By Colin O’Connell
Staff Writer
How did this happen? It was a joke at first. He had his silly red hat and models marching him out to the podium.
And now as I type this sentence, I have to refer to him as President Donald Trump.
You can say that this country is filled with racists and misogynists. You can say that the media won this election for Trump by giving him all the airtime he could have ever wanted.
I blame the Democratic Party.
Hillary was the wrong candidate. They had a sure thing with Trump running for the GOP, a lay-up. And instead of going with someone with very little scandal baggage like Bernie Sanders or getting on their knees and begging Joe Biden to run, they went with Clinton.
The DNC wanted to make history. They wanted to say that they put a woman in the White House. But it doesn’t count if you can’t actually finish the job.
The last thing the Democrats should have done was given Trump an opponent with so many open targets.
Benghazi. Emails. Her husband.
Donald Trump is a sleazy 90s comedian and he hit every single vulnerability that she had.
Still, even then, Hillary should have wiped the floor with Trump. But then she made the worst possible decision: to play Trump’s game.
Trump wanted the classic mud-slinging contest because he only had a couple of policies he was going to focus on.
All I wanted to hear was policies and Clinton wouldn’t give them to us. Instead she would attack Trump, call him a sexist, bring up the leaked audio of his potential sexual assault.
She tried to serve us the worst of Trump when all we wanted to see was the best that Clinton had to offer.
But we didn’t get it. She relied on getting the votes from women. All she ran were ads about why Trump was awful and why she is great for women and minorities.
And Trump touted a revolution. He said he was going to bring about change. No more career politicians. A clean slate from an outsider to make our country great again.
Now, he didn’t get my vote, but the fact is that I very reluctantly voted for Clinton.
If Democrats had nominated Biden, Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, then any one of those would have gotten my vote without hesitation over Trump.
But they didn’t.
They went with name recognition.
They went with experience.
They went with baggage.
Hillary Clinton’s baggage was too much for her to overcome.
Now, maybe there are numbers out there that will say that Biden or Warren wouldn’t have done any better. We already saw when Bernie went head-to-head with Clinton he lost, though Clinton got help from the DNC.
You drove people away from the polls. You gave him the chance to sell people on change, just like Obama did.
Trump is the GOP’s Obama. He’s cruder, he’s not as charismatic, and he’s much more of a bully.
But he has now become the new identity of Republicans everywhere.
Clinton instead had the same identity of Obama, just not as likable. She showed disdain for her opponent’s supporters.
Obama never did that. Bush didn’t even do that.
She did. And all that did was drive Trump supporters to go out and campaign even harder.
Clinton goaded Trump and his supporters, and they made her pay for it. She angered them and they took the White House right out from under her.
Maybe Clinton was the best candidate the Democrats could have given us in July, but clearly by November she wasn’t.
My party should be disgusted with what happened. I’m disgusted with it. They stood by, accepted money from Wall Street, and did everything they could to try and get Clinton into the White House.
And they still failed.
And oh by the way, House Speaker Paul Ryan was able to rally the troops and clinch a Republican House of Representatives and Senate.
Meanwhile, the Democrats put all of their eggs in the Clinton basket, pretty much ignored the Congressional elections, and still lost the White House.
The Democratic party needs to be changed from the ground up. And I’m more than willing to be a part of that change.
I cannot in good conscious sit by and watch my party die this sad death.
Email Colin at:
coconnel11@live.esu.edu