Learning from Mistakes

The only thing that is smarter than learning from your own mistakes is learning from the ones others make before you.  The advancement of society depends upon it. Over the past several years the GOP has steadfastly exploited a mistake made over two decades ago by their opposition.  But exploiting that failure in others is a different tool than learning from it.  The mistake I'm talking about is none other than William Jefferson Clinton.  The Democratic party, after two terms of Reagan and one term of George Bush the elder, after watching Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis FAIL to win the hearts and minds of the American people, saw Slick Willy with his Saxophone and his teflon coating as a renaissance of the JFK era.  I remember this because it was the first election in which I was old enough to vote.
People who paid attention knew that Billy-boy had some baggage, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers were out there, and Whitewater. But he seemed so perfect a totem for the ascendancy of the Baby Boomers, finally taking the reigns from the "Greatest Generation."  Sure he didn't have the military background the GHW Bush had, but he could be the Democratic version of Ronald Reagan if not the second coming of JFK.  So the Democrats, who had pretty much given up on the religious right and the moral majority ever voting blue again, decided to hitch their wagons to a man they knew had moral failings, but who had political gifts.  They sold whatever conscience they had in order to win.
I'm not talking political ideals here at all, I'm talking personalities, because I am beginning to suspect that, in the years I have been voting, it is personality and not ideology that wins these things.
Caveat Emptor: The Democrats got 16 years of not being able to pretend to have a moral bone in their body, ceding the high ground on any question of principle to an opposition who honestly had no better right to claim it than they did.  I thought that perhaps the Obama Presidency, eight years of what now seems a blissful, scandal free administration led by a man that reasonable people were almost forced to admire for his composure and decorum if not his policy, might finally lift the Dems out of the moral dumpster fire of Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman."
Then they ran Hillary, who for all her qualifications is still, for some reason, a Clinton.  I thought that maybe, despite all good sense, perhaps the Republicans were actually moral enough to reject Trump, con man extraordinaire, and they probably would have been against almost anyone else besides a Clinton.  I know, people try to say it was more complicated than that, maybe it was the fact that she was a woman, maybe it was Comey, maybe it was Benghazi, the emails, whatever, but most of the people I know who voted for Trump did it with their noses held and voted against Clinton.
People remember things longer than we generally acknowledge and having the President of the United States of America make a mockery of your whole system (moral, legal and ethical) stings pretty bad. So what better way to take revenge on the Clinton machine than by electing a Republican version of him over his wife.  I really do think that Trump is a lot like Bill Clinton, with the added frosting of political incompetence and borderline mental stability.  Both of them probably deserve to be impeached at some point (Bill survived his, Trump might too).
The thing is though, while we are paying attention to the orange haired ignoramus, political stuff is happening that's going to really hurt our country.  We are ceding our nation to oligarchs and plutocrats and engaging in the worst sort of identity politics.  Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch, both long term fixtures in the US Congress made statements over the past several days that absolutely personify the worst stereotypes of heartless right-wing snobbery. This sort of blatant, haughty, disdain for poor and working class people reveals that the GOP doesn't fully understand the populist sentiment that inflicted Trump upon them (and us).  The fact that Trump is about as populist as Andrew Carnegie is irrelevant, the people who voted for him did so out of a very populist sentiment and it is not one of the better angels of populism either.  The reason why Donald J Trump still holds an approval rating even in the 30s is because he continues to be inflammatory. And what a lot of people wanted from Trump was to simply have him break stuff. I think we need to understand that a good portion of Trump voters would like Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch to get hoisted by their own petard as much as they would enjoy Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi getting tarred and feathered. Because large numbers of people simply hate Washington D.C. and assume that all politicians are crooked, bottom-feeders, and they have ample reason for that; Bill Clinton was the head hyena, and as we are finding out now, he had quite a pack of fellow predatory scavengers.
Bill Clinton had his famous, "it's the economy stupid" line about how he was managing to remain popular despite scandals.  The current day administration ought to know though that their plutocratic policies are going to be like gasoline on a fire of outrage if they don't work. If the people who believe in what the Trump sold them wake up to find that they have actually been betrayed into the hands of robber barons, they are not going to be happy with you, and thanks to the interweb, your Mr. Burns imitations are now out there, so that everyone can witness your own little "let them eat cake moment." One commentator referred to it as "riding a hungry tiger," good luck when the tiger notices that you are moist and delicious.
I can't say I'm happy about the prospect of things going sideways and south, schadenfreude only goes so far, I live in this country too.