The Mall – 1989
æ President Clinton Responds to 33 Million Unemployed Report: “It’s Not My Fault.”
President Hillary Clinton said a government report showing massive U.S. job losses isn’t a surprise and that she shouldn’t be blamed for it.
“It’s fully expected. There’s no surprise,” she said to reporters Friday. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, look at this.’ Well, even the Republicans aren’t blaming me for that”.
33 million new unemployed workers since March has ballooned the US unemployment rate to 14.75%, the highest increase since the Great Depression.
#satire
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æ Coronavirus In Context – Part Four : Mayday, We’ve Passed Vietnam
58,200. The Vietnam War stretched on for over a decade and tore the heart out of the American psyche. To this day the cost in lives and national focus lives on in our VA hospitals and retirement communities. As Covid-19 crosses the fatalities in Vietnam we watch as these heroes from another generation, safe in the belief that their fighting was over, are dealt yet another blow at the hands of an invisible enemy.
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æ Coronavirus In Context – Part Three : The April Fool’s Day March To 5000
Where were you on 9/11? Where were you when the US invaded Iraq? These memories are seared into the minds of most Americans that were alive at the time yet Covid-19 has marched past these sad milestones in mere weeks. #Dataviz
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æ Coronavirus in Context – Part Two : The United States Crosses 500
American’s response to tragedy can be unpredictable. Sometimes America jumps, sword in hand and attacks issues head on such as the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in 1995. Other times America simply doesn’t seem to have a grasp of what’s coming. #DataViz
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æ Coronavirus In Context – Part One : St Patrick’s Day
Coronavirus Covid-19 has touched our lives in incalculable ways. For some though, the cost has been everything.
Humans want to quantify and understand the world around us and sometimes numbers are not enough. We need to understand people and loss in context. People are not just numbers but as a number they deserve relevance. We as a society react unpredictably to tragic events and our response often lags the gravity of the situation. This is an attempt to bring perspective to what’s unfolding. There will be more to come. #DataViz
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æ How Trump Could Win Reelection – Part One : History
This a multi-part series covering my by-the-numbers theory as to how Donald Trump can be reelected. Be prepared. This information is not to take sides but to provide context.
Part One: History
Trump is an incumbent President. This gives him and his staff huge advantages over any opponent. He can command airtime and news coverage at will and can use the resources of the American government to put him anywhere at any time to foster his campaign. The last incumbent President to lose an election was George H.W. Bush in 1992. Although the republican party didn’t do him any favors running Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke in the primaries, Bush had an 89% approval rate after the Gulf War and stood little chance of being usurped from his own ranks. Bush’s approval was so high that Jessie Jackson and Mario Cuomo refused to even consider running on the democratic side for fear of a blowout. This implies that the loss to Clinton for the Presidency was a fluke. That’s because it was.
Why did Bush lose? Well, the democrats ran their own conservative ticket. Two southerners with conservative backgrounds were chosen with the assumption that liberal voters would simply have nowhere else to vote. Don’t forget that Gore’s wife Tipper was a flag-bearer for the Parents Music Resource Center, the reason you saw parental advisory stickers and hard music bans around the country. Also, third party candidate Ross Perot beat one of the two main candidates in two states and received 20% of the popular vote running a largely conservative platform. 1992 was the last election in nearly 30 years where Florida didn’t vote for the winner, Georgia and Montana voted for a democrat. In this race, a moderate republican lost to a conservative democrat in a three-way election. Even given this situation, Clinton’s 43% share of the popular vote was the second-lowest for any winning candidate in the 20th century.
Previously, the last time an incumbent President lost was in 1980 when democrat Jimmy Carter was crushed electorally by Ronald Reagan amid an Iran scandal and oil embargo. Reagan and the party took a hard turn towards conservatism dropping their forty-year commitment to passing the Equal Rights Amendment and uniting for the first time the interests of evangelicals, defense hawks,
and trading tax cuts for support from wealthy and corporate interests. Both incumbent losses, in 1980 and 1992 occurred during a growing recession which is not present in 2020.
The previous election in 1976 found incumbent and President Gerald Ford nominating Kansas Senator Bob Dole as Vice President at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. Facing another southern democrat, Ford would struggle against Carter’s popularity with evangelicals, middle class conservatives wary of Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, and his incumbency representing the distrust with the federal government. In the end, the democratic party pulled off an unusual victory with the only Democratic candidate since 1964 to win a majority of the Southern states.
If you don’t believe that history has an impact on the 2020 election and Trump’s chances of winning then stay tuned for Part Two: The Math coming soon.
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