This is my post-election disaster diary. I initially started writing this as kind of a therapy exercise for myself, but I’ve put it into diary format to share here, in case it helps someone else, too.
I’m a very infrequent diarist here, but a very frequent lurker. So if you look at my diary history or my profile, you won’t find much there. I guess disasters bring us out in ways celebrations might not have.
By way of introduction, I am a United States Air Force Veteran of the Cold War, something of a political activist, and a computer guy by career.
Being a Cold War veteran maybe helps explain more, both in my own mind but to others, why I am so absolutely horrified that a guy who has more allegiance to Russia and Vladimir Putin than to the United States, will be our next president.
I’m horrified for a lot of reasons, but that’s at the top of my list. The fact (yes, fact) that he’s not Constitutionally qualified to be president is on the list too, along with misogyny, sexual assault/battery, racism, and on and on. My emotions run the full gamut – anger, frustration, bitterness, grief, shock, embarrassment, fear.
I am having a great deal of difficulty with recovery. Like a lot of you, I’ve not been sleeping well at night; I’m irritable, inconsolable. So I took to writing, to get some of this out of my head and out where I can see it. Here it is, and as long as it is, of course there’s always more. Maybe I’ll write more another day…
I look back on my own history with politics and political involvement in the vain hope that I can gain enough perspective to be able to put this election in its rightful place.
The first election I ever voted in, I voted for Ronald Reagan. I don’t recall being very educated on what that would mean, but I do remember Jimmy Carter being a real downer, a bleak guy, a bit hapless, and Reagan presented the opposite of all that. So I voted on my emotions, no facts, and celebrated when Reagan won big.
I went into the US Air Force during Reagan’s first term. While I was being paid little or nothing to serve my country, I remember Reagan saying that he wanted the military to get a pay raise. I never saw the pay raise, and I found this disappointing, but I voted for him again anyway.
I got out of the US Air Force after four years, in 1984. By 1992, I was beginning to see things in government that I didn’t like. I wasn’t sure anyone was doing anything about any of it, so when Ross Perot ran, I worked in his campaign – until he made his crazy dumbass speech about being targeted by assassins. I voted for Bill Clinton.
After dropping Ross Perot as my candidate, I wrote Bill Clinton a letter, saying I was hoping we could get universal health care that was not employer-based, because I hoped to quit my job and start a business. I got a card back from his campaign, thanking me for my support. I chuckle and shake my head at how naïve I was then. I thought he’d actually get the letter, and I thought he’d do something about it. Bill Clinton had a talent for making people feel that way. He still does, most of the time.
In 2000, when W ran for president, I just shook my head, figuring the country would never vote for an illiterate buffoon after having had a Rhodes Scholar for a president for the last eight years.
Al Gore was boring as hell, as much of a policy wonk as I’d ever seen up to that point, but I liked his views on the environment. I shook my head and rolled my eyes when he picked Joe Lieberman to be his VP candidate, but figured that wasn’t that big of a deal. I really paid very little attention to the election, because it just wasn’t very interesting. W made weird speeches that totally crossed the line on separation of church and state, but I wasn’t worried because he just seemed too stupid to ever get elected.
When the Florida recount happened, I became very afraid. One of my coworkers (and friend, oddly) had a big pickup truck. He had a big sign he put up in the back window with a flag, an eagle, and the words “Sore/Loserman” printed in it. It was my first exposure to right wing craziness, cocooned as I was in the safety of the liberal Santa Clara valley. I watched tv footage of angry mobs intimidating ballot counters, laws being ignored and broken, lunacy taking over. It was a long time before I learned that those angry mobs were actually people from W’s campaign brought in to be assholes and disrupt the vote that they knew they’d lose if a sane, methodical process were allowed to run to conclusion.
