It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer  of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of  course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.

 

Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really  overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor  got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from  the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday.  It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama,  never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since  both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio  by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

 

As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything  Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.

 

In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now  look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.

 

Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:

 

1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.

2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.

3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.

 

The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:

 

1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..

2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.

3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.

4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).

5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.

6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.

7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.

 

Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,

 

Editor, The Amazing Democrats. 

Join us on our blog everyone is talking about: https://theamazingdemocrats.wordpress.com

“Like” us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AmazingDemocrats

Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing

“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard. 

by BBC News.

Thousands of people are sending positive messages to a boy who says he is scared because he is gay.

His photograph features on the blog Human of New York, which catalogues people’s lives across the US city.

“I’m homosexual and I’m afraid about what my future will be and that people won’t like me,” the accompanying caption reads.

High profile figures including Ellen DeGeneres and Hillary Clinton have also posted words of support.

“Not only will people like you, they’ll love you. I just heard of you and I love you already,” wrote DeGeneres.

 “Prediction from a grown-up: Your future is going to be amazing,” Clinton wrote.

“You will surprise yourself with what you’re capable of and the incredible things you go on to do. Find the people who love and believe in you – there will be lots of them.”

She signed off her message with an “H” showing that she, rather than a member of her staff, had written it.

Many people said that the image, which shows the unnamed boy sitting on a step, with his head in his hand and tears in his eyes, affected them.

 Others said that the LGBT community in the US was very supportive and explained that the introduction of new marriage laws showed that society was changing in its attitudes towards gay people.

 Humans of New York is created by the photographer Brandon Stanton, who has also made a book of his images. His page has more than 13 million likes on Facebook.

Although he includes a quotation from each participant, he never reveals their age or name.

Other recent stories on the blog include a girl who wants to be a doctor when she is older, a woman talking about the end of her relationship and a man who has come to the US from Honduras to work.

Ireland’s Marriage Equality Moment

by Patrick Healy (New York Times)

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida hardened his position against same-sex marriage in an interview that aired on Sunday, making clear he did not believe in constitutional protection for gay marriages — an issue now before the United States Supreme Court — and leaving out his past call for “respect” for gay couples.

Appearing on “The Brody File” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Mr. Bush, a likely Republican candidate for president in 2016, was asked in a brief interview if he believed there should be a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

“I don’t, but I’m not a lawyer, and clearly this has been accelerated at a warp pace,” he said. “What’s interesting is four years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had the same view that I just expressed to you.” He added: “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed. It’s hard to fathom why it is this way.”

He also warned that the country’s future would be at risk without traditional marriages between a man and a woman who go on to raise children.

“To imagine how we are going to succeed in our country unless we have committed family life, committed child-centered family system, is hard to imagine,” Mr. Bush said. “We need to be stalwart supporters of traditional marriage.”

Mr. Bush was explicitly opposed to same-sex marriage for years, but in recent months, since he has been considering a run for the presidency, he has made a wider range of statements — saying same-sex marriage is an issue that should be decided by the states, for instance. This winter, as gay couples began to wed in Florida, Mr. Bush also struck a conciliatory tone about those marriages.

“We live in a democracy, and regardless of our disagreements, we have to respect the rule of law,” he said in a statement to The New York Times in January. “I hope that we can show respect for the good people on all sides of the gay and lesbian marriage issue — including couples making lifetime commitments to each other who are seeking greater legal protections and those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty.”

Mr. Bush reiterated in the “Brody File” interview on Sunday that his views about same-sex marriage are based on his Catholic faith. “I think traditional marriage is a sacrament,” he said. “It’s at the core of the Catholic faith.”

By FINTAN O’TOOLE (NEW YORK TIMES)

 DUBLIN — ON a Sunday in May, a reporter for The Irish Times went looking for religious people who might be expected to oppose same-sex marriage. The issue is a hot topic in Ireland because on Friday the nation votes in a referendum that, if passed, will enshrine marriage equality in the Constitution.

The reporter engaged an older woman after Mass at Dublin’s main Catholic cathedral. “I’m just going to vote for gay people because I have nothing against them,” the woman, Rita O’Connor, told the journalist. “I can’t understand why anybody is against it.” And she dismissed the church’s opposition: “It’s a stupid carry-on.”

Conservatives sometimes say that marriage equality is an elite project, pushed through by courts or parliaments, but popular enthusiasm for the cause is palpable. The referendum has already been good for the travel trade.

