Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Nov. 13th through Nov. 19th

Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings posts give the Moose, old and new, a place to visit and share words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.

Welcomings will be posted at the start of each week (every Sunday morning). To find the posts, just bookmark this link and Voila! (which is Moose for “I found everyone!!”).

The format is simple: each day, the first moose to arrive on-line will post a comment welcoming the new day and complaining (or bragging!) about their weather. Or mentioning an interesting or thought provoking news item. Or simply checking in.

So … what’s going on in your part of Moosylvania?

NOTE: The comments page will now split off after 20 or so left margin comments with the most recent comments on the current page. To see the older comments, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the link.

44 Comments

  1. Good morning, 47 and partly sunny in Bellingham. My sleep clock remains off kilter but the last nap was long enough to feel restful. My day is off to a slow start though.

    I spent most of yesterday working in the upper garden, planting another screening pot, getting the holes started for the two bigger trees, cleaning up the potting bench area, putting the twiggy patio furniture away for winter, etc. It was good to be outdoors.

    We were at a community college event last night, a foundation event featuring a tasty easy dinner and then a discussion about books lead by a literature prof and the owner of my local bookstore. It was fun to be among like minded friends.

    My outrage meter seems to be overwhelmed….can’t keep up with the latest alarming yam news. His transition isn’t going so well.

  2. sometimes the smallest things can make a difference — I feel 1000x better because someone just called to order Profiles in Courage. Also, most of our copies are checked out. Just knowing that people still check that out from the library…. a teensy bit of hope.

  3. Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …

    It is 32 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 55 degrees. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    It looks like the Medicare phaseout is getting the attention that it deserves. We need to do everything we can to make it toxic to touch. I may even break down and call Ron Freaking Johnson’s office. There are so many things wrong with it that it is impossible to understate how terrible it will be. One of my friends said that the insurance industry and health care industry – hospitals, doctors, pharma – will not allow it. I guess we will see. I am not sure who the new Drumpf administration will be listening to, to be perfectly honest. I do get the sense that the dog who caught the car is having a very difficult time figuring out what to do with it. The transition is on hold again because Mike Pence won’t sign the NDA required by statute to work with the existing administration.

    Dee, I agree with you completely that the problem with this generation is a lack of understanding about how government works. Many were too young to see what a Republican president did to our country at the turn of the century. Purity killed millions after the 2000 election and purity will, unfortunately, kill more after this debacle. Politics is about choices and the choices that people made in 2016 need to turn into a lesson that won’t be forgotten as quickly this time.

    I ate a real meal for the first time in a week and slept for 7.5 hours last night. I think I am reaching the resignation part of grief. Now we have to do what we can to set up a firewall in the Senate to protect the most vulnerable. Three Senators … three Senators … three Senators.

    See all y’all later!

  4. Good morning, Moosekind. It’s partly sunny in NoVa this morning, current temp. 34 F. and heading for 63 F.

    Still not feeling entirely well. This is the cold that refuses to leave. Still, I have too much to do to spend the day in bed.

    One of my friends emailed yesterday that she’s had only two full nights’ sleep since the Awful Event. Often she wakes during the night and lies sleepless for a couple of hours contemplating the horrors of a Thing presidency. Yesterday afternoon m’daughter in Austin and I Face-timed for an hour. We are both reevaluating everything we have ever believed and asking ourselves where we go from here. We are both off Facebook for the time being. She might make it permanent, whereas I will decide that after the outcome of my reevaluation.

    Thing’s transition seems to be in disarray. It would be amusing if it weren’t so fraught with danger for all of us.

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!

    • This, about the transition in disarray:

      It would be amusing if it weren’t so fraught with danger for all of us.

      I am concerned about national security and defense. When President Obama took over, he left the Defense Department’s leadership in place which meant that our (literal) guard was not let down. He had Joe Biden to lean on for foreign policy and for finding people to run the national security apparatus. I don’t worry as much about things like HHS keeping our earned benefits paid on time because that is not done by cabinet level people – programs in place and authorized by Congress will continue as before.

      That 7.5 hours sleep is the longest I have slept in a week (the previous record was 4 hours and there were at least two nights when it was 0). I still woke up worrying but at least it was after my brain had time to rest.

    • Take care of yourself Diana. I took a birthday bouquet to my DIL yesterday afternoon, visited with the grand girls and cuddled the dogs……it helped.

