1. It’s Sunday, November 13, 2016.

2. The postmortems for the election continue ad nauseum.

On the one side are the people I sympathize with: the Clinton supporters. They are the people terrified by what Trump said during the campaign, and how that will translate to his imminent presidency.

There is a record of what he said. There is no nuance. There is no amelioration. It’s there – as Casey Stengel said, “You can look it up.”

We’re also hearing a lot from Trump supporters explaining why they voted. They explain their anger.

It’s a rage at people – mostly on the two coasts – that they believe don’t care about them or their values. They think their struggles to get ahead – or even hold what they have – are ignored, by people like Clinton and President Obama. They think they struck a blow against arrogance, against protecting corporate interests, against accelerated social change, against spoiled elites who have more sympathy for minorities than for them.

3. So I want to bring out a quote from a campaign speech made in early September. 

In this speech, the candidate spoke about “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from.”

The candidate said moments later that these people want their lives to be different. “They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end.”

The candidate, of course, was Hillary Clinton. The speech, of course, came on Sept. 9 at a fundraiser in New York.

And it was the quote before that everyone remembered: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?”

The “basket of deplorables” came to symbolize how out-of-touch Hillary Clinton was supposed to be with people struggling to get by in places like post-industrial Pennsylania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But as the first quote illustrates, she knew exactly what the problem was. She had all the sympathy in the world for the problems of the struggling middle class.

4. Now, to be fair, she didn’t say it well. Why she had to put everybody into two baskets will haunt her until the day she dies.

I don’t know if anybody read over the speech before she gave it, or she delivered it ad lib on a day she found out she had pneumonia. But, yes, her wording stinks.

But because of the way things are reported, the other ideas of that speech were lost. And because the campaign was so embarrassed by it, all she ever did was give a half-hearted apology.

She would have been better off owning it and clarifying it. She never really did.

That’s on her. What’s on journalists is the reporting of it – the playing up the one part without providing equal weight to the other. The idea of balance, which supposedly equated Trump’s multiple offenses with Clinton’s e-mail server blunder, never seemed to apply to any other part of her campaign.

Because, yes, there were more than a few Trump supporters for whom the word “deplorable” is being charitable. The white nationalists. The Holocaust deniers – or embracers. The woman haters. With Trump’s victory, those cockroaches have emerged from the cracks, thinking this is their deliverance.

Had Hillary Clinton been merely more elegant about what she said, perhaps we wouldn’t be at the point we’re at today.

But to say she and the Democrats were clueless about the struggles of people watching their way of life get away is misleading and unfair.

It’s just that Trump and the Republicans found a hole in the backfield and ran with it.

That’s point one.

Point two is this:

5. I understand the frustration with what was revealed in the John Podesta and DNC e-mails. The arrogance, the favoritism, the cozying up to moneyed elites on Wall Street and elsewhere.

What I don’t understand is the lack of outrage that this information was obtained nefariously. It was obtained through the connivance of a foreign power, one with a vested interest in affecting the outcome of our election. And one candidate, rather than condemn this invasion of privacy, encouraged and took advantage of it.

Do not dare tell me that the disclosures by Putin’s tame WikiLeaks pals are some great contribution to American democracy. If you say that, you’re basically supporting theft as political action.

What’s in the hacked e-mails of John Podesta and the DNC is embarrassing and stupid. What’s indisputably criminal is the fact that they were stolen from computers, and put to use to advance the agenda of Russia.

I am absolutely not a Marco Rubio fan. But the Florida senator was absolutely right in October when he told CNN “as our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process, and I will not indulge it.” 

Rubio also said: ”I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.”

6. While they probably should focus on how to recover quickly from this debacle, Democrats and progressives will dwell for next few weeks on why this went so terribly wrong.

That’s good – you can’t completely do the first part without the second.

But Democrats have nothing to apologize for. They are not insensitive to anyone – including those people in now former blue states that turned away from Clinton. Yes, they didn’t present it as well as they should have.

But now, with the elevation of Trump and the Republican agenda, those people will get to see what insensitive really looks like.

1. It’s Saturday, November 12, 2016.

2. Again, I’m not a fan of the protests against Trump’s election.

Yes, I’m sympathetic – and angry. But all the protests do is rile up the Trumpistas (I don’t believe my inability to settle on one name for Trump’s supporters is the reason the jackass won, but it does trouble me).