Then the Supreme Court selected W to be our president, and I was very embarrassed and sad for a few days. My crazy right wing friend with the pickup truck gloated, mounted two US flags on his truck, and changed the words from “Sore Loserman” to something along the lines of “Bush~Cheney”. He drove around for days flipping off Mexicans and anyone else he thought might have voted for “Sore/Loserman”.
It was awful.
By 2002, I’d moved out of California and voted for the first time in Colorado. It was a real eye-opener about how things work outside of California. None of my left-leaning candidates won. Not one. Our write-in candidate for one of the races didn’t even show up in the county results. I had just gotten married and my new wife and I felt a tinge of fear.
By 2004, we had had it with W. Things were awful and getting worse. 9/11 had happened, we’d been lied into the Iraq war, we’d read of Bush and Cheney refusing to put their Halliburton assets into blind trusts, corruption and environmental disasters were not only tolerated, they were institutionalized. We feared for our country and our future, personally.
Some acquaintances of ours invited us to a rally for General Wes Clark, and we were hooked. We began to campaign for Clark. We made phone calls, we did on-line stuff, we emailed, and then we flew to New Hampshire to work in the primary. My wife had broken her ankle and was on crutches but we went anyway. We stayed with some wonderful people that left their bedroom window open upstairs for “fresh air”, even though it was below zero outside. I canvassed with our host’s husband, and had my first lesson in walk packets. Our walk packet had not been properly cut and we were sent out canvassing everybody, not just Clark supporters or even Democrats. It was a rather bruising experience, not to mention a waste of time.
My wife and I did sign waving outside a polling place in below zero temperatures. She held up a sign that read, “CAST your for vote for Clark” next to her leg in its cast. We got a lot of smiles, a few thumbs up, and went into the evening expecting to see Clark win. He was, after all, probably the most qualified of the candidates running. Military experience and foreign policy cred was be-all, end-all at that time, and we were proud optimists. We were in the hall for the post-election rally, with the TV cameras, reporters, the podium, and the bleachers where supporters would stand while Wes Clark gave his victory speech. We came in third, and flew home, disappointed but still devoted. We licked our wounds a bit and went back to work.
We lost several more contests, watched as our preferred candidate bowed out, asking John Kerry for “permission to come aboard” as a gesture of party unity. We were sad, but stayed involved, and in coming weeks threw ourselves into the Kerry campaign in a very big way. As I recall, the Kerry campaign didn’t send anyone “on the payroll” into Colorado until the fall sometime, maybe September. Too late to do any good at all, and the people we got were too inexperienced to know what to do or how to do it.
We canvassed in the mountains, which would be the first time such a thing had ever been done. We didn’t even have walk packets for the mountains; the software (such as it was) wouldn’t print them out because most places were considered “un-walkable”. People thought we were a little nuts, but my wife pulled people out of the woodwork, and working 12-14 hours a day, she built a sizeable county-wide volunteer team from nothing. She built walk packets from phone lists, people called where we had no addresses, then we canvassed until we thought our feet would give out. We canvassed some mountain places down long driveways where we were too scared to get out of the car. We eventually were blessed with a volunteer that knew map stuff, and he built walk packets that were laid out in walk/drive order, which was incredibly helpful. (By 2016, the official campaign still hadn’t incorporated this concept. Our walk packets were in voter name alphabetic order first and street name second, resulting in a ridiculous amount of wasted time. Don’t we ever learn anything?)
We did what we had to do to make sure W was a one-term president.
Then we lost. We lost Colorado, though we’re sure we narrowed it a lot, but we still lost. We went to the “Victory Party” in downtown Denver the night of the election, celebrated a Senate win by Ken Salazar, and slept fitfully while they tried to figure out who won Ohio. The next day, we watched John Kerry make his concession speech in Faneuil Hall and grieved as we tried to make sense of what happened.
We went back to our campaign office having been defeated. This is a miserable thing to have to do, a sad, sad duty for anyone to have to live through. I will never forget it as long as I live.