  5. Good morning Meese

    Just watched Rev. Barber’s sermon
    Revival and Resiliency After Rejection | Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II

  6. Took the day off because my friend wants to go to a movie. She’s cancer-free for now but you never know & if she wants to do stuff, I will. Slept in, even a disturbed sleep-in is good.

    So, going to Doctor Strange this afternoon. Cooking for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving luncheon at work tomorrow. I’m making the baked barley recipe, because it looks to be cheap & good. Will try to squeeze in a walk. Oh — high this afternoon of 88. Which is ridiculous. Cold front coming Friday, though — and Saturday will actually be cold. Like, cold.

    • Thanks for sharing the tweets anotherdem. I am not as twitter versed as you are so I appreciate the links you share.

  7. low 40s this morning – saw the waning moon out my bedroom window when I got up – supposedly heading for 80 today. Hope not because it will be too warm to start a fire when I get home, but by bedtime I’ll be cold. I’m probably going to have to have that oak tree trimmed back or even topped. Either that or resign myself to lower electricity production at the time of year when I need every minute of sunlight on those panels. Sigh.

    Every time I think I’m dealing with this, I find out otherwise. I’m having trouble talking to people. Even ones I know are on our team. And especially those who aren’t. At the Market Saturday, I started choking up talking to my long-time vendors. And just now, when I finally got some quiet during Senate office hours, I called Boozman’s office about protecting Medicare and Social Security now like he did 10 years ago in the House and started crying on the phone with the staffer. Just barely got my message out. I guess/hope he’s been getting a lot of these calls because the staffer was very reassuring said, “You can trust him, ma’am” – which Goddess knows on most stuff I don’t, but I have no choice now. I haven’t tried Womack yet but I’m probably not going to do Cotton. Crying just gives him his jollies and not being civil would just make him mad (madder – he’s mad as a hatter now).

    Soloing today which may or may not be a good thing. My friend/co-worker is the only one I can talk to right now without choking up but when she’s not here I can play soothing music (she’s a musician – the sound out of my computer speakers bothers her). Anyway, best get some coffee and then to work. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • My tears are right on the surface too bfitz. The meanest of the R’s policies and so many people hurting just overwhelms me.

      As you know I struggled with pruning my old maple trees, but now the leaves are gone I can see how skillful the arborist was with balancing the cuts, thinning the branches, and keeping the basic shape of the tree intact. I hope you can find someone to open the canopy of your oak tree so more light reaches your solar panels.

      • Trying to find an actual arborist who will return my phone calls. sigh. The Rs policies are so mean – and a woman at work I used to think of as one of the sweetest in the world told me today that she’d voted for Trump. And like a little kid said immediately “don’t hate me” – I don’t remember exactly what I said – something about ask me again in a year if Paul Ryan steals my Social Security. You really start rethinking your opinions of other people at times like these.

        • I know! I find myself looking at people and wondering…did you vote for Thing?

          It may be my imagination, but in the days since The Awful Event, people seem to be cross or grim. My hairdresser, the checkers at the grocery store, just about everyone I meet.

          Has anyone else noticed that?

          • I am avoiding humans in Wisconsin because they are mostly terrible. In 2004, when constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage were on the ballots in many states, Wisconsin passed one that was particularly egregious because it also banned any legal agreements that would allow same-sex couples to draw up documents to protect their domestic partnerships. It passed overwhelmingly and I looked at people here differently after that – wondering which of them voted to take away rights from their fellow citizens and to deny them legal protections.

            Right now, there is a lot of anxiety because the Drumpf voters are spiking the football at our heads. Someone said that it is early yet; we need to let their giddiness subside, which it surely will when they realize that their hero is a tapped in oligarch who will deliver for his peers and the Republican Party establishment and kick them to the curb.

  8. Morning all – so dry here, woke up with a nosebleed. We’re not used to humidity this low I guess.

    Guys, you’re doing the right thing, calling even Members of Congress who are die hard Tea Partyists is not a waste. We have to mobilize and register outrage with all of them, especially House members but also the Senate. I can’t guarantee it will work, but I agree with Jan’s friend – Medicare and the health and insurance industries are so intertwined now, it would be panic time for those powerful interest groups if Congress seriously attempted to unwind it. Social Security is a different matter – no other interest groups are really involved beyond we the people who depend on it, which just means we have to create an even louder buzz saw ourselves, along with all the aging groups out there like AARP and others.

