How is a 5' 5" Female Competing against a 6' 3" Provider?
This election: it's not about lost wages and jobs. It's about lost stature for white men and the women who depend on white men for a living. And that's kinda absurd.
Honestly, bad enough the country wanted to have a beer with W back in 2000. (To be fair, I didn't want to have a beer with Gore. I don't think I could have withstood his personality.) But picking presidents based on their personalities makes zero sense to me. And the Repubs used to be the best on this issue: they had Nixon, Goldwater, Coolidge. Not terrifically sexy or convincingly "fun" guys.
Dems had Jack, Bill, Teddy, Robert. And all was going just fine, until the Repubs hit upon a winning formula—telegenic shisters. And so the world got Reagan. And as undereducated he was, at least he had experience governing a REAL state. OK, he buried it in debt and supported laws that drained the government coffers, but at least we knew that going in.
What strikes me is how ludicrously under experienced the candidate of the current Republican party is. Why is this guy the party pic? A series of articles in the Times illuminated the answer today. The upshot is that the median income of the average Trump primary voter is $72,000, which is $16,000 higher than the national average.
Why does this matter? Because it means well-off higher educated people are what's truly driving his campaign. Uneducated, "some time" voters don't drive elections. Two things drive elections of inexperienced candidates: "hope" or "glory."
I believe Trump brings these well-off folks a sense that the country they used to have more power over looked a certain way, and that meant it was led by a tall, strapping former footballer, not a 5' 5" woman who graduated at the top of her class. We don't want the valedictorian, we want the sexy all-star. We want glory this year. for 8 years we wanted the former head of the law review. But after 8 years of the C student who got us mired in the middle east, the head of the law review seemed like a better bet.
But these folks suddenly realized, "Hey wait a minute, this guys doesn't look like me or the high school footballer. He looks eerily different. And now after 8 years of different, you want me to vote for a what?!" A woman? How emascualating!
LOL, paleez. Grow a pair, fellas.
And all those women voting for this strapping bully are interested in him mostly because they know their income stream depends on a man or men or child support that is tied to men like that succeeding. These are women living in states where its hard for a woman to make a satisfying wage. If you've lived your reality in a place where your wages depend on the local mines or the local manufacturing and the pensions that used to come with it, well, that money isn't there any longer. And if you are the wife of one of those men, well...that cushy retirement you were promised is more or less not there.
So be not surprised when you see all these Trump women. They have nothing to look forward to when they see a woman in the White House. Her ascension would be just more proof that that pension left when we started flooding our markets with Chinese steel.
The consequences are complicated, obviously. We cannot hope for peace after this election, the country is too fractured. 9/11 was probably the initial blow—bringing to American reality what a half century of a hateful middle east policy could drive into the people who lived half way around the world. And then Trump was the death knell cleaving a country that was well on its way into two divided state. His ability to now bring the radical right agenda to "normalcy" will be the kindling that these folks need to make closure nigh impossible.
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