Today is my mom’s birthday. I didn’t forget. I’ll never forget.

I just didn’t have anything to say that I haven’t already said.

In a couple of weeks, when my slides and movies have been converted, maybe I’ll have some more pictures to show you. It’s been a half century since I’ve seen some of them.

Quite a lot is said about the “skills gap”, the difference between the people who are looking for jobs and the jobs that are on offer, but not enough is being said about the yawning chasm between the imaginary labor market and the real one. This post at Pew’s Stateline blog goes some way to remedying that:

LE SUEUR, Minn. — Customers can’t get enough of Cambria’s quartz countertops, and the million-square-foot production facility here is racing to keep up. Under bright lights and high ceilings, churning machinery fuses quartz crystals into heavy slabs and polishes them until they shine.

This facility is short 40 production workers. It took months to find all the workers for a new assembly line added earlier this year — even after Cambria boosted entry-level wages from $16.66 to $18 an hour. The labor shortage is costing the company some $3.8 million per month, said Marty Davis, the company’s president and CEO.

Employers across the country, from manufacturers in rural Minnesota to hospitals in New York City, are having trouble filling jobs. It now takes about 28 workdays to fill the average job vacancy, compared to about 24 days, on average, in 2007.

The declining unemployment rate has made it more difficult for employers to find workers, but it’s still tougher than it should be given the current jobless rate. Since the recession ended, the number of job openings has increased faster than the number of new hires.

Among the many excellent points made in the post are:

• Job openings are increasingly outstripping hires. That’s been true since the first of the year and it’s now quite noticeable.
• There is no such thing as a national job market. There are regional and local job markets. A policy targeted at filling an imaginary national job market (higher education) does very little for local job markets.
• If there were a skills deficit, wages would be rising. They aren’t.
• A lot of people don’t want to work in small towns for long hours at low pay. IMO there’s a component of real or perceived racism in that. YMMV.
• The labor force we have differs dramatically from the labor force we’ve had for the last half century.

The national solutions aren’t addressing any of those problems. We need to start searching for solutions to the problems we actually have.

There’s at least one thing I disagree with in the post:

Automation and downsizing have also reduced the number of hiring managers at firms, and hence the number of people who can push back on unrealistic job descriptions, according to Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Hiring managers don’t “push back” for a simple reason. They’re afraid that if they do, they’ll be replaced by somebody who doesn’t push back. That’s a characteristic of a slack labor market.

One of the things that should be kept in mind: as with nearly all business problems 85% of the labor force/hiring problem is a management problem. We need more managers who are trying to build better companies and fewer who are hurrying to ready IPOs.

What do you think the most likely explanation for the large percentage of those arrested in anti-Trump demonstrations in Oregon not having voted in Oregon:

1. They’re anarchists and nihilists.
2. They’re professional demonstrators from out of state.
3. They were Sanders supporters who couldn’t be convinced to vote for HRC.
4. Real Oregonians were too high to vote.
5. What election?
6. Other

While Republicans struggle with the reality that Trumpism isn’t conservatism, the editors of the Washington Post still haven’t realized that today’s progressives aren’t liberals:

But what does it mean to be progressive? We don’t propose to lay out an agenda here — this is a debate that will and should go on for months, hopefully drawing on new ideas and up-and-coming leaders, and we expect to return to it often. We would, though, like to suggest that in some key areas, the people who are defining themselves as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — identified with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — are embracing principles that are not genuinely progressive.

Specifically: They want to enlarge government entitlements and hand out the benefits as broadly as possible — free college, free health care, expanded Social Security — regardless of need or available resources. They emphasize redistribution over growth. And their ostensible protection of American workers leaves no room to consider the welfare of poor people elsewhere in the world. On all three counts, we think that the higher moral ground and the smarter policy lie elsewhere.

Take free college, a key plank of Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign. Generally two arguments are offered for making such a benefit universal. One is political: If everyone gets a benefit, everyone will press Congress or state legislatures to keep funding it. The other is moral: This is something society should do. We don’t make the wealthy pay tuition for high school; why should college be any different?

Our answer — we would argue, the progressive answer — is that there are people in society with far greater needs than that upper-middle-class family in Fairfax County that would be relieved of its tuition burden at the College of William & Mary if Mr. Sanders got his wish. In an era of constrained resources, is the nation serious about helping the “left-behinds” in small-town America, whose plight President-elect Donald Trump supposedly championed? How about the mothers and children who remain trapped in multi-generational poverty in our biggest cities? Government programs should benefit those who most need the hand up.

When your strategy for helping the unfortunate consists of making transfer payments to service providers or letting contracts to service providers for same, you’re already one degree of separation away from the compassion you claim to have. Little by little the transfer payments and contracts become ends in themselves. Throw in a soupçon of bribing the middle income to foster political support for your plans and you get to where we are now.

As I’ve quipped before Republicans are now in the position of the dog who caught the car. To get some idea of how that’s the case consider Robert VerBruggen’s reaction at The American Conservative:

Pretty much everyone thought Hillary Clinton would be the president-elect right now. As a result, few spent much time gaming out the scenario we find ourselves in: next year, Donald Trump will be the president, accompanied by a Republican (though not filibuster-proof) Senate and a solidly GOP House.

I’m as guilty as anyone. My last pre-election column was about what President Clinton would do to the Supreme Court. A month ago I tried to find Obamacare tweaks that Republicans could demand in exchange for helping to fix the law, because only a moron would think anything more dramatic might be possible.

So here’s an attempt to atone for my sins and outline the possibilities for a Trump presidency in a number of domestic-policy areas.

His problem: Trumpism isn’t conservatism, at least not conservatism as Mr. VerBruggen would apparently define it. Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy ride. Next step: how great a distance will there be between Trump’s rhetoric and the policies he supports?

