Julian Castro Quotes

Utley made the statement on election night of 1948 when HG Kaltenborn and must other pundits observed that Truman’s early lead was not big enough to overcome the results of the rural precincts which were slower to report and most assumed went heavily for Dewey. Utley, however, had conducted his own exit poll in the Chicago region and found that people who supported Dewey, when they got into the voting booth just could not support him. He appears to be the first journalist to call the election for Truman.

At the time of this statement neither major political party had a base large enough to win a Presidential election. The winner must get independent votes. However, much campaigning is done to motivate the base as without the base winning is also impossible.

This appears to be the first time in American history where the losing opposition did not at least claim that they wanted to work with the elected president to better the country. In this case, the partisanship was so bad that the major goal of the Republicans was to do what they could to have the president fail in his first term. To achieve their objective, the Republicans opposed almost every presidential legislative initiative of Obama’s including those that they had supported in previous ones. In several cases, the President proposed to accept previous Republican programs and ideas, and must Republicans then voted against the proposal so that they could deny the president any legislative success even if it moved the Republican programmatic agenda ahead. The Strategy worked in the sense that that Congress passed fewer bills that any in history, but failed to keep Obama from a second term. While the voters were not happy that the President was not able to persuade the Republicans to compromise and pass needed legislation, enough of them realized that the Republicans were more responsible, and reelected the President. The constant opposition to anything Obama advocated and the drumbeat of accusations against him drove his public approval numbers way down. In the process the Republicans drove their own approval percentage under 10 percent. The Republicans followed McConnell’s leadership, hurt the President badly, hurt themselves worse, and hurt the country.

In reality, Donald Trump won despite the opoposition of the leaderships of both political parties. In the Republican Primary elections he defeated the condidates preferred by the Republican leaders and elected officials accross the country. However, once he won the promaries, most--many reluctantly--supported him rather than the Democrat. Then Tump, to almsot everyone's surprise, bested Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Candidate and became President.