Tag Archives: journalists

ANALYSTS, COLUMNISTS & EXPERTS

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Why did the Democrats lose? Each analyst, columnist and expert reads the results and expresses good points, many of which are found in statistics of the election.

A compelling, overarching reason for the Democratic loss is their static view of the electorate and issues. The Democrats constructed a model, like a model guiding stock market trades. The Democrats enunciated the model and gave it support at every opportunity. The pre-election polls indicated the model was sound; the Democrats were favored.

The model included philosophy as well as philosophy of governing; where to spend money. It included psychology, how to react to things (insults), what to say, how to contact the electorate, etc. The model representing the theory of philosophy and the psychology was imprecise and incomplete. Bless her, Hillary Clinton stuck with the model.

What the model also overlooked was Hillary Clinton’s effectiveness as a candidate. At the beginning of the campaign the candidate and the Democrats knew of her flaws and ingrained behaviors. Hillary is bookish; her speech can be elevated to obscurity and incomprehension – she spoke in complete sentences; her movements and motions before a crowd can seem defensive. Hillary Clinton did improve as a campaigner, but she also lapsed into more familiar ways. There are things – Certainly if talk is in complete sentences, but talk in short sentences. Never say Motor Vehicle; say car. Use the Anglo-Saxon side of the language rather than the French (Latin). The grammar is Anglo-Saxon. Mark Twain also observed, At a dime a word, I never use metropolis when I can use city. [Note Metropolis is used in cartoons today.]

Hillary Clinton also had a public record that was known to the American people. Whether they believed she did some or all the things listed, her ratings on trustworthiness were very low. She never got a positive trustworthy rating, even in comparison to her opponent. She carried that load through the election but lost to another New Yorker whom Americans also did not trust. In the end Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate beaten by another flawed candidate.

Analysts, columnists and experts don’t talk about the best candidates. I am not referring to Bernie Sanders, who was incredibly sincere and seemingly honest in his campaign. He spoke well and had enthusiastic crowds, but the Democrats would have suffered the same fate. Bernie was more to the Left and easily placed there. The Democrats who came to Trump would not have gone elsewhere in large numbers.

A Sanders nomination, along with Trump, would have brought forth a real third party – Michael Bloomberg. He had the revenues, he had the ability, he had the resume, he had the ability and he had conducted polling. He could have taken the middle of America. Second Amendment people complain about him, but in California and especially in Nevada, his local, small-step gun control measures won in referenda. Bloomberg did not run.

The Democrats lost their best choice, Joe Biden. Certainly, he was part of the Obama Administration; he had that baggage. But he likes people and attracts crowds; he seems openly friendly. Despite a long public record, he had no glaring embarrassments to bite him.

Sanders’ supporters believed if Hillary Clinton were dropped or were rejected in the Winter 2016, Bernie would have gotten the nomination. Head to head with Biden, it is likely Sanders would have lost.

This speculation over candidates and each of their strengths is why columnists, analysts and experts forego looking at the Democratic nominee. Nobody wants to believe that Hillary Clinton lost one or two-tenths of a percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin based upon perceptions of her earlier public life. The percentage of the vote lost in each state may be narrower.

Now, reporters, analysts and experts are coming from the woodwork for their year-end analyses. THIS IS WHY IT HAPPENED. In The Big Short, Michael Lewis, quotes a trader who sums up his trade and the after reaction from the financial community:
“I must say that I have been astonished by how many people now say they saw the subprime meltdown, the commodities boom and the fading economy coming…And if they don’t always say it in so many words, they do it by appearing on TV or extending interviews to journalists, stridently projecting their own confidence in what will happen next. And surely, these people would never have the nerve to tell what’s happening next, if they were so horribly wrong on what happened last, right? (p. 246)
Guess what journalists, experts, analysis’s and columnists are doing today, all without doing much thinking, doing no research, doing no analyses and failing to be trustworthy and honest. They’re just moving their mouthes because that’s all these jokers can do!

Looking at the entire election and asking about the substance and method to convey it, plus scrutinizing the candidates. is important. The whole thing did not need changing. Hillary Clinton won a majority of the popular vote; she came close to victory. Democrats now cannot turn off her voters. But the message of the Democratic Party should be more hopeful. For example,
the problem with Obamacare is Bill Clinton is correct: It’s crazy to double costs and cut in half services provided. As costs got worse over the years, the Democratic Party never announced solutions to address the issue. They stuck with the model; they adhered to theory. They worshipped Health Insurance figureheads that might be idolized. No one in Congress proposed anything resembling healthcare – paying for health insurance does not mean one has healthcare. Happily one roadblock is removed in January 2017. Old-timer, Harry Reid was a deceitful, detestful man whose slime trail leads to the flames of Hell.

NEW YORK CITIERS

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NEW YORK CITIERS

Citizens of New York state are New Yorkers, but an odd breed of beings are New York Citiers. This has always been the case, noted during the American Revolution and through the Constitutional period. Three examples provide this distinction – the separation of New York Citiers from other Americans – and tell that New York Citiers are selfish, irrational, duplicitous, depraved and unreformable.