Our neighboring tenant was a W supporter, and we came back to find some of our signs had Bush/Cheney signs haphazardly plastered over them, most of our signs just torn off the walls, the outside signs torn down and the metal hangars bent and hurled against our door in a heap. Some of our signs had things written on them but I’ve successfully forgotten exactly what crude words were used.
It was awful.
We went home and licked our wounds and read reports of people being systematically disenfranchised by limiting voting locations in Democratic-leaning precincts. We read of the dual roll the Ohio Secretary of State played, being both the state campaign manager for W while also being the “impartial” Secretary of State. We read of hate and corruption and conspiracies. We read of Congressional investigations to the missing voting machine boxes in Ohio, and other “irregularities”. No one ever did anything to address the issues. Some small fumbling around got done, Diebold machines fell out of favor as people lost confidence in them, but no laws were passed anywhere to prevent a repeat of the nightmare.
Earlier in 2004, we’d been fortunate to get invitations to the ’04 Democratic National Convention. We were not delegates or anything really cool like that, but at least we were able to go; my wife was a Rules Committee member. We were able to secure seats in the main hall on the second night. Our fabulous seats were so high in the arena that we looked down on the balloons ready to drop on the last night.
This was a time when Democrats cowered in fear, lost elections after being successfully cast as anti-American for opposing the war on terror or the Iraq war, and became generally Republican-lite just to try to stay in office. It was a very bad, even scary time to be a Democrat.
We were sitting there, listening to various speakers, none of whom I remember, when some people from Illinois came in and sat next to us carrying “Barack Obama” signs. Seeing our puzzled expressions, they told us who Barack Obama was, and they said, “oh, just wait, he’s awesome and he’s going to be President someday”.
I remember Barack Obama’s speech like it was yesterday. His line “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America” had people on their feet cheering as loud as they could. He had us wildly cheering throughout his whole speech. He had us in tears. We hoped against hope he’d run someday, but doubted it would happen. Too soon we said, sadly shaking our heads, too unknown. We regretfully wondered if enough people would vote for a man with dark skin named Barack Obama.
The people from Illinois left immediately after Barack Obama’s speech and went back to Illinois, caring little for the remaining speeches or the rest of the convention. I don’t remember one word of Edward’s speech or Kerry’s speech. As it turned out, the people from Illinois were right – they’d heard the only speech that really mattered at the 2004 DNC.
In 2008, we were amazed to hear that Barack Obama was going to run. We got on board pretty much right away. Obama’s “if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city” speeches brought tears to my eyes then and still do. We worked hard during the primaries, and stepped respectfully around women who were supporting Hillary, who wanted to see the first woman nominee and President. Many of us saw too much baggage from the Clinton era, and were skeptical that she could get the country to set it all aside and follow her to a win.
When Barack Obama won the primaries, we celebrated, but knew the titanic struggle ahead of us was nothing compared to what we had been through in the primaries. We were again blessed to have spectator seats at the Democratic National Convention in Mile High Stadium the night Barack Obama accepted the nomination. We worked desperately for his campaign in the months following the convention, and we wept with joy when he won. We were able to attend his inauguration, and will never forget how it felt for the nation to have rallied around this man with the odd-sounding name and the dark skin. At the inauguration, no one cared what skin color people had. We wept with joy with our arms around some African American folks we had never met before. It was dawn in America, at long last.
We thought maybe, just maybe, the country had moved forward. Maybe racism and misogyny and other awful aspects of who we are as a nation had been forever marginalized. Maybe we were entering a new era. Hope dominated.
I will never forget how much safer I felt as W took his last ride overhead on Marine One, as he left the White House for his last Air Force One ride back to west Texas. With Obama in the White House, we left Washington DC, knowing our country was safe and our future was secure.
