Michelle’s Trump Despair

The Wall Street Journal ^ | December 21,2016 | DANIEL HENNINGER

[Hojczyk]

In 2008, Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” was a brilliant slogan for his historic campaign and an apt summary of why most people cast votes in any democracy.

No one will better Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign commercial, which opens with the image of a train station called Hope: “I was born in a little town called Hope, Arkansas.”

Given hope’s roots in Bethlehem, it’s no coincidence that so many sky’s-the-limit politicians turn messianic.

Hillary Clinton, who considers herself the spiritual heir of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s politics, is no doubt shattered that those once-potent ideas, which are also Mr. Obama’s ideas, failed her this year.

Donald Trump, promiser of “a beautiful wall,” out-hoped the progressives who thought they owned it. Voters concluded that an ideology-free businessman would turn hope into change better than yet another bearer of liberal orthodoxy.

Among the reasons for Mr. Trump’s win is the corrosive state of the nation’s culture, from the opioid crisis to political correctness. The notion that Donald Trump might help rehabilitate the culture would strike many as laughable.

Maybe so. But Donald Trump seems to have been genuinely moved by the opioid crisis he discovered in New Hampshire and elsewhere. That kind of exposure is another argument for the 50-state Electoral College.

Our electoral system, up and running since 1789, forces candidates to meet people living in a large, regionally complex country. Running for president may attract self-inflated personalities, but there is only one person looking into the faces of and listening to uncounted pleas on the campaign trail—from Iowans, Floridians, Ohioans, Mainers—and that is the candidate.

[LibWhacker]

But, I’ll try it next time.

Oh, good, you were able to access the article then somehow? It definitely works whether it's the NYT, WSJ, etc., as long as, apparently, Google has negotiated a deal with them. It's an extra step and that's a bother that's not worth it sometimes, but it works most times for me.