In 1775 New York Citiers were conflicted about the Britain and King or Americans and freedom. No one wanted to stand in one camp or the other: “…it had to receive the rebel generals on the same day that it must welcome back from a visit to England its royal governor…Fortunately, they landed there several hours apart, so that “the volunteer companies raised for the express purpose of rebellion,” as the loyalist judge, Thomas Jones, put it, “the members of the Provincial Congress….the parsons of the dissenting meetinghouses, with all the leaders and partisans of faction and rebellion,” would meet the generals at four in the afternoon, and conduct them to Leonard Lispenard’s house, “amidst repeated shouts and huzzas,” and, at nine o’clock, “the members of his Majesty’s Council, the Judges of the Supreme Court, the Attorney General…the Clergymen of the Church of England,” and so on, all the dignified, respectable, highly placed officials, “with a numerous train of his Majesty’s loyal and well affected subjects,” could meet the Governor and conduct him, “with universal shouts of applause,” to the residence of Hugh Wallace, Esq. “But strange to relate… those very people who attended the rebel Generals in the morning… and now, one and all, joined in the Governor’s train and with the loudest acclamations… welcomed him back to the colony…What a farce! What cursed hypocrisy!”

Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, NY, MacMillan, p. 102.

New York City was the last place on the original 13 states that the British occupied. The British liked the place and left their mark, concealing the abhorrent, sinful and arrogant attitudes and moods of the people existing in that place. I often wonder whether the negotiators of the 1783 Treaty of Paris did not make a mistake: Leave the British in possession of New York City in exchange for giving the United States of America Canada.

Of course, no one would trade New York City for twenty-five cents, so neither the Canadians nor the British would go for it today. New York City has one major drawback, its people:

“With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found. We have been treated with an assiduous respect. But I have not seen one real gentlemen, one well-bred man, since I came to town. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable.

There is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast and all together. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again, and talk again.

Page Smith, John Adams, NY, Doubleday, 1962, vol. 1, p. 166.

As stated, the primary economic activity of New York Citiers is talk, from any man or woman from that place. Americans get to experience New York City on TV every minute of every day. Almost every New York City journalist asks a very imperfect question and the interviewee guesses at the desired answer. The journalist, in New York Citier fashion just like John Adams reported, interrupts and sometimes answers his own question while arguing with the interviewee and asking another imperfect question. In that process a few dozen cliches, slogans and homilies, are spit out in an attempt to direct the interviewee onto the politically correct answer. New York Citiers are obviously eager to tell their individual stories to captive audiences and interviewees, silent and not heard. Any interviewee who doesn’t comply with these broadcast rules is never interviewed again.

But talk is cheap, especially today when mouths are disconnected from brains frequently addled by chemicals or sheer ignorance. Excessive jabbering on TV comes from great insecurity, much like rulers of a totalitarian society: “…no matter how enlightened, [they] will never surrender – a constantly exercise – their power to hector, warn, and admonish, in brief to pester and bore their helpless subjects.” (Adam Ulam, The Fall of the American University, N.Y., The Library Press, 1972, p. 170.)

Other than what New York Citiers chatter about incessantly today, like each of them is living in a Woody Allen movie, they were obsessively nonsensical in the 1780s. James Madison wrote George Washington a letter discussing the suitability of New York City as the capital of the United States, but he kept referring to the people of that place:

It seems to be particularly essential that an eye should be had in all our public arrangements to the accommodation of the Western Country, which perhaps cannot be sufficiently gratified at any rate, but which might be furnished with new fuel to its jealousy by being summoned to the sea-shore & almost at one end of the Continent. There are reasons, but of too confidential a nature for any other than verbal communication which make it of crucial importance…

The extreme eccentricity of [New York City] will certainly in my opinion being on a premature and consequently an improper choice. This policy [Capital of New York City] is avowed by some of the sticklers for this place, and is known to prevail with the bulk of them. People from the interior…will never patiently repeat their trips to this remote situation…

Papers of James Madison, vol 12, p. 343, August 24, 1788.

Madison is not the sort of person to come out and complain in a letter. He’s willing to voice reasons and reactions to New York City in a personal meeting, but he couldn’t avoid noting the extreme eccentricity present in 1788. It’s more true today. It is a place that derives all the benefits of having 33,000 police officers on its force. How have those cops done? Street crime is down, but in New York City white collar crime is unknown. Did Wall Street executives always comply with all laws, from 2005-2010?

If New York City is the center of journalism, what did journalists do over the last ten years to uncover and report the greatest financial crimes committed since the 1920s? Have any articles examined or explained high speed trading strategies, and how those programs are analogous to “pooling” arrangements made by Wall Street traders 90 years ago? Has anyone ever noticed that in his book on the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith has a chapter entitled, “In Goldman Sachs We Trust,” and why is anyone trusting that institution and those people these days? New York City may be the center of advertising, but does anyone want to watch ads today? Larry and Darin did a lot better than the guys on “Madmen.”

In the early 1970s Richard Nixon brought the country to its knees by depleting trust and confidence in government. In the last ten years through Wall Street New York Citiers have attacked America and Americans, and afterward seeking protection in security laws, in privilege and immunity, in trade secrets and confidence as well as a financial mafia pledged to silence. Trust and confidence nationwide remain uneasy. Any investor would have been better off investing with the mob, than with most institutions on Wall Street. New York Citiers turned their private exposure into public obligations through the obscenely wild expansion of debt and using the Federal Reserve balance sheet. This is the status of New York Citiers, nothing to applaud and everything to detest – pride and arrogance in their insularity. It has been a problem for this country since the founding.