In the fall of 2000 before the Presidential election I had an outpatient operation to remove a precancerous skin lesion on my abdomen. I remember lying on my back on a surgical table with the doctor standing over me as he held a long needle and began to numb the area around the skin he was about to remove. A young nurse was beside him to assist with scalpels, stitches, and bandages.
Other than small head, hand or finger gestures I didn’t move. He said something about fat cells ‘weeping’ after cutting them open. Then he began to talk about the election. He talked about how Gore would be bad for the economy, business, and doctors. I nodded in agreement because I wanted him to be on my side. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember the nurse chiming in about Bush being the ‘lesser of two evils.’
This last election was like that operation, without the anesthesia but again with the tired advice, ‘vote for the lesser of two evils.' According to the logic of our two-party system there were only two choices. A vote for a third party candidate was effectively a vote for the worse (way worse) of the two main candidates.
There was some truth to this. Many democrats voted for a third-party candidate or didn’t vote. The two most well-known third party choices, the Green and Libertarian, were particularly weak with unrealistic platforms. Despite warnings to voters from the liberal media, they may have taken away much needed votes from Clinton in the swing states.
Any complacency on the Democrats’ side was buoyed by the [inaccurate] polls. On the day of the election, the New York Times declared “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 37-yard field goal.” It’s sad that Clinton, who could have been our first woman President, missed that field goal.
A more recent New York Times article updated the narrative. When all the votes are counted the voter turnout should be close to 58.4%. This is “lower than in 2012 but comparable to other presidential elections.” It was also determined that third party voters were not responsible for Trump getting elected. In my opinion voter turnout was still too low for a nation that values its democracy. And it's time to start over.
Our children's pediatrician is a conservative Filipino woman who talked about voting for Trump every time I saw her this year. She had prayed about Trump and God had told her to forgive his past. She took up tweeting and showed me a few of her tweets displayed on her smart phone. She told me she'd move back to the Philippines if Clinton was elected. And she gave me a list of people to look into: George Soros, behind One World Order, Saul Alinsky, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who was responsible for the death of black babies. She let all her patients know. Hillary's ads focusing almost entirely on Trump's temperament were wasted on her and may have been a bad decision overall.
Why did Trump win? Joint CTO Bryan Cantrell thinks that the technology industry should share the blame.
“We're living through a period of tremendous economic and workforce disruption and the future of software and artificial intelligence is only going to accelerate it. Many more types of jobs will be put at risk and new opportunities will open […] Work is going to change, and skills and job preparation have to change to keep up. “
His observations apparently also hold true for presidential polling. An Artificial Intelligence (AI) system called MogAI predicted that Trump would win by analyzing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google data.
The workers who voted for Trump are looking forward to the return of factories and better paying jobs. The blog Our finite world has an analysis of the energy problem behind Trump's election. Based on this analysis, the forecast is for the economy will get better before it gets worse. But when reading any analysis or news story it's important to be skeptical. It's too bad that most of us don't have the time to do our own research, so we gravitate to articles that confirm what we already think. I may be no different from anyone else, but notice that Trump's choices for the EPA confirm that his plan is to reduce complexity. Below is a chart of US GDP from 1935 to the present. I suggest coming back to this chart two, four, six, and eight years from now. There may be more election post mortems.
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