptic guys. Whatever. Somebody is machinating something. If machinate is a word. I’d look it up but my dictionary is untrustable. Benghazi, Ben Turpin, Ben Franklin. Or just Ben, the rat.
My vote by mail packet came yesterday, just in time. Now voting is convenient. Even more convenient is that the registrar of voters changed my name to Mrs. Elia K. Fliegman, which I had been planning to do, actually, and this save me reams of inconvenient paperwork. This does sound eerily like one of Woody Allen’s bits when he was a stand up comic and actually funny, but it’s real life, and hence tragic. Think of Mrs. Elia K. Fliegman waking up transformed into a giant drummer. Think of poor Mr. Fliegman. Suddenly his wife is an epileptic weirdo, and my wife is stuck with Mrs. Fliegman’s entire collection of Hummels.
It’s the Russians’ hand. There’s no doubt about it.
Anyway, I considered voting by mail as Mrs. Elia K. Fliegman, but just my luck I’d be detected by a Trump poll watcher. Imagine my shame. You don’t look like Mrs. Elia K. Fliegman, Chuck Todd would say, and I’d deck him. Who wouldn’t?
Trumpstock
You’ll notice, incidentally, that most of that crowd is baby boomers. We are the worst generation politically since the 1920’s. We voted Republican in most elections, and if not Republican we came close, even in 1968. It was us who dismantled the New Deal. Reagan and his people began it, but it was the baby boomers who went at it hammer and saw and destroyed it. The Tea Party was the most successful political movement the baby boomers ever came up with, and look what it wrought, the political equivalent of the Mongol invasions. The George W. Bush administration was the ultimate in the baby boomer political philosophy in action, such as it was. Thankfully most of us will be dead in a couple decades and the younger folks can rebuild what our parents built. We may have been lots of fun and made some of the greatest music of all time, but we sure fucked everything up. Not that you can tell us that, though. We have convinced ourselves that it was us and us alone who brought progressive values to America. But think of this. When our parents saw Barry Goldwater running for president, they turned him down in a landslide. They knew dangerous crazies when they saw them. When we saw George W Bush, we elected him.
And Trump? Well, this is who baby boomers vote for when they get old and cranky. He is us. Maybe not me and you, but most of us. Certainly most of us baby boomer men, white and a surprising number Hispanic. And the majority of Trump’s female followers were born between 1946 to 1964, inclusive. There are not only a helluva lot of us–we were the biggest American generation ever since before the First World War, proportionately, there were so many of us and we all had lots of siblings, unlike today–and we live longer and healthier than our parents did, but we vote far, far more conservatively than any other generation in our age group, ever. The Bernie voters never had a chance against our numbers and voting participation rate–and that was against only those of us who voted for Democrats this year. More of us voted for Republicans. And most of them voted for Trump. The only reason that Trump is in this race at all is because so many Baby Boomers love the guy to death. Hey, we are wild and crazy guys. By the time we got to Trumpstock we were half a million strong.
A Trump rally in Loveland, Colorado, 10/3/2016. This shot is by Nate Gowdy, a brilliant photographer you can find on Facebook. His work has the depth of Walker Evans, and each picture tells a story worth far, far more than a thousand words. (Thanks, too, to Michael Rowe, who doesn’t know me from Adam, for the tip.)
Curt Shilling
Curt Shilling went on Hardball on MSNBC last night to announce his intention to consider running for the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Elizabeth Warren and even though Chris Matthews was easy on him, Shilling almost immediately disintegrated into incoherence. He bitched about everyone dumping on him for his “you’re a Jew” comment on CNN, and then made a big scene out of something he misheard Chris Matthews say. (Matthews said troops, Shilling angrily insisted he’d said truth, and wound up looking the complete fool.) Unless the former Red Sox pitching great can learn to communicate on television, he won’t even make it out of his own primary. I have never witnessed a potential candidate (and one nationally known) so unprepared to run for a statewide office, even in a geographically small state like Massachusetts. He makes Paul LePage of nearby Maine look almost slick and professional in comparison. I’m not saying Elizabeth Warren has nothing to worry about, as these are weird times and one never knows, but head to head in a debate she will reduce him to chopped liver. If this is a sign of the quality of Trump inspired candidates the Republican Party can expect to see for a couple election cycles they are in serious trouble. Either someone in the Massachusetts GOP establishment better send Curt Shilling to candidate school quick, or find someone else to run for the Republican senate nomination who can send him off to the showers for good.
