CommentsCAMPAIGN 2016--Remember Jeb Bush? You know, he was the guy, with the... thing? And our dear friend Martin O’ Malley! He held an event in Iowa in a blizzard. One guy showed up ― and he wasn’t really feeling it, as it turned out.
So much has happened since we launched First To Last in January 2015. American politics as we understood it seems to have fallen apart. Jeb Bush folded like aHoberman sphere; Donald Trump stepped out from a puff of brimstone to sell America a monorail. Hillary Clinton, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.
We’ve seen Bernie Sanders ― who maybe didn’t think he was going to be in this race too long ― hang on through the entire primary, and influence the Democratic Party. We learned, the hard way, that winners don’t finish third. (Sorry, Marco Rubio.) And somehow, Wikileaks has gone from plumbing the secrets of the Deep State to being as obsessed with dumb campaign minutiae and horse-race politics as the establishment media it rebelled against. Who knew Julian Assange was destined to become Woke Mark Halperin? Seems a disappointment.
Seriously, what have we learned? Here are our Dirty Dozen takeaways. No time to be clever, people, the apocalypse is nigh. (Hey, that’s also Trump’s pitch to America!)
1
WE DIDN'T KNOW TRUMP HAD THIS IN HIM
This is probably something you've noticed. Very few people figured on Trump being a serious candidate. He laid waste to our conventional wisdom and all of the well-worn cliches in which we've taken comfort.
2
WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE, EITHER
Or at least, we don't know what we thought we knew. In a race where political science has been upended and norms put to the torch, we were all like the cast of "Lost," struggling to feed ourselves and wary of smoke monsters.3
THE FBI IS AS POLITICAL AS IT HAS EVER BEEN
The fact that Rudy Giuliani's cronies essentially walked up to the edge of staging an actual coup d'etat shouldn't make us sleep that easy!
4
SOMETIMES OLD BRAND NAMES CAN FAIL
See Jeb Bush.5
SOMETIMES BIG MONEY CAN FAIL
See Jeb Bush.
6
TWITTER MAY BE LOSING MONEY BUT IT'S POWERFUL IN POLITICS
It elevated Trump in the first place. It also frequently set the narrative before the pundit class could get there. And it's been a Love Canal of grotesqueness throughout.7
SOBERING THOUGHT #1
Trump has come very close to winning this thing. Just think about what might have happened if he'd invested any time or effort in a real ground game!
8
SOBERING THOUGHT #2
Clinton has come very close to winning this thing. But her ability to govern, and to keep the Democratic coalition together, may depend on her abandoning the middle-of-the-road Clintonism that she wears like a pantsuit.9
PAUL RYAN ISN'T SHREWD
Donald Trump finally exposed the fact that the Emperor of the House has no clothes.
10
"PARTY LEADER" REALLY IS AN OXYMORON
Or, in the case of Reince Priebus and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, just "moron" will do.11
WHAT "ISSUES" MATTERED IN THIS RACE?
Did any? (See also: the lack of ideas.)
12
THE BOTTOM LINE
We always knew that this wasn't going to be a particularly upbeat election. But this campaign season exposed a real darkness at the center of our body politic, a lack of vision among our leaders, and no small amount of rot in our institutions, which we've always trusted to keep autocrats at bay. Whoever wins this race will face an enormous challenge stitching this country back together, and as near as we can tell, only one of the major-party candidates has even a passing interest in doing so.
(Howard Fineman Global Editorial Director, Jason Linkins Eat The Press Editor, and Lauren Weber The Morning Email Editor, The Huffington Post … where this piece was first posted.)
-cw
Here’s What We Learned During This Miserable, Endless Election Year