    I saw George Mitchell, former Senator and leader, on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night, and I have to wonder if he’s living in the same post election world as the rest of us. He was talking and acting like we’re dealing with a normal Republican President and Congress, talking about the Dems helping pass infrastructure spending, etc. I was appalled – this is the kind of thinking that will re-relect Trump in 2020 and insure Republican control of Congress for a generation. And I suspect this is the way many of them are thinking – spending bills are always popular, even if it will bankrupt the country down the road, as it surely will combined with the tax changes they’re talking about. We need our Dems in the Senate and House to FIGHT, not negotiate, in my opinion.

    This is NOT a legitimate government that’s forming here – I mean, Trump seems to have a family cabal in mind, letting his son-in-law apparently do the work for him? Good Goddess. Nobody in former Republican administrations really wants to work with them, so we’re seeing the dregs of the dregs mentioned for Cabinet posts, and the overall transition is pretty much stymied because they don’t know what they’re doing. As O’Donnell points out, a slow transition is not such a bad thing, as it will leave the career agency people running the show longer, but that can’t last forever, and then it is likely to be a cesspool of corruption and mismanagement. Ugh. I just hope there’s a way to stop ideas like a registry of Muslim Americans (which they’re discussing apparently) in their tracks – and we need a vigilant Congress to stay on top of those things.

    Just remember, everyone, Hillary won the votes – she was NOT rejected by the people of this country, she will end up winning by probably 2 million votes (she’s ahead by over 1M now), and it was only a matter of 100,000 votes or so in 3 swing states that cost her the EC win. It’s appalling that almost half the people who voted went for Trump, but he is NOT the choice of the American people, never forget.

    Everyone have a good day – we’ll get through this I hope.

    • I saw something on Twitter this morning that was a reminder: there were a half a dozen things that came at us at the end and any one of them could have tilted the election – that we still kept it so close is testament to the appeal of our party and our issues.

      I just listed to Chuck Schumer announcing the leadership team and I have more confidence than I did that we will not cave. I don’t want our side to be Republicanish in their obstructionism, to obstruct just because they can – some day our going high when they go low will pay a bonus. But there can be no compromise on letting the forces of racism and bigotry get a foothold in our shared government. The scariest pick being floated is Kris Kobach as Attorney General. I have been following his career because his actions have been ground zero for voter suppression and he was also the author of the heinous, and unconstitutional, SB 1070 passed in Arizona, the “show your papers” law. He cannot be allowed in that position and I hope that we can get a Gang of Three to vote against his confirmation if he is indeed chosen.

      So many battles – where to fight? That will be the biggest question.

    • The idea of interning Muslims in camps as white people did with Japanese-Americans in WWII makes me feel sick. We can’t let that happen! I read the book Mazanar and felt awful.

  9. Good morning, 44 and partly sunny in Bellingham. I thought I was doing better, but the hours between midnight and 4:00am were long, fraught with worry and no sleep. And unfortunately my pool is closed until after Christmas so I don’t have a place to exercise and clear my brain. The clinic housing the pool is being moved to a new facility and the new pool isn’t finished, but the good news is that the pool program will continue.

    I’ll start making my phone calls re health care today. The congressional delegates I can vote for all support the ACA, Medicare, and Social Security so I’ll be brief. I do plan to call the entire delegation, even those I can’t vote for, with the hopes that enough phone calls will get their attention. It’s not much, but for now it’s the best I can do.

  10. Good morning, meese! Thursday …

    It is 48 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 64. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast. The record for this day is 66 so we may hit that.

    I know that many of you probably watched Hillary’s speech last night. I can’t. I have not watched her concession speech, either. I am brokenhearted over her loss and can’t bear to see her pain. I keep hearing (white male) pundits talking about her “unapproachableness” and her “secretiveness” being her demise. Fk you all!! It is because the margin for error was too close to overcome misogyny – in the end .1% of our voters in a half dozen blue states could not picture a woman as president. They would rather have a disgusting pig who has no respect for the traditions of government than the most qualified person, male or female to run for presidency.

    I have a few White House transcripts I saved in Pocket to explore later related to the rebuilding of our party. But it is too soon for me, the loss is too fresh. President Obama gave us until Thanksgiving to be sad and mope around but then he wants us fired up and ready to organize for the pushback and the win back.