Ireland does not permit citizens to vote from abroad, so many younger people are traveling back for the historic vote. Anyone booking a flight to Dublin from Boston or New York before Friday must expect to pay top dollar. Closer to home, a London-based group named Get the Boat 2 Vote has organized group travel by rail and ferry.

If polls are accurate, Ms. O’Connor represents a majority view — in a corner of Europe hardly thought of as a bastion of liberalism, like Sweden or the Netherlands. In spite of opposition from the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian churches, from Islamic leaders and conservative civic groups,surveys of public opinion consistently show more than 70 percent in favor of the government’s starkly simple proposal to add a line to the Irish Constitution: “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Few on either side of the argument expect the result to be as emphatic, and Irish referendums have a history of surprising results. Twice in recent years, major changes in European Union treaties have initially been rejected by Irish voters in shock results. Most pollsters believe that some likely “no” voters are shy about saying what they think.

Nevertheless, the odds are that the Irish will embrace same-sex marriage, and by doing so send a message that they accept gay men and lesbians as ordinary citizens. Who would have guessed that the country poised to become the first country in the world to grant same-sex couples full legal equality by direct popular vote would be socially conservative Ireland?

There is a certain poignancy in this possibility. The most notorious case of the legal persecution of homosexuality in modern Irish history was the trial and imprisonment of the writer Oscar Wilde, in England, in 1895. In 1916, a campaign to prevent the execution of the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement was thwarted when influential supporters were shown extracts from Casement’s secret diaries, detailing his homosexual activities. For a long time, Irish nationalists insisted that the diaries must be forgeries (forensic studies later authenticated them).

Ireland retained British laws against “gross indecency” — under which Wilde was punished — on its statute books after independence in 1922. Upheld by the Irish Supreme Court, those laws were not changed until 1993, and only after an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Ireland was thus one of the last Western democracies decriminalize consensual sexual activity between adult gay men. That it may now consolidate same-sex marriage as the new normal in the developed world is striking evidence of how quickly and profoundly attitudes have changed. If it happens, it will owe much to two circumstances, one great and epic, the other small and intimate.

Few democracies have ever seen such a close alignment of religious and political power as Ireland after independence. The new state was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and deeply identified with the church. For decades, almost all political parties followed church teaching on “moral” questions and inscribed that teaching in law.

Contraceptives were fully legalized only in 1985. Divorce was outlawed until a narrowly approved referendum in 1995. Ireland’s abortion laws are still so restrictive that they allow almost no exceptions, even for rape, incest or fatal fetal abnormalities.

Yet the church’s power proved immensely damaging to those who once wielded it. Its arrogance resulted in the catastrophic scandals of church leaders’ covering up decades of child abuse by priests and religious orders. The church’s moral authority has largely collapsed in Ireland.

As a result, its ability to influence the referendum on same-sex marriage is limited. Many church leaders have avoided taking a hard line. This owes something to Pope Francis’s more conciliatory tone on homosexuality, but even more to an awareness that many of the faithful, like Ms. O’Connor, no longer take church teaching on sexuality as gospel. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, went so far as to warn church leaders not to use “language which is insensitive and over-judgmental” — a warning surely rooted in his understanding of the other, more personal force in this debate.

Changes in attitudes to L.G.B.T. people have been driven by one overwhelming factor: Once people were out of the closet, they were not “them” but “us” — family, friends, neighbors. This is a powerful force in a close-knit country like Ireland.

Ireland doesn’t always function well at the level of large institutions, but the Irish tend to be good at social relations. If they know you, they want to think well of you.

Before the referendum campaign got underway, the minister for health, Leo Varadkar, who is widely seen as a possible future prime minister, announced that he was gay. The only negative reactions were good-humored expressions of disappointment from female admirers of the 36-year-old doctor, while some gay men joked on social media that their mothers were urging them to marry the minister.

Mothers count in this debate. The Irish mammy is a formidable figure and Irish mammies want their children to be able to marry, whatever their partner’s gender.

In a memorable intervention, a former president of Ireland and a practicing Roman Catholic, Mary McAleese, joined her son, Justin, who is gay, in calling for a “yes” vote. Borrowing from the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic, she said that she wanted “the children of the nation to be cherished equally.”

Standing between mothers and what they want for their children is not a comfortable place for the proposition’s conservative opponents to be.