Fireside chat

Met some very nice and interesting people. A couple from Colorado driving down to visit his mom in Phoenix. They had previously driven more than ten thousand miles around the US to go to games in all but 4 baseball stadia. He had been the player coach of Holland’s baseball team and she had been an opera singer. Their daughter went to DO school in a deprived part of West Virginia and was now a family practitioner in … UC Davis. We recommended Lady Bird.

Cue Marcus pulling his chair up to the fire. Despite his boyish demeanor he is a medical helicopter pilot . Amazingly, he had lived in the same part of West Virginia and also had witnessed the physical maiming, geographical violation and toxic contamination of architecture that became an unprompted and agreed topic of conversation amongst the group.

Despite this, everyone who we were chatting with leaned right. Marcus expanded on this, pointing to Trumps charisma – he worked at it by going to large and small towns never visited by Hilary. He also felt had to admire his success in business. But in his own words, Marcus is neither right nor left and probably would have voted for Bernie. He hated Hilary, mainly for her lack of charisma and some stories from friends in the military whose personal encounters with her enforced that view. It was the person rather than the policy.

There is a real lesson for Democrats here. There are people who are persuadable but not if you don’t talk to them, engage them personally and explain why you stand for their interests . The failure to do that explains the last election and why a state like West Virginia, whose people and landscape have been maimed by the greed of unrestrained capitalism vote solidly Republican.