    In the meantime, I called Ron Freaking Johnson’s office and asked them how he would vote on the Medicare phaseout. The person I spoke to said he had not made a statement on that but would soon. She then asked how I wanted him to vote and I said I hoped he would oppose it and that it would be personally devastating to me especially since I will lose healthcare when the ACA is repealed. Once the House passes its bill, I will call again and maybe make a trip to Oshkosh to talk to people in person. Destroying people’s safety net is all fun and games when real humans are not hurt. The Republicans need to see the face of the America they hate.

    President Obama spoke to the Greek people yesterday about small-d democracy and fighting the urges of nationalism. I did not watch it but I saved it off to listen to and will probably post it. By the way, I changed the Moose menu heading from “From the White House” to “Obama’s White House” because I sure as hell am not going to report on the yammerings from Drumpf.

    See all y’all later!!

      • They are literally insane, Dee. Bernie Sanders is NOT the face of the Democratic Party. Some of his ideas have been incorporated into the platform but we do not win behind an old white male from the whitest state in the country. He can’t unring the bells of racial divisiveness he rang during his white male privilege primary … continues to ring, for crying out loud! He sounds like Jim Freaking Webb!!

        PLUS people who are thinking about 2020 are doing electoral politics wrong. Next year there are two governors races and then in 2018 the midterms and the dozen or so red state governorships and hundreds of state legislature seats coming up. We have to win New Jersey and Virginia and build a bench for the midterms. We literally ran no one in dozens of Congressional Districts and local legislature races. The hyper focus on the national party while our states were turning red was a key factor in our loss. You want to be a national party only, winning the popular vote and getting a participation ribbon? Then you will lose the states you need to win the electoral college. Also, the states are where justice is dispensed. We will not have a Justice Department much interested in justice for 4 years and we need to have state and county justice in place to protect people. In Ramsey County, Minnesota, the DA charged the cop who killed Philando Castile. Make sure that people interested in justice are elected there.

        I will look at the video shortly. I am trying not to get outraged by the blatant racism and othering that now seems to be “okay”. The West Virginia mayor’s disrespect for our First Lady pretty much sums up how this race was NOT about economic anxiety but a reaction to having the first black president and a possible female president.

      • Love it. Like one commenter there said, it should be on the front page for the next 4 years. Tipped, rec’d, tweeted, facebooked.

      • That is a great video – I know the woman in it is not Ashley Judd, I wonder who it is? A well spent few minutes watching it, thanks Dee.

  11. Good morning, Moosekind. It seems ironic that we’re having such beautiful weather when we are all literally in mourning. Current temp. in NoVa is 35 F., going up to 61 F. later.

    I remarked on GOS that I feel as if someone has died and life will never be the same again. A couple of people said they felt the same way.

    Can’t deal with activism yet, although I’ve taken names and numbers. Need to be able to get over this in my own way, however long it’s going to take.

    In the meantime, life goes on: now planning for our last “normal” Thanksgiving and our last “normal” Christmas. Who knows what we’ll be doing a year from now? Apparently Thing plans to let his immediate family run the “guvmint” while he plays on Twitter 24/7.

    We’re going to a Thanksgiving lunch at Miss Pink Cheeks’ school today. The food will be awful but it’s nice to see the children and parents. Perhaps later today I’ll have time to make a Victoria Sponge Cake.

    Goddess bless all here!

  12. I only woke up once last night! Pretty amazing. Saw Doctor Strange yesterday with my friend — who is walking without her cane most of the time now. The movie is really good. And they have $5 movies on Tuesdays so we’re going to see Fantastic beasts on the Tuesday after it comes out.

    Democratic club had elections last night, I’m secretary again.

    Here I was, having a nice morning, then this (Trump surrogate cites the Japanese internment camps as a precedent for the Muslim registry):

    https://twitter.com/professormccabe/status/799156106903875584

    https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/799079032499343360

  13. Morning all. A bit chilly here this morning, but it will be back up to 80 the next couple of days, then we’ll get that cold front and down into the 60’s on Saturday which will be great!

    I’m so disappointed in Congressional Democrats gassing on about “working with” Trump and the Republicans – wake up, sheeple, these goons are talking about registering Muslims and internment camps for God’s sake! It’s even more important that we all make phone calls and INSIST on protections of our Social Security, Medicare and ACA – only fear of losing their seats will move these people.

    I woke up thinking and very depressed about the Supreme Court. That’s the first thing they’ll move on, I think, and it will devastate us for a generation. I know there’s a theory that Obama could use the unavoidable brief recess between Congresses on Jan 3 to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and thus stave off the inevitable for another year, but I doubt Obama would do that. I just feel like there are too many people in DC treating this as a more or less normal transition when all the evidence is that it is not normal in any way, that we are teetering on the edge of fascism here.

