With the media in full damage control mode over Donald Trump’s victory over Secretary of State Clinton, it’s clear that no one in the newsrooms of America gets it.
“How could this happen?” they ask rhetorically, along with scores of Hollywood A-list celebrities and inside-the-beltway political hacks and amateur pundits, all bewildered that a system so programmed to plug Clinton into the Oval Office could derail in such spectacular fashion.
James Carville, the brains behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 win, coined the simple expression, “it’s the economy, stupid” and it became the unofficial slogan of his campaign. And it’s really been the issue ever since.
This election has been about manufacturing.
More specifically, the loss of manufacturing jobs in the vast expanse of flyover America that isn’t plugged into the government/Wall Street/Silicon Valley complex that has made the smartest people in the most expensive cities rich while the critical technological base that actually adds value has fled the country.
Clearly nobody explained to Clinton the cold, hard fact that manufacturing jobs represent the only way that marginally educated, semi-skilled workers can earn enough to enter and stay in the middle class. Those jobs were distributed geographically and generated consumer spending that was the economic rocket fuel that made America preeminent in the last half of the 20th Century.
The belief that working class America is too stupid to vote for it’s own salvation is at the core of both the Republican and Democratic elites and this left a yawning gap big enough to drive a circus wagon through. At the head of that wagon was Donald Trump, and now the brain trusts at the DNC and RNC have to figure out how to convince an increasingly impoverished population that they should accept their Wal-Mart greeter futures as the price of a better, service-driven life for the next generation.
Who knew that the Deplorables would resist their own slow-motion execution?
Clinton has just learned a painful lesson about Americans: mainly that they’re the last people on earth to accept a bad outcome just because somebody rich and powerful told them to.
Trump, unfortunately, will draw the wrong conclusion from his win. Trump has backed into the Oval Office riding a cheap surfboard on the tsunami of voter frustration. Now he has to deliver, and slapping tariffs on imported manufactured goods won’t be enough.
He’ll need to attack the skills gap, the outrageous levels of bureaucracy and regulation in industry and the health care fiasco.
All at once. Fast. But will it happen?
I doubt it. But the shockwave that he’s sent through the Republicrat party establishment will hopefully convince a few of them to go to Flint, or Terre Haute, or Savannah or Bakersfield and think about what advanced manufacturing could bring to America.
Let’s hope it’s not 4 wasted years…