Post-Election Refractions: Mea Dumba Edition

We have seen the future, and it is the past

By Ed Goldman

The most difficult words for someone to say who’s in the news media and someone who considers himself a liberal—I’m both, but they’re not always one and the same—are, “I just don’t get it.”

Hence, some takeaways from the November 5 Presidential coronation as I realized more than half the country decided it was time to Make America Grate Again:

Oversight delivery

1. As I was watching Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign go down in flames, it occurred to me that in all my years as a voter, only three of my choices became POTUS: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Not Jimmy Carter (2.0), not Walter Mondale, not George McGovern. Not Michael Dukakis. Not Al Gore. Neither Hillary Clinton nor John Kerry.

2. Can I pick ‘em, or what? You probably don’t want to ask me to buy your weekly lottery ticket or choose what I think will be next year’s most popular color to paint the ashram you’re building in your rumpus room.

3. To be clear, I liked only three of the Democratic Party candidates for whom I’ve voted (Carter, Obama and Harris). But I liked the others’ opponents far less.

4. Why couldn’t Trump’s campaign have emulated those of Adlai Stevenson, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein and Harold Stassen—you know, people who run and lose repeatedly? Stassen is the gold standout here, having sought the Republican nomination for President 10 times.

Some people think Alf Landon should also be on that list but he actually ran for President only once, garnering five electoral votes to FDR’s 523 in 1936. This would be called a landslide today but the word avalanche, tsunami or Armageddon might be the better choice. What Landon did do with distinction was live to be 100, the only Presidential candidate besides Jimmy Carter to do so. So did George Burns, Bob Hope and Irving Berlin (101!); but they were in show business, which, while strikingly similar to politics, is much more predictable and not nearly as entertaining.

5. Some of our cliches need updating. For example, a number of pundits and millions of voters were so sick and tired of seeing and hearing Donald Trump 24/7 that the old expression, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” was really gaining traction (and giving some of us hope). Yet it might have been precisely because people had all those years to know and either love or loathe him—and had relatively little time to get to know or knock Kamala Harris—that we gave his hideous past a pass and have once again turned over the nuclear-bomb codes to him. Ergo, the birth of a new cliché: “Familiarity breeds exempt.”

6. With the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court now clearly within Trump’s purview and/or sovereignty, depending on just how hysterical you’re willing to be, the old riddle, “What do you give a ferocious Great Dane or 500-pound gorilla?” has new meaning. Answer: Whatever the hell he wants.

7. If I hear Biden say, “I’d have beat Trump” one more time, I may book a flight to DC and dump vanilla ice cream cones on the front steps of the White House. I’m not worried about getting arrested. As we learned during the recent campaign, even when you give the U.S. Secret Service advance notice of your intentions and possibly a diagram, there’s still a better-than-even chance you’ll be ignored. Until they arrest or shoot you, that is.

8. To my journalistic credit, I knew within two minutes of the Biden/Trump debate this fall—when Biden actually started to say something— that Biden would lose not only the debate but also the Presidency, one way or another. Eight years earlier I had also won a $500 bet that Trump would win it his first time around, when his 2016 speech accepting the Republican nomination consisted of him yelling for nearly an hour but not losing his voice. It was a feat I’d seen only my mom achieve many years earlier when I was a high school senior and thought aloud about converting to Christianity in order to save a romantic relationship.

Those exceptions aside, I have to conclude that when it comes to most things political, I know NOTHING. Zip. Bada. Bubkis. Nil. Zero. (Well, okay. I do know how to use a Thesaurus.) So do the panels of news and polling experts on every network and each side of the aisle. They’re as useless as a tribunal of ostriches, considered by many to be the world’s dumbest animals. Put those flightless birds in designer suits, spray or comb-over their feathers and teach them how to use an electronic vote-count board and they’d be just as accurate, trenchant and cute.

9. Finally, unlike Judaism and Christianity, thankfully, that relationship mentioned above didn’t survive. So how grate was that?

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).