One winner in this giant imbroglio after the election is the reputation of Hillary Clinton. Clearly she was not as bad a candidate or as universally despised as people have made her out to be.
If Joe Biden, the most inoffensive white-bread candidate imaginable, can barely squeak by President Trump, then this has a lot more to do with the extraordinary devotion that President Trump inspires than with what Hillary did wrong.
And let’s not forget Jim Comey’s 11th hour surprise and the Russian interference in 2016.
What is absolutely clear now is how much the Republicans were gearing up to run against Bernie Sanders than to run against Joe Biden.
Sanders partisans – and I’ve been one for most of my life – have argued for a long time that the polls showed the Bernie would have beat Trump in 2016, and showed that he would have beaten him again in 2020.
Well, I hope we can all agree now that any polls related to the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections are not to be trusted.
Bernie would have been competitive, but I don’t think he beats Trump in either 2016 or 2020. He’s still a septuagenarian socialist Jew, and that would have been a bridge too far for a lot of “housewives” in the suburbs of Atlanta, or Pittsburg, or Milwaukee or Detroit.
I don’t know that anybody other than Barack Obama himself beats Trump in either of those years.
I hope that four years from now the country might be ready for a President Kamala Harris. But given how unbelievably popular bigotry has become again in this country, I’m not so sure.
I know one thing: I won’t be trusting the polls.
Other than that, let’s hope that Joe Biden can restore a tiny bit of bipartisanship, and hope that the next four years can calm the waters just a little bit.
So that we can all catch our breath again. Just let us catch our breath again.
