The problem of living in an echo chamber, is that the walls doing the reflecting also keep out alternative voices.
The Democrats really seem to believe that if they just shout long enough and hard enough that they will get their way. They literally seem to want to pout and fit their way back into national dominance. Something has been taken from them, they don’t get it, they don’t understand it–CAN’T understand it within their own paradigm–and emotional spasms are all they have. It’s all they got.
Again, to me the Nike error is fascinating. Anyone with a shred of common sense could have predicted this. The moment I saw Kaepernick on the ad I knew this campaign would backfire badly. It took me a tenth of a second.
But this campaign was months in the planning, perhaps even years. Negotiations and discussions likely started happening not long after the whole kneeling thing started, I guess the season before last, so perhaps up to two years ago.
Highly paid professionals sat in well appointed meeting rooms, drank excellent coffee, perhaps sometimes worked late into the night, all in support of this big initiative, this bold move which they likely framed as “risky” when they wanted to seem like brave souls out fighting the Good Fight, but which they must have been sure would succeed on balance, and perhaps all the more if it offended, you know, the white supremacists who seem to lurk in Small Town America, but which Nike never needed to succeed.
Here is the thing, though: Trump won the election, and did so after similar miscalculations by the Democrats at a national level. The egregiousness of the error, the complete failure of the polling data, is one reason why many of the more rabid lunatic ones continue to believe the Russians “stole” the election, even when nobody anywhere is claiming that. The DoJ merely said they tried a little bit, and failed a whole lot.
But in all honesty, I thought Nike’s ad might at least appeal to blacks or to Democrats. But it seems to have failed across the board. They lost Republicans almost entirely, but even millenials, even Gen X, even blacks, even Democrats now seemingly few Nike less favorably.
I don’t think it is overstating the case to call this a bellwether for the election. Kaepernick stands for a certain brand of politics, a certain political stance. The sheer extent of his patent unpopularity can plausibly be viewed as that brand of politics, too–the OBAMA brand of politics–similarly dropping like a rock in water.
There is a sea change in the air. I feel it. It may or may not happen, but the stage is plainly set. It is plainly possible. As I said a few months ago, it might be possible for the political Left to lose in 50 days 50 years of work. The whole world could just turns its back on them and their lunatic, cruel ideas.