I am going to say something very controversial for some...

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

181. I don't think we have learned anything from the past election, or we learned the wrong things

We are going to be re-fighting the 2016 campaign for a generation whether we like it or not. Urbane centrism vs. Racially charged populism.

The resistance to any introspection what-so-ever is unsettling, finding comfort in a conspiracy theory is naturally cathartic but it isn't going to lead to the right candidate running the right campaign. The "if not for those dastardly Russians" reasoning seems to have vindicated a candidate and campaign that just weren't nationally competitive.

I had an interesting conversation with my father shortly before the election. My dad doesn't like the Clintons in general (he calls them the "The Trailer Park Hill-Billy Bears&quot but believed none the less that Hillary would win. The thing that distressed him about Trump was that Trump had rehabilitated a strategy the Republicans had been too polite to use for decades. So even if Trump went down to a crushing defeat Trumpism would be back attached to an affable southern governor, possibly female, who might not be as easily defeated as Trump should have been.