I had to wait until President Barack Obama gave his concession speech. I know what you’re thinking: Obama couldn’t have given a concession speech on Wednesday because he neither ran in or lost Tuesday’s election. Well, this is Obama and every election is about him. It’s not fair to say that he spent the last three months not doing his job as president but in campaign mode for Hillary Clinton. He has spent the last eight years campaigning for Obama and he never let the job of the presidency get in his way.
Only two more months and change and he’ll be out of the way.
I have to admit feeling a strong sense of gratification waking up to a President-Elect Donald Trump. I have been predicting his win right here for the last six weeks. Did I ever lose faith? I came close to doubting during the worst few days of the “locker room” video that was followed by a plethora of sexual assault accusations. That’s when I re-watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and remembered that in any Frank Capra film, the hero has to go through some dark corridors before finding the light.
The illumination came on Tuesday night. I was waiting for the “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment but realized that the mainstream media had been holding up the “Clinton Trumps Trump” headline ever since The Donald came down the escalator at Trump Towers and declared himself a candidate. The Clinton News Network had the narrative already written but they just got the ending wrong.
But more than just Donald Trump won this election. The people and social media won this election. You had to strain to find a Trump ad on television while Clinton – replete with the tinny strains of piano chords – seemed to play constantly. But Trump saved his and the GOP’s bank account by allowing the citizen journalists on Twitter and Facebook to promote his candidacy. If you wanted to know who was really winning this election, you ignored the polls, forgot cable TV and saw who was trending that afternoon.
I’ll tell you when I first knew that Trump was going to win. My wife and I always spend July 1-3 in Gettysburg, PA, where as a Civil War re-enactor I commemorate the actual three days of the historic battle there. Of late we spend time with a local husband and wife who own their own business. She told us that Trump was not only going to become the next president, he was going to win the Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania – for three reasons: Obamacare, taxes and regulations.
And that’s precisely why Trump did win.
Like every American, our friends in Gettysburg told us that they were sick and tired of The Unaffordable Health Care Act but were afraid to get either sick or tired because the deductable was too high. That was before the October Surprise of the rates going up an average of 25 per cent, which, as Trump has noted, would have probably become 50 per cent of higher – would have if Clinton had of won. Now Obamacare, like Obama, is history.
So too are Clinton’s tax hikes and the curb on prosperity that defined the Obama years: job-killing, initiative-stifling regulations that came in the form of weekly executive orders from the Oval Office.
Fox News’s Bill Hemmer wondered aloud on Wednesday morning, “When’s the last time Obama sat down with someone in the Congress?” It was a rhetorical question, but we all knew the answer. It’s been eight years because he just ran the country into the ground with executive orders and forgets the legislative branch of government.
I’ll tell you why Trump is going to be different. He’s not a politician and he didn’t make any promises that he can’t keep or take out any loans that he can’t repay. He started this race as a politically incorrect businessman and that’s how he finished it. This guy is the real deal. He was still saying “We’re going to repeal Obamacare” in the last week of the campaign just like he was in the first week. He doesn’t have to move to the centre or mend political fences – just build a wall.
After eight years of Democratic campaigning, get ready for business not as usual.
Feels good to be right.