The day will come in the Trump years that the people who voted for him will be on our side. Wait until then.

And here’s something that really bothers me: One of those leading the protests in Miami is a supporter of Jill Stein.

So here’s my message to this clown: You can’t have voted for Jill Stein and be mad that Trump won!

Jill Stein was never going to win the presidency. Hillary Clinton had a chance. If you really hated Trump, Clinton was your only option. And you have no credence being upset – you knew when you voted for Stein that you were risking a Trump win. Or you were an idiot.

3. Some Clinton supporters in their despair are hoping the Electoral College will reverse the gloom and choose her instead of him.

Their reasoning, if that’s the right word, is that because Clinton won the popular vote, she should win. And the electors will see the wisdom in that and do the right thing.

Which, of course, it isn’t.

Yeah, it sucks that Clinton, as of this writing, got 574,064 more votes than Trump and didn’t win. If that holds, she gets a place in history as having the biggest popular vote margin without winning, surpassing the 543,895 margin of Al Gore over George W. Bush.

But, alas, that’s not how we elect our presidents. It’s a federal system, meaning each state gets an individual say through the electors chosen Tuesday. Those electors are going to do what the people of their state told them to do.

And if, by some quirk, you could find 37 faithless electors, why would you want the crisis that would unfold?

Trump would claim the system was rigged and the most non-violent protests you’re seeing against him would be full-scale rioting against her. A Republican Congress would make the lack of cooperation President Obama got seem like a lovefest.

She’d be a powerless president. That’s not what any of us want for the first woman in the White House.

Unfortunately, we’ll all just have to wait.

4. There was one issue about which Trump and Clinton agreed: The nation needs a massive infrastructure rebuild.

And I’m betting that the first priority when he takes office.

Why? Because it’s popular.

Everybody laments the crappy roads and bridges they use to get to work or play. Lots of folks have a bad water story – even in the leafy suburbs. Fixing all that gets a big thumbs up.

And infrastructure puts lots of people to work, spurring the economy. If Trump follows through on his other promises, that’s going to counter the damage he’ll do dismantling trade agreements and pissing off the rest of the world.

When President Obama proposed massive infrastructure as a stimulus to blast us out of the Great Recession, he faced obstruction from Republicans. They claimed it was big government interference and dragged their feet.

That caused the package that passed to be smaller than he desired, and limited the boost to the economy.

But one thing we’ve learned in this election is that Republicans will gladly burn principles to stay in power. Trump will get support from enough Republicans to go with that of idealistic Democrats and get whatever size package he wants through.

It will be distasteful for Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to help Trump. But Democrats shouldn’t sacrifice beliefs for political expediency. That would make them Republicans.

And, believe me, there will be other fights worth fighting.

It’s November 11, 2016, Veteran’s Day.

And it’s time for 20 Questions Friday, my effort to shape the end of this absolutely crazy week in American history in interrogatory form.

Try to enjoy this weekend.

— Will Trump’s Attorney General follow through on a campaign promise and appoint a special prosecutor to look into Hillary Clinton?

— Should President Obama try to protect Clinton by pardoning her before he leaves office?

— How can we convince the people protesting Trump’s election that, for now, what they’re doing is counter-productive because it keeps the Trump supporters in their riled-up state?

— On the other hand, aren’t the protesters just following the example that Republicans and the Trump trumpeters set?

— In what way does bringing Washington lobbyists into Trump’s transition team and administration change the direction of Washington?

— Does anybody remember any questions in the debates about whether Trump would back Paul Ryan’s proposals to make Medicare a voucher system and privatize Social Security? Or do we only remember the umpteen questions about Clinton’s e-mails?

— Do you think the people in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who voted for Trump are going to be thrilled when the low-cost health care they’ve been promised after age 65 comes with strings attached?

— Are you wondering if it was Trump who got the “Access Hollywood” tape released so that we’d talk about that instead of real issues, about which he had no clue?

— Do you feel as though you wasted a significant chunk of your life that you’ll never get back checking the fivethirtyeight.com election forecast?

— Will the reporters in the front row of Trump’s first news conference as president – assuming he ever has a news conference – be from Fox, Breitbart, Newsmax, Infowars and the National Enquirer?

— Should New York Mayor Bill de Blasio delete the city’s database of undocumented immigrants?

— Would you be willing to harbor an undocumented immigrant in the event Trump follows through on his mass deportation idea?

