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“That was some weird shit,” George W. reportedly said with characteristic Texas bluntness. I couldn’t have agreed more. We headed
Chaffetz posted a picture of our handshake with the caption “So pleased she is not the President. I thanked her for her service and wished her luck. The investigation continues.” What a class act! I came this close to tweeting back, “To be honest, thought you were Reince.”
I wanted badly to join the crowds and chant my heart out. But I believed it was important for new voices to take the stage, especially on this day. There are so many exciting young women leaders ready to play bigger roles in our politics. The last thing I wanted was to be a distraction from the genuine outpouring of grassroots energy.
These people were looking for absolution that I just couldn’t give. We all have to live with the consequences of our decisions. There
I wear my composure like a suit of armor, for better or worse. In some ways, it felt like I had been training for this latest feat of self-control for decades.
I remember when Bill lost his reelection as Governor of Arkansas in 1980. He was so distraught at the outcome that I had to go to the hotel where the election night party was held to speak to his supporters on his behalf. For a good while afterward, he was so depressed that he practically couldn’t get off the floor. That’s not me. I keep going. I also stew and ruminate.
The election is now over, The result is now known. The will of the people Has clearly been shown. Let’s all get together; Let bitterness pass. I’ll hug your Elephant; And you kiss my Ass.
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. . . . You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
It is Friday, but Sunday is coming. This is not the devotional I had hoped to write. This is not the devotional you wish to receive this day. While Good Friday may be the starkest representation of a Friday that we have, life is filled with a lot of Fridays. For the disciples and Christ’s followers in the first century, Good Friday represented the day that everything fell apart. All was lost. And even though Jesus told his followers that three days later the temple would be restored . . . they betrayed, denied, mourned, fled, and hid. They did just about everything but feel good about Friday
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For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. —T. S. Eliot
Mary Oliver, says, while our mistakes make us want to cry, the world doesn’t need more of that.
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. —George Bernard Shaw
A woman in treatment told me, “We’re not bad people trying to get good. We’re sick people trying to get well.”
So how did it go? Well, we didn’t win.
“We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other’s back. Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cherish what we have in common and fight back against those who would drive us apart.”
By the end, I knew my opponents’ positions inside and out—in some cases, better than they did.
You bear it by working hard to get ready. You bear it by having good people by your side. You bear it by not just hoping but knowing you can handle a lot, because you already have. At least, that’s what always worked for me.
Often, it’s just about finding the right words. And impulsive doesn’t mean the same thing as truthful. Just look at Donald Trump.
Interestingly, many would say that my tears turned out to be a good thing for me. Dozens if not hundreds of pundits have commented about how that moment “humanized” me. Maybe that’s true. If so, I’m both fine with that and a little beleaguered at the reminder that, yet again, I—a human—required “humanizing” at all.
A British publication once offered a prize for the best definition of a friend. Among the thousands of answers received were: “One who multiplies joys, divides grief, and whose honesty is inviolable.” And “One who understands our silence.” The winning definition read: “A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.” —Bits and Pieces magazine
democracy. As FDR supposedly told a group of civil rights leaders, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now make me do it.”
Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before.
Really???
Where there’s a will to condemn, evidence will follow. —Chinese proverb
Kissinger around the same time. The State Department released the transcript of a 1974 conversation about Cyprus between then-Secretary of State Kissinger and the director of the CIA, but much of the text was blacked out because it was now considered classified. This puzzled historians because State had published the full, unredacted transcript eight years before in an official history book . . . and on the department’s website!
Times was taken to task by its ombudsman for downplaying the seriousness of Russia’s meddling. “This is an act of foreign interference in an American election on a scale we’ve never seen, yet on most days, it has been the also-ran of media coverage,” wrote Liz Spayd
When reason fails, the devil helps. —Fyodor Dostoevsky
In late 2015, European intelligence agencies picked up contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence operatives.
Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that nearly 20 percent of all political tweets sent between September 16 and October 21, 2016, were generated by bots. Many of them probably were Russian.
One study found that in Michigan alone, nearly half of all political news on Twitter in the final days before the election was false or misleading propaganda.
Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and Putin opponent who said, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
Also, it’s just not true. Not even close. Vox did an analysis of all my campaign events and found that I talked about jobs, workers, and the economy far more than anything else. As the Atlantic put it in a piece titled, “The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class,” I ran on “the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history” and talked more about jobs in my convention speech than Trump did in his, as well as in our first debate, which was watched by eighty-four million people.
Democrats have to continue championing civil rights, human rights, and other issues that are part of our march toward a more perfect union. We shouldn’t sacrifice our principles to pursue a shrinking pool of voters who look more to the past than the future.
De Tocqueville thought that spirit made America’s great democratic experiment possible.
That and the economic success and comfort allowed by slavery
Bob Putnam, which later became a bestselling book titled Bowling Alone.
de Tocqueville. After studying the French Revolution, he wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet.
But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?
