This is actually the GOP’s perfect scenario. They haven’t acknowledged the legitimacy of a Democratic Presidential victory since 1976, when they were still bleeding out from Watergate. For Bill Clinton, it was “well he didn’t break 50% so he’s not REALLY President” and for Barack Obama, who easily broke 50%, it was “well he’s not REALLY an American so he can’t REALLY be President.” Funny how none of that mattered when George W. Bush finished with fewer votes than his opponent, but anyway…
See, the GOP knows what any wrestling promoter knows. You don’t want the good guy to win the title. You want the bad guy to have the title, because the money is in the chase. So Hillary wins a historic victory – but she did it over a damaged candidate who was a fluke and a one-off happenstance, so she didn’t really win against a real opponent, so she shouldn’t really be allowed to be President. And right on cue, four more years of scorched earth and conspiracy theory and pretending the Republicans didn’t just pledge their troth to a short-fingered vulgarian from Queens with a checkbook full of red ink and the morals of a goat.
Trump will disappear down the memory hole, the Tea Party will be recycled under some other name, and the GOP establishment will win them back onside in a heartbeat by rallying them against the menace of the Evil Bitch Empress Hillary of their quarter-century’s fear-mongering. And we’ll be right back where we started.
This, ultimately, is why I didn’t have patience for the Bernie kids and why I have no time for the Libertarians or the sentient Caucasian dreadlocks that support Jill Stein. This is where our political system has left us – all a Democrat can hope to do is hold the line and stop things getting any worse. You wanna dream, go major in theater, because here in reality, we can’t have the magical sugarplum new progressive Jerusalem. Not yet. We still have to grind it out at the coalface, one day and one election at a time, until the day when we can tip the balance and start to do more than just bail out the ship. It’s not enough to show up and vote for President once or twice, it’s all the way down the ballot. It’s organizing. It’s finding candidates who can move the ball and supporting them for years as they move up the chain. And if you do that long enough, eventually maybe the lion will lie down with the lamb and we’ll beat our swords into plowshares and ain’t gonna study war no more. But until then, the lamb ain’t gonna get a lot of sleep. And neither should we.
November won’t be the end. It’ll be the end of the beginning, but there’s a long way yet to go, and you’d better be ready for a long, long haul to come.
What are you prepared to do?