alias Bruce.

The midterms proved that most voters don’t want Trump. The GOP is betting it won’t matter.

The Democrats have taken the House. Good. It will save lives. Some of us who would suffer and die under GOP-ruled policies on health care, policing, poverty, and poisoning of our air and water will instead live longer lives because of particular bills that Trump and his supine party will be unable to ratify. You and I awoke this morning to a better reality than we feared.

But that is not the only truth today. Here are some others:

- The Electoral College is the Trump Party’s last weapon. Money, male rule, and racism are the traditional toxins that have prevented the United States from being a democracy. Structurally, the Electoral College is the hangman’s bridge for all travelers in American government. Virtually no seekers of the presidency cross it intact without proving allegiance to those who stand to lose money or power if their policy needs are not met. Trump, as Charles Blow has said, represents a war: money’s last hope of directing the rage of non-rich white males at someone other than the white rich super-minority whose explosively greedy choices have decimated what remains of non-educated white privilege. Aside from white rage and male crotch-clutching, today’s Republican Party platform of enabling rich cheaters offers nothing — nada, zero — that non-college-educated white Americans can embrace or believe. From omnivorous political rodents like Mitch McConnell to self-promoting brayers like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, the sole remaining salable alternative to a progressive money-shouldn’t-rule pitch is a white-or-male-must-rule pitch. That’s all that the CEOs have left to offer before the incessantly climate-heated, increasingly brown, increasingly young and non-rich population of the United States inevitably surges progressive. The Electoral College, whereby states secure representation without regard to population, is the last anachronism protecting the artificial dominance of old white racist senators and presidents in America. It elected Trump in 2016 — where he lost the popular vote — and it will, unjustly, thanks to Republican white and rural gerrymandering, re-elect him in 2020, absent some sea change of popular revolt.

- Today’s institutional Democratic Party will not lead. It will follow. You already know more about this than any pundit needs to tell you. From Bill Clinton’s smarmy supply-side myths to Hillary Clinton’s empty corporate “Stronger Together” jingle to Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s we-can’t-go-there calculus of mannered self-censoring to the DNC’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ actual progressive momentum, the institutional Democrats have excruciatingly shown us that they and their donors forbid authenticity about how corporate-funded policy actually works. Key Democratic candidates who won this season — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — led on their own, defiant of party norms. Key progressives who lost succumbed to plain old institutional corruption (as with Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, whose opponent used his official position to implement policies undermining her voters) or, to my mind, to bad “moderate” advice (as with Beto O’Rourke, who inexplicably met a bloodthirsty Ted Cruz with soft anecdotes about voters’ family stories instead of a savaging of Cruz’s empty and corrupt claims. Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party, terrified of the gall it takes to piss off today’s corporate DNC donors with passionate truths about the corporate-funded modern American pretense of democracy, will, in future history, appear as the fading rear guard of small-d democratic values. True leadership will come, and is already emerging, from those who dare to run and win (or lose) on honest arguments about corporate power. At some point in the future, this truthful baseline will become a new normal, which the fearful inheritors of today’s DNC will then timidly claim as their own.

What will make the difference is what you and I now do, in public as we face politicians and police, and in private at our gatherings of family and coworkers and friends. It has happened at decisive moments in all repressive regimes.

Our move.

What's Bill Clinton got as a speaker and campaigner that Barack Obama doesn't have?

Two things, as we saw at the 2012 Democratic National Convention:

1.) Clinton has a uniquely commanding presence. Yes, Barack Obama is eloquent. But that's the easy part. The harder part is what Clinton has: an in-your-face but inviting air of authority. Clinton can stand in front of an audience of  millions, point his finger, and say, "Now, listen to me," or "Now, pay attention to this," and not sound arrogant or bossy. At his best, Clinton seems so possessed by his message that he comes across as compelled to fiercely order his audience to listen. (The strongest preachers carry this same presence.) Obama, regardless of his intellectual acumen and whatever his moral intent, simply comes across as a less authoritative personality. Obama will spin a gorgeous narrative to try to persuade us of something, but at the end of the day he is not going to rock the podium and fiercely demand that we as citizens follow the dictates of justice and conscience. I have argued, and still do, that part of what hampers Obama is his conciliatory "good Negro" persona as a response to the virulent racism that faces his presidency in a nation that still deeply fears the "Bad Nigger."

2.) Clinton has a spectacular gift for down-to-earth policy talk. No modern politician can stand up and talk policy like Bill Clinton. Like Noam Chomsky, Clinton has the ability to run down the densest details of policy while also blowing his audience away with the raw power of what the numbers and the political machinations actually mean. He is part accountant and part preacher. In Clinton's DNC speech, his slicing and dicing of the Republican Lie Platform, in which he deftly rattled off strings of numbers and details with the moral ferocity of an evangelist, was a work of art. Neither Obama nor any other current politician or recent president could pull this off. Immediately after Clinton's speech, when Obama came onstage to embrace him, I actually felt sorry for Obama. He looked small. It was an unintended "Mr. President, you're no Bill Clinton" moment. The best we will get from an Obama speech, as we saw the following night, is beautifully soaring generalities peppered with a few careful examples. In the bloody arena of today's pitched battle for the public interest, we need more than that from a president occupying the bully pulpit.

Remember, though, that I am talking about Clinton as a speaker and campaigner. As president, Clinton arguably made more concessions to the anti-progressive agenda than Obama has. (Think welfare reform, NAFTA, and Don't Ask Don't Tell.) It's not for nothing that President Clinton was known as the king of triangulation.

But as a man who can demolish the opposition's arguments on the stump, Clinton is in a league far beyond Obama. There is simply no contest. Which is why if Obama wins in November, Clinton, while not necessarily the decisive force, will have shown the influence of his persuasive powers yet again.