If it’s unclear to you what the Democratic and Republican National Committees do, this post at RealClearPolitics might serve as a good primer:

I worked as a DNC press secretary for five years, from 1983-87. Both chairmen I served fit the historical model of the chairmanship. Charles T. Manatt was chair of the California Democratic Party and Paul G. Kirk Jr. was a former top political aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy. Both stayed neutral in the presidential nominating processes they oversaw, and both worked to strengthen state party committees, to grow the grassroots and help fund get-out-the-vote functions of state and local organizations.

Manatt and Kirk were leaders of the DNC when Republicans held the White House. Both understood they didn’t get to set public policy for the party. But they embraced the modern role of national chairman, communicating policy consensus that develops from the Democrats’ congressional and gubernatorial wings, as well as from grassroots interests.

Both had to focus on raising money to strengthen state party organizations–the “party building” that helps candidates at all levels running under the Democratic label.

They also shape the future direction of their parties by enlisting candidates and channeling money to campaigns. The national committees are highly relevant if not instrumental to the direction of the parties. I thought that much was obvious.

I asked the corresponding question back when I believed that Hillary Clinton would be elected president but now that we’re faced with the reality of a Trump presidency I think it’s highly appropriate for me to return to the question. How do we mitigate the risks of a Trump presidency? I’ll provide some of my thoughts on the subject but I genuinely welcome other suggestions.

1. What risk?

IMO anyone who believes that a Trump presidency carries no risks is willfully blind. Every presidency carries risks and, given Mr. Trump’s history, lack of experience, and the way in which he conducted himself before, during, and to a lesser extent after his campaign, the risks of a Trump presidency are clearly higher than those in most.

2. Leave the country

That’s risk avoidance not risk mitigation. If Trump is as bad as you think he is, leaving the country probably won’t be enough. Read On the Beach.

3. Peaceful protests

It’s possible that peaceful grassroots opposition could bring fence-sitters over to your way of thinking. Violent protests that are clearly professionally organized and supported may have the opposite results of those you’re presumably trying to accomplish. If you support peaceful grassroots protests, how do you mitigate the risks of violent protests?

4. Make common cause with Republicans

Many Republicans don’t like Donald Trump any more than you do. Obstructing the Republican-led Congress bears the risk of forcing them to side with Trump. Does that increase or reduce risk? Believe it or not there are plenty of things on which Democrats and Republicans in Congress agree.

5. Stop smearing and slurring people who disagree with you.

It creates a lager mentality. It increases the risks rather than decreasing them.

6. Do what you can to encourage a fair and unbiased press.

It’s vitally important that we have a fair and unbiased press. The appearance and the fact of being unbiased are both important.

Please present your own ideas in comments.

I disagree with John Podhoretz and Noah Rothman’s claim in their article at Commentary:

Look to your right and you will see that his designated successor lost her bid for the presidency to a man Obama himself had not only campaigned against ferociously but declared unfit to hold the nuclear codes. Look to your left and you will see the news stories detailing the possible strategies for the repeal and the replacement of the president’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare. Then look up and down at the partisan cathedral he helped to rebuild. Its benches are, as Shakespeare said of tree branches in winter, “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” While he was the one with the nuclear codes, the Democratic Party has been hit with a neutron bomb. And on the bomb’s nose, written like the “Dear John” message on the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, were the words: “Barack Obama was here.”

I don’t believe it is all Obama’s fault. It is true that Republicans now control the White House, the Senate, the House, and two-thirds of state legislatures and governors’ mansions. However, as James Comey’s letters didn’t cause Hillary Clinton’s defeat, while President Obama didn’t cause Democrats to lose their strength outside the major cities where they hold nearly unchallenged sway, he didn’t help.

Democrats have been losing strength outside the Northeast, the West Coast, and major cities for decades. George W. Bush’s massive unpopularity and Barack Obama’s election in 2008 gave them a reprieve which they squandered.

A Hispanic voting bloc won’t give Democrats another reliable bloc like the black voters which they can remember only at election time and ignore the rest of the time. Indeed, there’s emerging evidence that black voters are tiring of the game as well.

They say that the first rule of holes is that when you’re in a hole, stop digging. The hole that Democrats are in was formed by the pursuit of multiculturalism and power for a handful of Ivy-educated elites at the expense of a different group of elites. If they want to be a real populist party, they need to do things for people not just the well-heeled.

“Trickle-down” economics is flawed whether it’s the supply side preached by the Republicans or the demand side practiced by the Democrats in which you pay professionals to perform services for the poor with the notional intention of helping the poor.

Let people be the captains of their own fates. That’s real populism.

This post is a response to comments in a post at Outside Beltway. I’m not generally known for my Pollyanna-ish attitude but when I look around me in my neighborhood or at work I don’t see racists and sexists. I do see people who are afraid for their jobs.

I continue to believe that we are good people with bad leaders not bad people with good leaders. I don’t even see how you could arrive at that conclusion.

Hillary Clinton was not drafted to run for the presidency by persistent popular clamoring. She was anointed by the DNC and President Obama as his rightful successor. To use the phrase so often applied that “sucked all the air out of the room”. Other Democratic candidates found it difficult to run.

In fact the only candidates who opposed HRC in the primaries had one or, in the case of Bernie Sanders, both feet out the door. I think that any of them would have beaten Donald Trump.

I do agree with one part of one comment:

Democrats need to figure something out, here. We just had a war. We lost. They won. And we have neither generals nor reliable troops to launch a counterattack.

There is no magic bullet, no master stroke that will solve the party’s problems. That will need to be done office by office, state by state. They shouldn’t expect a pre-fabricated made-to-order solution for all of their problems.

Whether the party can accomplish that I have no idea. They’ve got to root out the Clintonistas without casting out all of the centrists along with them.