RUSH: I’ve got these two postmortems. One is Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart. “Ohio Democrat Party Warns: Stop Talking About Mueller Investigation, Stick to Real Issues — Leaders of the Ohio Democrat Party are warning local activists to steer clear of talking about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into supposed Trump collusion with Russia and stick to real issues as the 2018 election season nears.”

So what this guy’s basically saying is, “Hey, stick in the real world. Stop playing the fantasy game here. Stop investing your electoral chances in whatever Mueller does.”

“With the first indictment coming out of Mueller’s team coming down and still no proof that any collusion with Russia occurred, Ohio Democrats are telling party members to stick with the issues. Instead of Russia, Ohio Democrats want to talk about the economy, jobs, and social issues, not pushing conspiracy theories, according to the Washington Post. David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democrat Party, told the Post that he and his fellow party officials do not spend time talking about Russian strongman Vladimir Putin or the firing of former FBI chief James Comey.”

You know, all politics is local, and these people in Ohio are thinking that the national Democrats and the national media are blowing it here. Pepper said, “I’m as frustrated as anyone by what Comey did and that Putin interfered, and Congress should get to the bottom of that, but if that’s what we talk about … we will lose again. My attitude is let’s fix the things we can fix, and the way we really win is by getting a core message that appeals across all 88 counties,” of Ohio.

Okay, there’s one. Here is another. This is by Noemie Emery. I mentioned this in the last hour, “And That’s Why Trump Won.” This is in the Washington Examiner. And I’ll ask the question again. Think back to the Trump campaign. Think back to any Trump rally or any Trump public appearance. The odds are Trump unloaded on China. He would unload on China and currency manipulation. He would be critical of China and their cheating, exporting a bunch of cheap stuff that we would buy here but not accepting any of our exports, balance of trade, the trade deficit with China. He dumped all over China. How many of you thought, “So what? China’s not an issue. I mean, I’m for Trump and I like Trump, but trade deals?” China was always part of Trump railing against bad trade deals.

I remember during the campaign we had some people saying, “Why’s he focusing on China? China’s not in the news for that. The Chinese…” Well, that’s what this piece is about. Noemie Emery: “And That’s Why Trump Won.” It has nothing to do with Russia, has nothing to do with Hillary. It has nothing to do with emails. It has nothing to do with anything that you would think. Let me give you two pull quotes that will give you the essence of Noemie Emery’s piece.

“On Oct. 10, 2000, on the advice of the experts, Bill Clinton signed a now-infamous trade deal with [the ChiComs], calling it a ‘win-win’ solution for both of the countries that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. It turned out the experts were wrong. It created job losses that were worse than expected. Workers didn’t ‘bounce back,’ as experts predicted, but remained unemployed. These [job] losses fanned out in concentric circles of failure, as losses of wages led to failures of stores, restaurants, and local businesses in their localities, as entire districts fell into decline,” because as people lost jobs, they lost the ability to spend money in the community.

Pull quote number two: “In the 2016 GOP primaries, Trump won 89 of the 100 counties mostly deeply affected by” Clinton’s trade deal with China. Trump’s “pessimism and anti-trade talk ‘tapping into sentiments'” that everybody in these counties felt but that were ignored by every other candidate and every other conventional voice. “The study concluded that ‘if Chinese import gains had been 50% smaller,’ Trump would have lost Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Hillary Clinton would have been president. The bill her husband signed sixteen years earlier ended up breaking her heart.”

Now, Noemie Emery’s point here is that Trump didn’t have an animus toward China for personal reasons. It wasn’t because he had had bad experiences with them. It’s because he knew! He knew that in certain parts of the country the trade deal with China had devastated… It’s much the same thing that Salena Zito has found in her reporting from the deep-middle parts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and West Virginia and so forth, parts of Ohio, that voters there were affected by all kinds of things that no other candidate ever mentioned.

No other candidate ever mentioned China. I mean, Trump would bring up China, the other candidates would respond and try to get their 2¢ in on China, but nobody made China an issue except for Trump. The fact that he did resonated with millions of people who had been adversely affected by that deal — and to them, it was every bit as bad as NAFTA was for other people. So Trump was naturally the candidate that was gonna get their support.

The point is a research study was done that if Clinton’s deal with China had only been half as bad — if only half the people lost their jobs had lost their jobs, if only half the businesses had closed, if only half of the restaurants had closed, whatever — then Hillary probably would have still won enough of those people. And the real point of it is the supposed idiot, the supposed dummkopf outsider who doesn’t know what he’s doing, was the only presidential candidate who understood that millions of Americans harbored sheer anger over a previous trade deal with China that had cost them jobs and communities.

It’s a really, really salient piece.

Related Links
Breitbart: Ohio Democrat Party Warns: Stop Talking About Mueller Investigation, Stick to Real Issues
Washington Examiner: And That's Why Trump Won - Noemie Emery

        

                        

                        
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