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Look who’s going for that Hillary white pant suit look.
Republican civil war
Odds are that the GOP will lose a couple dozen seats in the house this year. It seems as of now highly doubtful that they’ll lose more than that. Very effective gerrymandering by GOP controlled statehouses have left enough Republicans in safe districts that can withstand even a severe drubbing of their presidential candidate and a big increase in Democratic voters. But the irony is that the Republicans in districts that are not safe veer to the more moderate side of the GOP, being that the districts they are in are not conservative enough to have elected a Tea Partier. Democrats will pick up those seats, leaving a GOP majority in the house that, though smaller, will be even more conservative than it is now. Trump won’t win the White House, and a lot of Republican senators will be losing their seats because of Trump and likely losing the majority to the Democrats, but the House will be more Trumpified than it is now. There has been a long running Republican trend since 1980 (maybe since 1978) where every election brings more hard line conservatives into the House than before. In 1994–seven elections after the Reagan landslide in 1980–Newt Gingrich took control of the House GOP and set it firmly to the right. Indeed to the right of Reagan, certainly to the right of George S Bush. Clinton’s national health insurance plan was destroyed by the Gingrich revolution. Fast forward ten more congressional elections and Paul Ryan–more Reagan than Reagan just four years ago–is now far too moderate for most conservatives in the House (and among Republican Party rank and file) and in all likelihood will not be Speaker in 2017. Just four years ago he was hardline conservative. Now he is a RINO. Every Republican you see interviewed seems to see nothing but intra-party civil war and bloodletting. Meanwhile, the demographics in the general population run against them, and their base grows smaller and smaller. Parties do disappear sometimes. The Federalists were gone by the 1820’s after being dominant in the first twenty years of the country. The Whigs elected presidents before the Civil War and were national and growing until they almost instantaneously disappeared in the late 1850’s. But we’ve had two dominant parties since the Civil War, it’s hard to imagine one disintegrating completely. Yet that is what seems to be happening. A surreal time. Perhaps it is just a phase and the GOP will re-emerge. Perhaps it will split into multiple parties. The liberal Democrat in me snickers. The historian in me looks on in astonishment. To think I lived to see this day.
Trump’s kamikaze debate
If Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson could swing the funds he could go on an advertising, television and rally blitz this week as the honorable constitutional alternative to Donald Trump, and probably peel off lots of Republicans who can not now vote for Trump. He’d have to do it fast, but he might get 10-20% of the popular vote. Suddenly it is wide open on the conservative side, and Johnson ought to put down the bong and take advantage of the sudden opening. These things only happen once in a political lifetime.
Mosul
Mosul is not a battle, it’s a siege. There is no such thing as a surprise siege. This is such an idiotic debate point. When I saw Trump’s first tweet on this I laughed it was so ignorant. Sure enough, though, no matter how stupid and facile a point that Trump makes in one of his tweets–they all seem to begin as tweets–the press will feel compelled to ask the same question soon enough. Heated debate follows. Throughout this entire campaign year Trump has kept the process going that way. He’s obviously far too ignorant to be president, but the press’s admirable notion that they must be even handed means that such stupidity has to be treated as being informed and educated. Hence, the reporters repeating Trump’s question about why this Mosul operation–which began six months ago–was not kept a surprise. As if ISIS, knowing an attack was coming eventually and preparing for it for years, would have no idea that the build up of forces investing the city and the six months of aerial bombardment preceding it were not signs of an impending attack. But this is a siege of a fortified city, not a surprise attack on a sleeping army in the field. This assault can be no more a surprise attack than was the battle of Iwo Jima.
Brick's Politics 