— Is California Gov. Jerry Brown the new leader of the Free World?

— What do you think will be the capital of the resistance: New York, Los Angeles or some other city?

— Does this election upend the idea that the North won the Civil War and the U.S. won the Cold War?

— When you hear some politician or business leader say that everything will be all right, do you want to shake him/her?

— Will Trump gold-plate everything in the White House? (For a great look at his trashy hotel three blocks up the street, read my former colleague Emily Jane Fox’s Vanity Fair story.) 

— Why aren’t we as relieved that this election is over as we thought we’d be?

— How will I laugh tomorrow? (Tenth in a series of song-title questions)

— Will this sick feeling ever leave my stomach?

1. It’s Thursday, November 10, 2016.

2. It’s the 250th anniversary of the chartering of what is now Rutgers University, my son’s alma mater.

3. Trump’s election has sparked big protests in cities around the country.

His supporters are outraged by this, complaining that they didn’t protest when Obama won twice.

To them, I will spell out the difference: the people protesting have spent the last year and a-half hearing their champion trash them.

Not once or twice, in some moment of weakness during a long campaign, after which the candidate apologized. Every day, sometimes multiple times each day, Hispanics and Muslims and women and African-Americans and lots of other people have heard the insults – and, by the way to the Trump cheerleaders, your lack-of-a-heart-felt exhortations and taunts and Internet memes with Confederate flags.

When you win with a divisive campaign, you reap the whirlwind. That was the danger about which sober-minded people, including those Republicans who couldn’t vote for the candidate, warned.

Author Stephen King is absolutely right. Saying he was getting off the grid for awhile just to heal his wounds from this campaign, his message to Trump and his triumphant minions is the old antique shop sign: You break it, you own it.

4. But this is not to say that I think it’s a great idea for those opposed to Tuesday’s result to take to the streets.

Trust me, I’m sympathetic. The result of this election has made me angry and sad, and there’s a part of me that wants to go into some of kind of time-lock chamber that won’t open until Jan. 20, 2021.

And yet all these protests will do, coming on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech and President Obama’s message of reconciliation, is fire up the Trump types to prove the point I’m going to make beginning two paragraphs down.

It’s not worth the escalation. At least not for now. I strongly suspect there will be opportunities to tie up traffic across the country in the months ahead. And a lot of the people on the other side might be joining ours.

5. I got some great insight from students in my Media Writing class yesterday, as we pretty much ditched the curriculum for a day to discuss the event that kept us up all of the night before.

One of them said he could never understand why experts thought Pennsylvania was such a lock for Clinton. He had driven through the commonwealth, going all the way to Pittsburgh, and saw nothing but Trump signs along the road.

Now, as one political operative says, yard signs don’t equal votes. I couldn’t drive five miles through Rockland County, New York, without seeing hundreds of signs for a Republican county judge candidate. He lost. He couldn’t even win my precinct, which Trump won.

But my students thought the Trump enthusiasm they saw in Pennsylvania and in their home state of New Jersey was genuine.

By contrast, they never saw the same level of furor for Clinton. And they’re right. Except in pockets of liberals, there were few signs or other visible indications that someone supported the Democrat.

One other enlightening point from these young men and women. Most of them seemed visibly distraught by Trump’s victory.

But few – if any – shared that feeling about Clinton’s defeat. They didn’t like her.

There was the sense that she’s dishonest and feels entitled. Some believe she robbed Bernie Sanders of a fair shot at the Democratic nomination; they believe unequivocally that Sanders would have crushed Trump.

I asked if they felt this way because she’s a woman – having just written yesterday’s post giving that a reason No. 1. The male students said no, but some of the female students believe that strongly.

I asked if it was because of her husband, and their answers were kind of hemming and hawing.

That reflects a simple fact: They don’t really know Bill Clinton. They were born in his presidency. The credit Bill Clinton gets for a booming 1990s economy doesn’t resonate with them. And the Monica Lewinsky scandal doesn’t either – except that it’s part of a vague unease about the man that has been spread over time by his – and his wife’s opponents.

All they know is that they were really excited about Sanders, the same way they were still excited about President Obama – even though they were too young to vote for him.

And, by the way, very excited about the idea of Michelle Obama running in 2020.

One point I made through the campaign is that people don’t vote against someone for President. They vote for someone.

The 2016 election tested that theory. As of this writing, Hillary Clinton received 233,404 more votes than Trump.