    But then I think, well, what would happen if the Presidential Electors did vote their consciences, and give Hillary the Presidency – can you imagine the reaction from those 60 million Trump voters? I would fear greatly for enormous violence – and then she would be hamstrung for at least two years and probably longer, as the backlash would probably prevent Dems from making any progress to take Congress back. So the truth is there are no good solutions now – we’re truly farked, and we just have to find the least bad way forward. I hope and think Obama will stay involved in some way – and that he and others can come up with some ways to at least mitigate the damage Trump is going to cause to us and the world.

    Ok, off to pay bills and then re-immerse myself in my game, just to take my mind of the horrors to come. Have a good day everyone!

    • It would be ugly:

      what would happen if the Presidential Electors did vote their consciences, and give Hillary the Presidency – can you imagine the reaction from those 60 million Trump voters?

      I still hold out a sliver of hope that something Drumpf says or does is so horrible, so disgusting that the 60 million people who voted for him beg the electors to change their minds. Considering what he has already said that was not disqualifying in their eyes, there is probably nothing that would rise to that level. For the electors to do it on their own would be a terrible precedent, for one thing, and lead to armed rebellion, for another.

      This morning I was reading and taking in the worries of my friends and the advice they were getting from other friends – that we are still dealing with the shock of this thing and we don’t know exactly what will happen. We need to let ourselves finish grieving, first, then pick a cause to champion. I thought of the Serenity Prayer:

      Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
      Courage to change the things I can,
      And wisdom to know the difference.

      We need to start sorting out the battles that we can win, or move the needle on, and the ones that we should give up as a waste of energy. For example, having Steve Bannon as an advisor is awful but there are plenty of awful people who will slithering through the Oval Office over the next 4 years who we will be disgusted by. I think we can make a case for blocking the repeal of the ACA and for leaving Medicare alone. Orrin Hatch said he does not want to nuke the filibuster which means that they can only repeal it via reconciliation and can’t replace it with anything. No one is going to support a complete repeal with nothing for those 20 million people and no one can figure out what the replacement will look like! So we can leverage “Congressional Republicans in Disarray!” to our advantage. And finally, if Drumpf senses that people will turn on him if Medicare is phased out, he may be unwilling to sign the bill.

      So let’s wait and see what happens, trust the Senate (I know!), and start making a lot of noise about healthcare.

      • I think we can save Medicare and Social Security and maybe even ACA (since it’s an R plan in the first place, all they have to do is rename it and claim it’s their “replacement”) – and if we can hang onto the current limited form of the filibuster, the corporatist Rs will sit back and let us take the blame of course, but we can block truly horrendous SCOTUS appts and the other categories the filibuster still covers. Not much we can do about lower Court appts except hope Trump is as lazy as his R predecessor and won’t name that many.

        • It takes a while to ramp up an administration even when the president-elect is competent and engaged. Drumpf is anything but (despite David Freaking Axelrod’s pronouncements). We can hope that they move slowly enough that a new Congress, ready to put a stop to the worst of it, can get elected in 2018. Right now, the yam’s approval rating is 42% and his disapproval rating is 55% – approval will only go down. That gives us hope for an incredible surge of buyer’s (and non-voters) remorse to help with the pushback.

          Josh Marshall at TPM is keeping track of the status of both the ACA and Medicare repeal. The responses are all over the board. If Ryan can successfully tie ACA to Medicare and dupe enough people into thinking that they need to repeal both at once, we are sunk. But right now it looks like the Senate won’t buy the Medicare part of it without Democratic help. I hope to hell they don’t get it.

  14. 65 overnight – clouds moved in just after sunset – and 70 at the moment heading for upper 70s. Sunny again, which I need for the electricity if nothing else. Rollercoaster weather (global warming is a hoax, right) – our overnight low will also be tomorrow’s high and we’ll get our first hard frost early Saturday morning. Still can’t get an arborist to return my calls/emails.

    Dudebros are still taking up air at GOS. That’s the reason the Village Under the Bus community was created – a refuge from listening to the Deplorable Left violently insist that a 70+ y.o. New England Socialist Jew would have won and we should grovel before them and give them everything they want. So I stay in the Village and community groups (Pootie, KTK, Street Prophets, Community Fundraising, etc).

