Biting political analysis of the McCain funeral from Jeet Heer:

[PatrickforO]

32. Of course he did. However...

He did heavily stress the manufacturing that had been moved offshore and the need for better-negotiated trade agreements to bring back good jobs. That was his populist thread, and if you've ever met people in a little town that had a factory that moved, you know that whole swaths of this country's economy have turned to rust. People who were once middle class and had decent lives now are working at places like Wal-Mart because those are the only jobs. They don't have healthcare any more. Their once-new truck is now on its last legs. They can't afford to send their kids to college. Et cetera. When a politician says he wants to address those things, or implies he does, as Trump did, it is in fact a populist message. Trump was lying, of course, but that is a populist message.

Trump is also a racist, as you point out, and early on his campaign swung from hope into fear and hatred. I agree with you on that.

Clinton had a great platform, and in fact won the popular vote. Trump cheated, yes, with Russia, and was aided by years of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, to win the Electoral College by what? 78,000 votes in three states?

But don't forget the power of the media. They showed all of Trump's rallies in their entirety - great for ratings, and they presented him over and over and over and over as a legitimate candidate and a populist.

Like it or not, Clinton faced two major hurdles: first, unlike Trump, she was not perceived as a populist. Somehow, with much of the fault at the media's doorstep, Clinton's genuineness and caring was never stressed. Clinton is a great lady. She never forgets, and she still checks in with people whom she helped many years ago. She really cares, and that can't be taught. You either have it or you don't and Clinton is genuinely a very nice, very caring, hardworking person who would have made a fantastic president back in the day when we actually had people in DC who wanted to govern us. Had she won, the Republicans would for sure have impeached her by now, and you know this is true. They would have obstructed her every...single...step...of...the...way, unrelentingly, 24/7/365.

And, of course, this brings us to my second point: The right wing for some reason had spent years and years, decades, smearing Clinton. Whitewater this, emails that, pizzagate, and so on. The bottom line is that corporate hate-propaganda, that decades-long smear campaign worked. It made a substantial portion of our population, mostly older white men, absolutely, fervently hate her. I mean to the point where they are so into their hatred they spray saliva when they are talking about her.

So, she had that baggage - horribly biased media coverage creating the perception she was the establishment candidate, and the feverish hatred, built over decades, once again fanned into flame on thousands of AM radio stations, Fox 'news' and other corporate capitalist propaganda organs.

Trump wasn't a populist and isn't now. But as Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message." And that is the message people got because Trump is a master at creating chaos and riding it to victory. He implied he was a populist and this lie was accepted at face value. Somehow, he sensed that Americans want the game to change in some fundamental ways. And, you cannot deny we do want that kind of fundamental change - but there's the rub. What needs to change looks different for Trump supporters than it does to us. To an old white guy who used to be prosperous but now has to work two jobs just to stay above water, the fear, carefully fostered as part of the GOP's 'southern strategy,' makes him afraid he's going to ultimately lose everything to immigrants, gays and minorities.

This is why, when I'm talking to young people who want to run for office, I tell them they must pound on kitchen table issues. All politics is local, and the game people want to change is they want to have a better say in policies that affect them at the local, state and national levels. Kitchen table issues are populist issues. WE have the populist platform, and we need to pound on that with one voice. Then we'll win.