By 2010, it was all over. The Koch-brother’s funded astroturf war on Obamacare, coupled with President Obama’s failure to stay on the campaign trail, resulted in massive losses in state houses and the US House. We were devastated. We had seen an unprecedented obstruction war waged by Republicans and their Koch allies succeed wildly, with no basis in fact or reason. The gerrymandering that was done after the Republican success in the state houses ensured Republican control of the US House until at least 2020. They were exultant. They had worked for their moment for 40 years or more, and they saw their dream inch closure to reality.
In 2012, we proudly worked for Barack Obama and celebrated his re-election. In 2014, we worked hard on the dismal, losing Udall re-election campaign, and saw our governor barely survive re-election. Nationally, we lost the US Senate, and by 2016 saw them refuse to discuss or move on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. Republicans calculated that Garland would mean a permanent loss of conservative Supreme Court majority. They decided a “liberal” Supreme Court would be worse than any electoral losses they may endure by obstructing the nomination, so for the first time in US history, they refused to consider a Supreme Court nomination.
Then came the 2016 election cycle.
Their side ran a guy with shady (or illegal) financial dealings, a known serial liar, a tax-evader, a self-confirmed sexual predator, who was proudly immoral, misogynistic, openly hated all people of color, taunted and demeaned the disabled, and had no prior experience in government at any level, and this is the abbreviated list of automatic disqualifiers.
And then there’s the Putin connection. Every election in our history since WWII would have seen Trump bounced out of the process without even winning the nomination because of his known connections with the Russians. Just his sizeable debt load to Russia and/or Russian bankers would have invalidated his candidacy in all prior elections.
Add in his personal, visible bromance with Putin, and he would have been a dead candidate, nowhere near the nomination of his party, in all years prior to 2016.
As a Veteran of the Cold War, I just can’t get past this. Putin is the enemy. He’s KGB. He’s fanning the flames of Soviet supremacy and authoritarianism in his country. He’s not subtle about this, he does not try to hide anything from anybody. Look at what he did in the Crimea. Look at the Ukraine. Look at the spectacle of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
I am reminded that other veterans of other wars (and for many, shooting wars) must feel as I do now – how soon our country forgets.
Knowing that our President-elect is a Russian sympathizer at best and perhaps committer of treason at worst, makes me crazy. During the Cold War, he’d have been called a Communist sympathizer and his political career would have been over, if it ever even started. For decades, Republicans were foreign policy hawks, and won a lot of elections at all levels by painting Democrats as weak on national security, weak on Russia, weak on national defense.
This year, none of it mattered. Republicans threw their past overboard and voted for an icon of national security weakness, immorality, no experience at anything useful, and business failure.
In every election before this one, if something disqualifying was obviously true about a candidate, it was enough. Its truth could be relied on; it was safe. It meant that something too far outside acceptable norms would be rejected.
In our past, it was easy to be disqualified in people’s minds, and this was probably a good thing. Being a horrendous bigot was not ok in presidential candidates, even for people leading bigoted lives at home. Maybe it was more than a bit hypocritical, but it was more true than not.
The boundary lines changed over the years, as society decided different things were more or less acceptable. But there were always boundaries.
This year, boundaries only existed for Hillary. For Trump? None. As he said, he could blow someone away on Fifth Avenue in front of everyone, and no one would care.
This election is not like any other in our history. It was not just an election where two people ran, and one lost. This is a watershed election. This one is a magnitude 10 on the Richter scale.
Republicans stood by a guy who wants to set America on fire and burn it to the ground, just to be on TV, surrounded by people professing to love him. Republicans stood by a guy who does not care about America, who has no boundaries, no code of conduct. He serves himself, and does not care one wit about anything or anyone else.
The Republican Party proved that it was not a worthy adversary. All their crap about the Moral Majority, family values, party of national security over the years was proven to be the stupid, hypocritical joke many of us always thought it was.
In this election, something died. Once something dies, you can’t get it back. It’s a permanent loss. This is the point that the press misses; the pundits don’t see it, certainly Democratic leadership can’t see it.