But that doesn’t disprove the theory. Because we elect a President through the Electoral College, through the winning of individual states, not a whole nation.

And because she couldn’t get enough people to want her.

It’s shocking in a way, because I know so many women who were so excited by the prospect of reaching that milestone. The problem is not enough women – especially those who have just crossed the timeline from girl to woman – felt that way about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

(For an interesting take on this, here’s Clinton biographer David Maraniss’ piece for The Washington Post.)

6. As an aside, I’m going to raise this question again, without trying to answer it – sort of a prelim for tomorrow’s 20 Questions Friday:

Did Hillary Rodham Clinton have a better chance at winning the White House if she had run as Hillary Diane Rodham?

7. Finally, a clarification:

In my HARD TO KNOW HOW TO START blog yesterday, I talked about who should lead the Democratic Party going forward. And I mentioned Tammy Duckworth, the senator-elect from Illinois.

I still think it’s accurate to say Duckworth should be a leader among Democrats. She is bright and relatively young, and she is a great person for reaching out to Asian-Americans and military veterans.

But, if there was an implication that she’s a possible 2020 presidential candidate, it’s mistaken. As I should have remembered from a homework assignment I gave one of my students, Duckworth was born in Thailand. That makes her constitutionally ineligible to be President.

Again, it doesn’t preclude her from being a leader among Democrats. In fact, when Trump gives his first State of the Union speech to Congress early next year – that’s going to be something to watch – Duckworth might be a great candidate to give the Democratic rebuttal.

1. It’s later on Wednesday, November 9, 2016.

2. Last week, I tried to explain to my Media Writing students something they didn’t understand: how the Electoral College works.

I told them about a bunch of weird scenarios – and one of them might just come to pass.

Hillary Clinton has just taken the lead in the national popular vote. That means more Americans, as of this moment, voted for her than for Trump.

But, again as I told my class, that’s not the United States decides elections. We decide it on a state-by-state basis, awarding electors from each state who’ll meet next month to actually choose the president.

So the fact that Trump won some states by narrow margins overshadows Clinton’s big margins in California and New York.

My students were incensed by this. I told them that’s the reason they need to vote – if you want to change things, you don’t get to do it from the sidelines.

Now, the chances of this happening are slim. But the best chance of it happening will be if Trump is as abysmal as he’s been at everything he’s done – and people realize what a travesty it was that a relative handful of people in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin foisted him upon us.

If Clinton wins the popular vote, it will be the second time in 16 years that the biggest vote-getter isn’t president. Before 2000, it hadn’t happened since 1888, when incumbent President Grover Cleveland outpolled Benjamin Harrison across the country, but lost in the Electoral College.

3. In a little while, Hillary Clinton will give her concession speech.

I personally would rather have seen her give it early this morning in the Javits Center, where she could have rallied her crestfallen supporters. But maybe she, herself, was so shell-shocked that she couldn’t handle the moment the way she thought she should.

The postmortems for this election will be quite extensive. I’m just going to touch on two involving the Democrats:

• Was Hillary Clinton the wrong candidate for Democrats?

I’m just not convinced that Bernie Sanders would have done better. Trump and the Republicans would have labeled him “Crazy Bernie” or “Bernie the Socialist.” He would have used Sanders’ own words to show he would raise taxes – because that’s what Sanders said he’d do in order to pay for expanded Obamacare.

At this hour, I still believe that being a woman is the No. 1 reason she lost. But perhaps that’s running neck-and-neck with being a Clinton.

In a way, she paid the price for George W. Bush. The American people are not into dynasties. They tried it with W. – they got the Iraq War and a near depression. It’s why Jeb Bush did so badly in the GOP primaries.

And while Bill presided over a booming economy, he also presided over the most stupid scandal imaginable. That baggage never went away.

• Who leads the party now?

The problem with nominating the old folks in your party is that you don’t give a new generation a chance. One of the reasons Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 is that he was a fresh face – that gave him an edge over Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the others.

The Democrats had some winners last night, believe it or not. My favorite is Kamala Harris, who won the Senate seat from California. Yes, she’s got two “strikes” against her with the electorate that anointed Trump – African-American and female. But she’s a smart, dynamic young woman who can rally the party with young and minority voters.

Another is Tammy Duckworth, the senator-elect from Illinois. Again, two “strikes”: female and Asian-American. But a big plus is her military background – she lost both her legs in combat in Iraq.

