{"id":15845,"date":"2016-11-16T18:40:50","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T23:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=15845"},"modified":"2016-11-16T18:40:50","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T23:40:50","slug":"politics-as-usual-burning-it-all-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/politics-as-usual-burning-it-all-down\/","title":{"rendered":"POLITICS AS USUAL: Burning it all down"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s all over now but the cryin\u2019.
\nThe unthinkable is now thunk.
\nTrump will be the President of the United States. Even writing that sentence seems ridiculous to me, but there you have it. The facts are the facts, despite however much folks would want it to be otherwise. The most disliked candidate ever to run for office has managed to obtain it. But, leaving all the sobering surreal reality aside, let\u2019s get some things out of the way first, shall we?
\nLet\u2019s deal with facts.
\nTrump did not win the Presidency, he won the Electoral College. At the time of writing this column, Clinton\u2019s edge over Trump was approaching one million more votes. In fact, some agencies are reporting, by the time all the votes are counted (and that\u2019s another bizarre thing about their system) it looks like Clinton will have almost two million more votes than Trump, or nearly 2 per cent more people wanted her than him.
\nShe already has more votes cast for her than Obama did in securing his presidency. And Trump has less votes cast for him than Romney did in losing the presidency.
\nSo, let\u2019s dispense with the smug declarations that he has a \u201cclear\u201d mandate to govern. He has nothing of the sort. Yes, the people have indeed spoken, but once again their voices were not heard. In terms of actual votes cast, Trump should not be the president.
\nBut he is, so now the world has to deal with it.
\nBut let\u2019s deal with why the contest was so close in the first place. How did it come to pass that a trust fund baby, a self-described \u201cblue-collar billionaire\u201d came to be the voice of the unemployed rust belt workers?
\nBecause he promised to blow it all up. He railed about the \u201celites\u201d who don\u2019t care about regular folks, folks who have been left behind in the new economy. He did a good job of speaking directly to them. And he offered nothing but a firm promise to burn it all down.
\nThere was a lot of comment on Trump\u2019s rhetoric during the campaign and rightly so, but not enough on Clinton\u2019s tone-deafness when it came to the working class.
\nHer comments on the coal business are a good example. Imagine being a third generation coal miner and hear her say that she\u2019s putting coal out of business. Would you vote for her? It doesn\u2019t matter that she is right that we shouldn\u2019t use coal anymore. What are you offering the millions of people who rely on it for an income?
\nClinton and Obama talked about the fantastic recovery of the US following the 2008 market crash. And on paper they are right. The economy is booming \u2013 but only for some people. I saw a very stark figure on CNN the other day that drove this point home. Since 2008, over 8.4 million jobs have been created for people with post-secondary education and just 80,000 for folks with just high-school education.
\nYou can\u2019t get a job a Starbucks without a BA these days. What does that say to folks without one?
\nOnly 40 per cent of Americans have a college degree. Does that then mean that fully 60 per cent of the population is unemployable?
\nThere is real and justifiable anger about the economy across the globe. What is the answer? I don\u2019t know. But I do know that it isn\u2019t Donald Trump and, clearly, neither was it Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas Well, it\u2019s all over now but the cryin\u2019. The unthinkable is now thunk. Trump will be the President of the United States. Even writing that sentence seems ridiculous to me, but there you have it. The facts are the facts, despite however much folks would want it to be otherwise. The most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-47z","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 03:21:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}