What wakes us up in the night with horror panics is that we know that the country we have until President Obama’s last day in office is forever lost. Even if we fight and win some other day, what America once was, is gone, forever.
Democrats went up against Comey, the Russians, a traitorous megalomaniacal entertainer backed by millions of angry, resentful white racists (men and women), and lost the Presidency and a winnable US Senate race in Wisconsin.
I have seen all kinds of nonsense, Hillary didn’t talk issues to the right voters, she didn’t run ads in the right places, there was Clinton exhaustion, she made mistakes (yes, she did), but most of this is nonsense.
Republican voters were not listening to any issues, were not educated on any issues, and they absolutely did not care about any issues.
Some will point out that immigration and trade worked really well for them, issues where he won and she lost. But focusing on those issues ignores the reality - these issues were merely anchors, emotional connectors, for white resentment and white fear.
This was a racism and fear election. Hillary lost because she was not prepared to respond at that level. She may have believed, given our history, that racism and fear could not and would not win. Before this election, I’d have said she was right.
This is what makes this a turning point in America like none other. Half the voting electorate decided to turn out and vote in great numbers because they were angry, fearful, and resentful. Eight years of a black President followed by a woman President was a bridge too far. They decided to burn down America, screw the consequences.
Yes, they got an unconscionable assist from the media. New York Times, CNN, NBC, CBS, notably. Yes, Trump will make news/infotainment ratings and make them lots of money, for which they helped burn down the country. And now they stupidly peddle the idea that this was a change election. No, idiots, Obama’s election was a change election. This was a backlash election.
On top of everything else, what makes this so devastating is that we know Democrats won’t obstruct everything, like Republicans did for the last 8 years. We wish they would, but reality says they won’t, so there’s a very good chance that everything the left has worked for over the last 40-50 years is gone.
Even if elected Democrats do grow a spine over the next couple of weeks, the lesson Republicans will learn from this is that there are no consequences for trashing institutions and disregarding boundaries. McConnell will throw out the filibuster and they’ll do whatever they want.
Equal rights. Women’s rights, including reproductive rights. The environment. Voting rights. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare. Labor rights. Worker rights. Privacy. Internet fairness.
And the list goes on. All of it endangered, all totally at risk, and everyone knows it’s not just hyperbole. All without a Supreme Court we can rely on to maintain some level of fairness and sanity, because that’s gone, too, for 40 or 50 years.
What do we tell our daughters? There’s not much we can say. They know the truth. America turned on them with a vengeance.
What do we say to people of color, people who hold non-Protestant religious beliefs, Jews, folks in the LGBTQ community? America turned on these communities with an even bigger vengeance. Our next President has identified them as The Enemy.
We are losing, and will greatly lose, whatever influence we had in the world. Our friends around this planet are shocked by what happened here, and they are re-thinking their policies, looking for the new leadership in the world, because the US just created a vacancy.
It’s unbelievable, but all true, and it appears we’re helpless to do anything but watch in horror.
The part that really sucks is that there’s no way to leave the crazy white racists swimming in their own soup and suffering the consequences all by themselves. No, we’re all in the soup together. We’ll suffer together, be unemployed together, suffer economic failure together, and be internationally embarrassed together. It’s the part Republicans don’t get, never have, never will – we are all, every one of us, in this together.
What was once sacred, is no longer sacred. People taking oaths of office and feeling the weight of that office, doing their best, agonizing over decisions that had to be made for America and Americans. All that’s over.
Our next President will only worry about making money, paying off his nearly $1 billion debt to Putin and the Russians, while the Republican leeches swirling around him do whatever they want to hand over America to the corporations and finally terminate the FDR social programs.
This is way beyond party politics, losing an election, then picking up and fighting again another day.
This was an earth-shaking, transformative event in American history. I want everyone to see it this way. I especially want the political left to see it this way. They will not fight unless they understand that this is an existential battle like none other in our history.
The enemy is internal this time and everyone needs to understand that.