Thursday, June 22, 2017

Dump Trump! Wait! No! No! No! Dump Pelosi: More Lessons from Georgia 6

How fast perceptions can change in Politics. Just two days ago President Trump was an albatross wrapped around the Republican Party: Russian hacking of the Presidential Election; the Russian Connection; Obstruction of Justice; the constant attacks by late night shows, celebrities, and the media. His polls, already low, were in the tank. Time to impeach or dump the President. The Democrats had high hopes of winning the special election in Georgia 6. They wrapped the President around Karen Hander, the Republican candidate. The Republicans wrapped House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi around Jon Ossoff, as they have in other elections. The Republicans won. Congresswoman Pelosi is toxic in much of the country. Residents of red America don’t like Nancy Pelosi or her San Francisco Values. The young Ossofff was portrayed as Nancy Pelosi’s pupett. A classic republican ad (available on You tube) for Hander had San Francisco “residents” praising their next Congressman, Jon Ossoff, ending with a san Francisco cable car with a big “ad” for Jon Ossoff, next to a peace symbol, and above “San Francisco Congressman.” San Francisco Values don’t play well between the coasts. They also don’t like her. She comes across as arrogant, contemptuous, shrill and snarky. Congresswoman Pelosi has led the Democrats in the House for almost 15 years. She led them to victory and recontrol of the House in 2006. She gleefully pushed through ObamaCare (“We have to pass the Bill to know what’s in it”), and led the House Democrats to defeat in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, four losses in a row. Yet, she has retained her position as leader of the House Democrats. How? Money. Jesse Unruh, the great California politician, said “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Nancy Pelosi is a consummate fundraiser, raining money on her Democratic colleagues, $568 million. Just as money can’t always but love or an election, it also doesn’t always buy loyalty. Democrats don’t like losing, having controlled Congress for much of the past eight decades. They don’t like losing when they believed they would win, and she played a major role in the loss. The knifes are out with several Congressional Democrats meeting behind closed doors to discuss her future. Her days are numbered. The Democrats thought they had a real chance of winning because Georgia 6 contains a high percent of college educated graduates. They believe that educated Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans. The elitists believe the uneducated, hayseed, gun-clinging “deplorables” support President Trump and Republicans. President Trump barely carried District 6 in 2016. National surveys showed that voters with a college degree voted 52-43% for Clinton in 2016. Roughly 60% of District 6’s registered voters have college degrees. Ergo, 6 would turn blue from red, in their dreams. They forgot the great Speaker Tip O’Neill’s adage “All politics is local.” They ran a national campaign against President Trump for a carpetbagger in a local Congressional District. They continue to misunderstand “Flyover Country.” Even if the highly educated District 6 voters were lukewarm on President Trump, they did not want to go back to Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats. They don’t share the same values. Then we have the Hollywood celebrities. They were out in force in the primary and general election supporting Jon Ossoff. Campaign contributions rained in from Rosie O’Donnell, Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, Sean Daniel, Connie Britton, Sam Waterson, Kyra Sedgwick, Samuel L. Jackson (also did radio ads), Jon Cryer, Rhea Perlman, Lynda Carter, Sarah Silverman, George Takai and John Leguizamo. Tweets came from Chelsea Handler, Debra Messing, Mark Ruffalo, Kerry Washington, Billy Baldwin, and others. Alyssa Milano even drove Ossoff voters to the polls in the primary. The American people may watch their movies and TV shows, but they don’t like Hollywood values. Nor do they think Hollywood understands Americans who reside outside the Beverly Hills/Brentwood/Malibu cocoon. 7,218 contributions of $200 or more were recorded from California for the Ossoff Campaign. From March 29 through May 31 almost as much came from the San Francisco Bay Area ($220,532.10) as from all of Georgia ($228,474.44). Only 14% of his roughly $24 million campaign funding came from Georgia residents. Even his contributions were carpetbagged into the District. Voters don’t like incessant robocalls, which are political spam. The Ossoff Campaign engaged in a multitude of robocalls. (Side Bar – Congress has exempted political campaigns from the Do-Not Call List). Academicians also contributed to his campaign with month coming from each of the top 15 highly ranked universities, and public universities, such as Michigan. The Georgia 6 voters resented the external elitists trying to buy their seat. The Democratic “Get Out the Vote” effort encountered an obstacle in attempting to contact many Millennials, who were living in their parent’s homes because they either were unemployed or underemployed. If President Obama had spent more effort in growing the economy rather than in a policy redistribution, they might have homes of their own. One mother, in answering a Democratic call for her son, told her son that if he answered the call or voted for Ossoff, then he would immediately be cast out of the house on his own. The Democrats need a new message. Anti-Trump failed nationally in 2016. It failed locally in 2017.

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