We cats have been inundated with emails, not just from American friends wanting names of realtors in Canada, but Canadians who are, um, freaking out. (Join the crowd, right?)
As one Montrealer worried, when America gets the flu, Canada runs a fever. The question today is what happens to Canada when the US goes stark raving mad.
To our neighbors up north and everyone around the world who's wondering WTF happened, rest assured that the explanations will come thick and fast. We will agree with a lot of them and disagree with others. But if we had to sum up 2016 in an elevator speech, we'd say this: Republican obstructionism has been rewarded.
Quick rewind: On the night of January 20, 2009, leaders of the defeated GOP came together and secretly pledged not to cooperate with the newly inaugurated President Obama on anything — even to save the country from another Great Depression. And that was just the beginning. After the Democrats lost their Congressional majorities in 2010 and 2014, Washington ground to a halt. With Republicans refusing to budge, the government simply stopped working.
It didn't need to happen. If the GOP had accepted Obama — like we accepted Reagan's victory in 1980 — and worked with Democrats to rescue the economy, reform Wall Street, pass (and then fix) healthcare or even vote on a Supreme Court nominee, Americans would have felt much less frustrated this year. And a xenophobic demagogue would not have been able to harness the discontent and appeal to our darker instincts along the way.
We Democrats did everything right, organizationally. We wouldn't change a thing on our voter ID, our fundraising, our outreach or our GOTV. We not only need to keep that infrastructure in place, but figure out how to improve on it so we can fight all the battles to come. Why? Because when everything is said and done, Hillary Clinton will have won the 2016 popular vote by about 200,000. (She lost Texas by less than half of what Obama lost it.) We just have to keep all those folks voting.
The Electoral College may not have been on our side this year, but time and demographics are. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.
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