Moronic Analysis from Slate

[man on the moonshine]

You Played Yourself, Democrats. Again.
By Jim Newell
Dec. 20 2016 4:47 PM

Few people in the galaxy aren’t in need of a nice, long holiday after the deaths, the elections, and the deaths by election that have characterized 2016. These past 12 months have been taxing. The group that really needs to be put on mandatory vacation—starting now, and through New Year’s weekend, with no obligations other than daily meditation—is what remains of the Democratic Party. Democrats need to close the books on 2016 without somehow losing a thumb in the process. Monday’s Electoral College oopsie-daisy was the last straw, and mandatory restraint from further calendar-year Democratic beclownment is duly ordered.

This was the Year of Democratic Self-Owns. You know the pattern. It is marked by some hoped-for development that in theory would crush Republicans but, at the moment of action, embarrasses Democrats in ways that should have been foreseeable. Obviously we are speaking here of Democrats’ hope that the Republican Party would nominate Donald J. Trump for president. The Republican Party did its part and gave the Democrats a nominee who could not win. In response, the Democrats nominated one of their own. The stoppable force met the movable object and won on an electoral coin flip. In a few weeks, Donald J. Trump, the name-leasing tradesman popularized on television’s The Celebrity Apprentice, will preside over a unified Republican federal government working in close coordination with state-level unified Republican governments to remake the country in their image.

Think of all the misplaced confidences along the way.

Let’s go all the way back to late 2014 and the then-popular theory that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would retain Barack Obama’s “rising American electorate” coalition of unmarried women, minorities, and young people while performing leaps and bounds better than Obama among the white working class. Clinton allies were talking about putting Indiana, Missouri, and Arkansas in play. The members of the white working class had other ideas, and they cost Clinton the election.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_democrats_electoral_college_dream_gets_crushed.html

1. Democrats picked up seats in the House and Senate.
2. Clinton got nearly three million more votes than Trump.
3. Forget the Russians: if James Comey keeps his goddamn mouth shut and doesn't violate protocol, Hillary wins the White House and Dems retake the Senate.
4. Why didn't Jim Newelll write this article two months ago?

Just another case of self-rationalizing 20/20 hindsight from what passes for a "journalist" these days.