    Guess I’d best get back to work. It’s still so hard to focus that I’m taking twice or more times as long to do anything and once I’m distracted or interrupted I may not get back to a task for hours. Justice I suppose. I am currently giving the State the quality of work they are actually paying for rather than the quality of work I normally take pride in. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  15. Good morning, 42 and mostly cloudy in Bellingham. I stayed busy with house and laundry chores yesterday and I finally had a more normal night’s sleep last night. But watching HRC’s remarks flooded me with sadness and seems to have frozen my thoughts. She looked so weary.

    I’ve got several articles saved to read, but I can’t seem to focus so I’ll find some more busy work to do today.

  16. Good morning, meese! Friday …

    It is 57 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 64. The forecast calls for variable cloudiness.

    Well, I am back to “nap” sleeping – 4 hours and done. I need to find something else to put in my brain besides the election what-ifs (totally wasted energy) and the Republican president-elect’s transition (mostly wasted energy). I am trying to keep up with the status of healthcare. This is quite a dilemma for Republicans: they won over the red states on the promise of repeal and any go slow will rile their base. But if they don’t go slow, they will risk their majorities especially since they are bent on repealing the promise of Medicare along with the ACA.

    See all y’all later!

  17. Good morning, Meese. It’s 31 F. at the moment, going up to 70 F. today. I should be rejoicing but I’m not. Yesterday, while walking Miss Pink Cheeks to the park after picking her up from school, I tripped over an uneven sidewalk and went sprawling. My face looked like raw hamburger yesterday and doesn’t look a whole lot better after a night’s rest.

    If one could but catch a break! At least it all happened after Dearly and I went to the school to have Thanksgiving lunch with Younger Son and Miss Pink Cheeks. The food was fairly decent, remembering what we had in earlier years. When Younger Son was a child and we had Thanksgiving lunch with him, the food was absolutely awful.

    Still not up to listening to or watching any news. Getting a surprising amount done without it and Facebook.

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and Beyond! Speaking of ponds, when we went to Younger Son’s house yesterday to let the dog out for a few minutes, we could see the lake at the bottom of his backyard through the now-bare trees. An entire gaggle of wild Canada geese were swimming and honking on the lake. It was quite a sight!

    • Gak!! You are having the most horrible luck lately.

      I am starting to wade back into the news but very very selectively. I have no room in my life for anger at things that cannot be fixed. A sense of resolve is a better use of time.

      President Obama sat for an interview with a reporter from the New Yorker and gave us some hope.

      On the day after the election:

      “A lot of you are young and this is your first rodeo,” Obama told the staffers in the Oval Office, a source recalled. “For some of you, all you’ve ever known is winning. But the older people here, we have known loss. And this stings. This hurts.” It’s easy to be hopeful when things are going well, he went on, but when you need to be hopeful is when things are at their worst.

      I think this is true of him and also of Hillary running as the first woman:

      “A President who looked like me was inevitable at some point in American history,” he said. “It might have been somebody named Gonzales instead of Obama, but it was coming. And I probably showed up twenty years sooner than the demographics would have anticipated. And, in that sense, it was a little bit more surprising. The country had to do more adjusting and processing of it. It undoubtedly created more anxiety than it will twenty years from now, provoked more reactions in some portion of the population than it will twenty years from now. And that’s understandable.”

      On turnarounds:

      And Obama related the Party’s losses this year to previous setbacks—and recoveries. “Some of my staff are really young, so they don’t remember this,” Obama said. “They remember my speech from the Boston Convention, in 2004, because they uploaded it on YouTube or something, but they might have been fifteen when it happened. Well, that’s the election that John Kerry lost. George Bush was reëlected. Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader in the Senate, was defeated. The Senate went Republican. The House was Republican. Me and Ken Salazar, of Colorado, were the only two Democrats nationally who won. It was a very similar period to where we are right now. Two years later, Democrats had won back the Senate; I think they had won back the House. And four years later I was the President of the United States.

      “So this notion somehow that these irreversible tides have been unleashed, I think, surrenders our agency. […]

      “Setting aside the results of this election, Democrats are well positioned to keep winning Presidential elections just by appealing to the base. And, each year, the demographic improves.”

      The future:

      we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. […]

      “I’ll be fifty-five when I leave”—he knocked on a wooden end table—“assuming that I get a couple more decades of good health, at least, then I think both Michelle and I are interested in creating platforms that train, empower, network, boost the next generation of leadership.”

      I won’t be the “next generation of leadership” but I will do my best to support them.

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