Now is the time for the annual column on resolutions and predictions for the new year.
So here goes: My only resolution this time is not to make predictions.
Today, you see, is the day of my reckoning and your guffawing at my reckoning.
A year ago, I wrote a prediction column for 2016 full of myself and greatly detailed scenarios. I was so proud of my concocted narratives that I encouraged readers to clip or save the column to their desktops for later reference.
My humiliation can be deferred no longer.
What I wrote for Dec. 31, 2015, was that Donald Trump would so bedevil the Republicans in the coming year that neither he nor Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio would garner enough delegates to lock up the nomination. I wrote that the Republican establishment would work overtime to find a way to lift Rubio to the nomination without alienating too severely the Trump and Cruz voters. I wrote that the solution would be to nominate House Speaker Paul Ryan as Rubio's running mate.
That didn't quite happen. It didn't at all happen.
What I missed, repeatedly, all year, at every turn, as did nearly everyone else in the punditocracy, was the fullness of Trump's strength and consequence amid a mood of anger and disaffection and ... well, defiant voter irresponsibility. I missed that conventional politics had so alienated many Americans that absurd politics could prevail--that, in fact, the absurdity of Trump was his winning message; that the more the mainstream media made of his misstatements and overstatements, the more tightly he was embraced by voters who were sick up to here with Bushes and Clintons and Reid and Pelosi and McConnell and Boehner.
As a conventional political thinker trained by years of watching and analyzing politics closely, I assumed that Trump--while an important phenomenon--was, in fact, a joke, a very good one, and a spoiler who would fade in the end to the prevailing politics of the usual.
Likewise, on Election Day on Nov. 8, I added a short paragraph at the end of a column on another subject to say that Hillary Clinton seemed to have the closing momentum and would win the presidency with an electoral majority ranging from 271 to 339.
But then, in a hedge that the preceding months of misguided analysis had at least taught me to invoke, I pointed out that my thinking was conventional and that conventional thinking had been wrong at every turn.
I fretted that day about my prediction that Clinton would win Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire. She won them all. But I had no earthly idea she would lose Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania--by a combined margin of fewer than 100,000 voters, mostly working-class white people turning out more heavily than black voters.
Trump's win was both a fluke and not.
Now here's the kicker, the point at which my face turns reddest: My ineptitude in the Trump prediction was not the worst element in that column a year ago. This was: I said Hillary would coast to the nomination over Bernie Sanders and, convinced that the threat of ISIS made international issues the most important in the race, choose a fellow secretary of state, John Kerry, as her running mate.
I would like to say I was drunk. But I don't recall that I was.
May I say something mildly in my behalf at this point? Thank you. Goodness knows I need it.
Here is a paragraph from that column a year ago: "In the general election, Democrats will get more votes. They always do anymore ... But Rubio-Ryan will win Florida and Ohio and triumph in the electoral college to become minority president and vice president."
Other than the peripheral matter of having the wrong Republican presidential ticket, I nailed that sonofagun.
I also got a couple of things right about state politics, but those are easy and nobody much seems to care.
For this year, I fear the worst, hope for the best and predict not a blasted thing.
Will Trump actually build a wall, deport millions, ban Muslims, undo NAFTA, ally with Putin, cancel the Iran nuclear deal, restart nuclear proliferation, keep tweeting, rebuild the American infrastructure, cut taxes, start a trade war, restore jobs, imperil the world, impose American will on the world, grab private parts, leave private parts alone, succeed spectacularly or fail disastrously?
And will the Arkansas Legislature rename the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, ban transgenders from the public bathrooms with which they identify and make the Bible the official book of the state?
Beats the heck out of me.
The year 2017 invites dread but defies prediction.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/01/2017