Columnist.
It's been a tough year for political elites, here and around the world, what with the passage of Brexit in June in Britain, the repudiation of Colombia's Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the October FARC referendum and the defeat of America's Nobel Peace Prize recipient's preferred candidate in the November presidential election.
Now that the 538 electors have voted — and, with only the most minor of exceptions, for the expected candidates — we can marvel at how such a huge difference in public policies can be made by just a few votes, the 77,744 votes by which Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the 46 electoral votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Over the 40-some years that I have been working or closely observing the political campaign business, the rules of the game haven't changed much. Technology has changed the business somewhat, but the people who ran campaigns in the 1970s could have (and in some cases actually have) run them four decades later.
What is President-elect Donald Trump up to on foreign policy? It's a question with no clear answer. Some will dismiss his appointments and tweets as expressing no more than the impulses of an ignorant and undisciplined temperament — no more premeditated than the lunges of a rattlesnake.
Herewith some unsolicited free advice for the Democratic Party. Whether it's worth more than the price I leave up to Democrats to decide.
It's been a tough decade for the political left. Eight years ago, a Time magazine cover portrayed Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with a cigarette and holder and a cover line proclaiming, "The New New Deal." A Newsweek cover announced, "We Are All Socialists Now."
They're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California. In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours.
Would any Republican besides Donald Trump have beaten Hillary Clinton and been elected the 45th president? It's an interesting question, not susceptible to a definitive answer but with consequences for politics going forward.
In May 1986, a 39-year-old Manhattan real estate developer named Donald Trump promised to get Wollman Rink in Central Park up and running — something the city government, despite spending $13 million, had failed to do for six years. Trump delivered, ahead of time and under a $3 million budget.
History is on our side. That's a claim Barack Obama has made frequently, in his two successful campaigns for president and during his nearly eight years in office. It's a claim that looks a little shakier this Thanksgiving holiday than it did during the Halloween holiday three weeks ago.
What is to become of the Democratic Party? The world's oldest political party, which traces its roots to 1792, is in as dire straits as it has ever been.
Hillary Clinton lost the election in the Midwest. Donald Trump won 50 Midwestern electoral votes that went to Barack Obama in 2012 — Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio — plus 20 more in Pennsylvania, where the two-thirds of voters beyond metro Philadelphia are Midwestern in culture and concerns. Trump could have lost Florida and still won.
One of the issues President-elect Donald Trump says he wants Congress to act on is immigration. That's not entirely surprising, given that he spotlighted just that issue, in incendiary terms, after gliding down that escalator in the Trump Tower and announcing he was running 17 months ago.
Astounding. That's the best word to describe the tumultuous election night and the (to most people) surprise victory of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton hoped to win with votes of Northeasterners, including those who have moved south along Interstate 95 to North Carolina and Florida (44 electoral votes). Instead, Trump won with votes along the I-94 and I-80 corridors, from Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan to Wisconsin and Iowa (70 electoral votes).
Among the many complaints I have seen about this squalid presidential election — the most dismal choice of major-party nominees since 1856 — there's one that I find missing: that it shows how our politics have become less republican. That's republican with a small r, in contrast to royalist. This is not an entirely new trend, but it is one that has reached a dismal culmination. In his magisterial book "The Origins of Political Order," Francis Fukuyama shows how the progress toward good government — "getting to Denmark" is his phrase — involves a change from the familial to the institutional. Progress comes when a nation has a competent state, the rule of law and public accountability.
In my Nov. 1 column, I looked at the presidential election through the lens of the old children's radio show "Let's Pretend" — examining how things would look if it turned out that Donald Trump ends up winning. That would have required lots of pretending until recently. Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton led Trump by 6 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls. That lead is now 1.9 percent. RCP state polling averages then had Clinton ahead by 128 electoral votes. Now the estimated count is 273 to 265.
When I was a child, there was a Saturday morning radio program called "Let's Pretend." It used words and sounds to encourage young children to paint pictures in their heads of make-believe worlds. So in that spirit, let's pretend that history will show Donald Trump as being elected president Nov. 8. That result is hard to imagine for anyone who has been watching closely since the first presidential debate, which was Sept. 26. Since then, nearly all indications have been that Hillary Clinton is certain to win. So, as a thought exercise before the results are in, let's try to imagine how we could move from that seemingly real world to the "let's pretend" world of President Donald Trump.
Could a flailing Donald Trump campaign hurt down-ballot Republicans and cost the party majorities in the Senate and House? That seems possible, if he loses to Hillary Clinton by a margin similar to those in most current polls and if Americans keep on straight-ticket voting as they have increasingly in recent years. The trend is startling. In 2012, only 4 percent of voters opted for Barack Obama and a Republican congressional candidate, and only 6 percent went for Mitt Romney and a Democrat. That 10 percent total was the lowest since the question was first asked in 1952.
In last week's third and (thank goodness) final presidential debate, each candidate did an excellent job of presenting convincing arguments for why people shouldn't vote for the other. Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a felon, and Clinton called Trump a traitor. Unfortunately for America, there is plenty of basis for the former charge and less but still disturbing evidence for the latter. These two may not be the most unpopular pair of major-party presidential nominees in history. James Buchanan and John C. Fremont in 1856 may have been worse, at least judging from their later feckless careers.
2016 has been a big year for protest politics — not just in the United States, what with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump getting over 40 percent of primary votes, but also all over Europe and Latin America, where voters have been rejecting the advice of their nations' political, financial and media establishments. Two prime examples were in referendums. On June 23, 52 percent of British voters rejected the advice of Prime Minister David Cameron and other parties' leaders and chose to leave rather than remain in the European Union. On Oct. 2, 50.2 percent of voters in Colombia voted to reject President Juan Manuel Santos' peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas.
