THE COUNTRY’S FORGOTTEN
Today, President Barack Obama is likely to make a proclamation about Veterans Day or visit Arlington National Cemetery to honor the memory of men and women who served in the armed forces of the country. Next year that job will fall to Donald Trump, now the president-elect.
We hope both men, neither of whom served in the country’s military, truly think about the sacrifices made on the fields of battle that allowed their election to the nation’s highest office.
Those sacrifices, made on the fields of Shiloh and Chickamauga, on the Flanders fields of Belgium, on tiny islands in the South Pacific, in the cold mountains of Korea, in the sweltering rice paddies of Vietnam and in the dusty hamlets of Middle East countries, allowed a black community organizer and a white, wealthy real estate magnate the same opportunity — to put their names before the American people.
Eight years ago, black Americans who believed their voices hadn’t been heard by politicians of both political parties were energized to vote for the first black man to be nominated for president by one of those parties. Previously, they may not have voted, feeling their vote wouldn’t make a difference. Or perhaps they’d never registered to vote, feeling there had never been a candidate who knew how they really felt as a minority.
On Tuesday, small-town Americans who believed their voices hadn’t been heard by politicians of both political parties were energized to vote for a man who had never held political office. Previously, they may not have voted, feeling their vote wouldn’t make a difference. Or perhaps they’d never registered to vote, feeling there had never been a candidate who knew how they really felt as a citizen in flyover country.
Yesterday, Obama and Trump met at the White House after the acrimony of the campaign, Trump calling the president “a very good man” and Obama saying to Trump, “If you succeed, the country succeeds.”
Most of those who voted for the president-elect live in that flyover country, a term used to define the broad expanse of the country between the elitist culture of the Northeast and the celebrity culture of the West Coast.
You can view it best on a map of the United States showing county election results. The country is a sea of red (Republican), with blue (Democratic) dots in counties with large cities or blue blobs in states where the counties are geographically larger.
Vermont, with the exception of a tiny tip in its northeastern corner, is all blue. Massachusetts is all blue. No surprise on either one.
But New York State, for instance, is far more red than blue. Even Long Island, to the east of New York City, is more red than blue. Illinois, Oregon, Washington and Nevada, all of which voted in a majority for Democrat Hillary Clinton, are largely red except for the Chicago, Portland, Seattle and Las Vegas areas, respectively.
Evidence of the passion of this rural revolution already was in full view in tiny towns east and west of Cincinnati, along the Ohio River, in late July. Small campaign signs for Trump dotted the landscape. Signs supporting Clinton were not visible. The same was true on the flat Texas plain between Houston and Dallas in August and in the rural mountains of eastern New York and southern Vermont and New Hampshire in October.
To paraphrase the character Howard Beale in the 1976 satire movie “Network,” people were mad and were not going to take it anymore.
They’d been told they were racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic if they didn’t swallow everything the political left told them. They’d been told by 2008 candidate Obama that he would destroy the coal industry and then saw him do everything he could to do it, then tell them they’d have to pay more for clean air. They’d heard him accuse them of clinging to their guns and their religion, as if having one or the other or both was a crime. They’d heard the promises of keeping their doctor and their insurance plan and paying less if they swallowed Obamacare, and then have none of that happen.
Clinton, in this election, promised more of the same as the previous eight years. Trump made uncomfortable remarks about women and immigrants but spoke about a return of American jobs, about the country “winning” again, about tearing up the health care plan they didn’t want in the first place. They were willing to accept him, warts and all.
The national media, the pollsters and the Clinton campaign never grasped that. None of the three was able to understand the depths to which those in flyover country — those Trump referred to as the “forgotten men,” those who felt they didn’t have a recent voice until Trump — felt left out. And those are the people who propelled him to victory on Tuesday.
Now, on this Veterans Day, we hope the president-elect, in the years ahead, remembers all those in this country who have felt forgotten — those who came out in droves for Obama because they believed he understood their pain, those who have felt their middle-America majority viewpoint was overlooked in favor of a minority elitist perspective and those who have given their lives so both groups were free to vote their conscience.