http://jewishjournal.org/2016/12/08/editorial-trump-and-the-obama-legacy/
My response:
May I humbly suggest that your editorial entitled "Trump and the Obama Legacy" is, in large part, both presumptuous and erroneous.
Trump, indeed, won the electoral college (which is, in my opinion, an 18th century anachronism formulated in 1787, when states did not vary in size as they now do), that gave him the presidency. But as you deem the Democratic party an unelectable failure, you fail to recognize or state that Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million -- and counting -- more popular votes than Trump -- indeed, more than President Obama received in 2012 -- and many of those votes were, indeed, white.
I proudly add, as a Jew of Ashkenazi extraction, that 71 percent of Jews voted for Hillary as well. I am even prouder to say that Jews, since voting has been dissected, have always voted majority Democrat. Your analysis, especially in a Jewish newspaper, is skewed at best, as it omits this fact.
Hillary's vote total was the single-largest popular vote swamp by Democrats against a Republican to go on to lose the electoral college in US history. It was even greater than was Al Gore's popular vote lead over Bush.
To me, that means something. Democrats did not "slice and dice" the electorate, but rather went after votes they knew would be cast for them -- by those in the electorate that heretofore in US history had been ignored -- while holding the white progressive vote as well.
As to Republicans retaining state legislatures and governorships, Republicans have done a fantastic job at gerrymandering districts, both on the state and federal level, while they suppress the Democratic minority vote by stunningly nefarious means. If Republicans in these states kept the vote available to more persons of color for longer periods of time, perhaps the outcome would have been different.
You deem the recovery "slow and weak." You decline to acknowledge that Obama inherited an economic mess from Bush, and yet he decreased the unemployment rate by half; saved the auto industry; and for the first time, offered health insurance to insure 20 million people who otherwise would have gone uninsured, and filled emergency rooms. Obama eliminated the preexisting condition that had been a rationale insurance companies used in order to not insure those who needed insurance most. Is the ACA perfect? No, but under a Hillary Clinton administration, it would have been perfected. Now it stands to be, God forbid, repealed -- and I am sure not replaced -- so yet again, people will not be treated, and may consequently die.
To say Democrats thought of white Republicans as the "other" is simply ludicrous. From day one of President Obama's first administration, Republicans met at dinner and were committed to the passage of exactly nothing the president wanted. In other words, if they could not defeat the President by the ballot, they would defeat any and all proposals he might try to pass. The President's entire message, from the beginning of his administration to well into his second administration, was to work with Republicans on initiatives they both might benefit from. His mantra was always "compromise." He would continuously espouse the mechanics of government to be rooted in getting a little, and giving up a little, of what one wanted, in order to craft legislation with which both could live. But no matter which cheek the President turned, Republicans would slap him on the other.
Trump's initial foray into things political began with a racist and ridiculous disparagement of the President as not having been born in the United States, an obvious insult and falsehood Trump was forced to retract much later, during his run for the presidency.
The President has been besmirched by white Republicans time after time. One cannot forget South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson's famous insult, "you lie," directed at Obama during his State of the Union speech. Never has such rudeness occurred at a State of the Union address given by a white president.
Nor can I forget the President's attempt at racial inclusion convening the so-called "beer summit which involved a black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. going into his own home and being arrested wrongly by a white Cambridge police officer. The president here yet again tried to calm a racially tense situation through discussion.
One can only deduce that no matter what the President did, or however he did it, he would be overruled by a portion of the mostly white electorate, through their representatives who could never accept a black President. Are these the votes you would have wanted the Democratic nominee to pursue?
The fact that white men in the Rust Belt thought Hillary Clinton would destroy their coal and oil jobs was, perhaps, one area that stood better clarification by her, and she should have spent more time in those states doing precisely that. She did not want to eliminate coal and oil jobs entirely, but said that she wanted to transition workers from coal and oil jobs to those more environmentally-friendly, certainly healthier for them (I heard an interview one day on NPR where a coal miner praised G-d for sending Trump to restore coal production. Later in the interview, he incredulously said that both his father and grandfather had died of black lung disease) and thereby, reduce the carbon load on the environment. Who could argue with climate change amelioration? Trump and his minions, that's who.
Ultimately, I believe Hillary's main difficulty to those white men in the Rust Belt was that it was a woman transmitting the message -- and that is too bad. Nothing less than the planet's life is at stake!
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