What makes the inauguration this week so sweet is the fact that the other side has been calling us ignorant and despicable for so long.
And racist. And bigoted.
And last year, even “garbage.”
Like Joan Goodall living among the chimps, I spent the majority of my career living among newsroom liberals.
Short of venturing onto an American college campus, I don't think you'll find a more liberal group than newsroom folks. I can count on one hand the number of true conservatives I've worked with in a career that has spanned 50 years.
That's a long time to be the skunk at the garden party.
And that's what makes it so satisfying when the American people vote with the conservatives. Particularly satisfying this year, because the liberals have gone so far astray – open borders, boys playing girls' sports, crime, inflation, runaway spending – and the voters recognized it. Every one of the so-called “battleground states” went Republican this time, and the Democrats are bewildered, confused, adrift. How could people so much smarter than us – ask any college professor – lose political power to the likes of us?
One time at a small paper, I was hooted down in my own newsroom when I made the point that labor unions, which the liberals loved, were no different than political action committees, which liberals at that time hated. The idea was patently ridiculous to them. Crazy. How could the boss be so stupid?
At another paper, newsroom meetings were like the cafeteria table in high school where the cool kids sat, making fun of the kids with bad skin, or who were overweight, or didn't play sports. I think the current term for them is “mean girls.”
A recurring topic was the overweight wife of a Republican elected official. It always got a smug laugh.
I asked one of those staffers once if he had seen a show I'd watched on PBS.
“I read BOOKS!” he replied contemptuously. The obvious assumption – I didn't read books. (Not true.)
In that newsroom, anything a Republican proposed was a “scheme,” “ginned up” by greedy officials looking to pad their own pockets and create a few low-wage “nickel-95 jobs.”
Democrats were seen as heroes, standing up to heartless, greedy, evil Republicans.
At two papers in Illinois, we won awards from a tax group for our coverage of complex tax issues. It's a complicated subject, and we figured we'd ask every question we could think of, some of them dumb, until we understood. But sometimes the biggest challenge we faced was opposition from our own newsroom staff, who tended to side with whatever the taxing bodies wanted. Having gone to school, they sided with the school superintendent. The assumption being that anyone who questioned a tax increase – say a retired guy on a fixed income trying to hold onto his house – was against education, against little children, and probably hadn't gone to school.
In one of those towns, a limit on tax increases made it onto the county ballot. At a public forum, I asked the school superintendent how many multiples of the rate of inflation the schools needed. He said they might be able to get along on twice the increases folks on Social Security get.
That tax cap passed.
So the full-court press that Donald Trump faced from even before he came down the escalator in 2015 came as no surprise to me. The Democrats and their eager assistants in the news media never let up, impeaching him twice over allegations rejected in the Senate, then bringing over 90 criminal charges against him to keep him from seeking a second term, unsuccessfully.
And two nuts even tried to kill him.
They've done everything they can think of to keep the guy out of office, to no avail. He won both the electoral college and the popular vote, kept the House and took back the Senate.
Suddenly, optimism is breaking out as a fresh new start beckons.
“Not bad,” as Ronald Reagan said in his farewell speech in 1989. “Not bad at all.”
For folks who consider themselves so much smarter than the rest of us, our liberal friends have failed.
Spectacularly.
And I'm loving every minute of it.
Columnist Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