And there’s Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Again, he’s African-American. A dynamic leader who’s popular on the late-show comedy circuit that’s essential to reaching a millennial audience.

The party needs to lick its wounds quickly. It needs to start planning for big off-year elections next year in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City, and the 2018 midterms. This midterm, they’ll have an edge. If the Trump presidency is a failure, the country might well be ready to throw Republicans out the door.

4. Here’s the first in a series of last night’s winners: ISIS.

The people of the United States have embraced the idea that the name of the religion ISIS has hijacked is Radical Islam. They don’t want Muslims from Syria or Libya or anyplace else to show up.

We are no longer the hope of those trying to flee the chaos of the Middle East.

ISIS can exploit that until the desert runs out of sand.

Yes, Trump will try to escalate the fight against the terrorists. But that ignores the fact that, like his KKK and neo-Nazi buddies, such dregs of humanity don’t go completely away.

That despair might spark the next terrorist attack against the United States.

1. It’s Wednesday, November 9, 2016.

2. On this date in 1965, New York City and much of the Northeast suffered a massive power failure.

The lights were out until early the next morning, but it was more of a shared communal experience than a catastrophe.

3. Now, the lights have gone out again. This won’t be so pleasant.

The Americans who reject diversity and education and tolerance have seized the day. They have given the raspberry to the Golden Rule.

Ubi est mea? Where’s mine? That is their mantra. That is how they view the world.

They think people of color, people of other faiths, people of other nations somehow get free stuff that they don’t get. There’s been this persistent thread online in recent years that the Obama administration was giving free cellphones to poor people. It’s rubbish.

4. There will be much hand-wringing in the next few days as the Trumpians celebrate at their bonfire of the vanities. What went wrong? Is that the America Americans really want? How did those of us who were so sure we would see the first woman President in our history miss this so goddamn badly?

Lots of us – and I’m pretty sure them ain’t reading this – will talk about leaving the country, or giving up on the country. And some of us will do what the old-fashioned thing that the people who backed the loser of the election do – congratulate the victor and try to heal the nation’s wounds.

5. The hell with all that.

In a few hours, the stocks in which my retirement funds are invested will lose 4% of their value. And that’s for starters. I have to worry about the safety of my son who’s teaching in South Korea. I have to worry about the way my adult daughter is treated in a country that has just OK’d male superiority.

I won’t take it lying down. I’m an American, too. And I think what this nation did to itself tonight is a horrendous breach of faith. 

6. The 2020 presidential election is 1,455 days away. We’re not failing next time.

1. It’s Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

It’s Election Day.

Finally.

2. I was driving home from my teaching job yesterday afternoon. Through some affluent suburbs in northern New Jersey. A leafy town called Franklin Lakes, where several McMansions have sprouted, including one that’s just about finished.

It was a gorgeous fall afternoon. The leaves were a little past peak, but not much. There’s still some vibrant oranges and yellow among the about-to-fall-off browns. The sky was deep blue, the roads were relatively empty.

And I’m thinking.

In 48 hours, how I’m viewing this scene will be completely altered.

Will it be something I’ll remember fondly, the portent of a hopeful future? Gliding into my elder years with my family. Worrying about the day-to-day things of personal life.

Or will I look back at the drive as the last days of peace in our lives? Will I go from a caring, welcoming, open country to a place where differences are demonic? Where you’re only as worthy as what you muscle your way to? Where truth is meaningless, and entitlement reigns?

This election is finally here. The decision is ours.

It could be a different world when I make the same drive tomorrow. I wonder how different.

1. It’s Sunday, November 6, 2016. The election is two days away.

2. In the United States and Canada, we are now on Standard Time. At 2 a.m. today, it was 1 a.m. today again.

Every time we change the clocks, there is complaining. Some of it is justified – if you’re the parent of a newborn, you’ve been working diligently to get him or her on a nice steady sleeping pattern. And then wham, the kid’s getting up at 2 a.m. for the 3 a.m. feeding.

But most of the complaints are stupid. Why does it have to be dark at 4:30 p.m.? I got up early on a day I like to sleep in. What a pain it is to change all the clocks?

Let’s take ‘em in reverse order:

If you’re so lazy that you can’t take five seconds to change your clocks, there’s little hope for doing something serious, like voting on Tuesday. Your smartphone, computer and cable box all changed the time by themselves.

Do you think it’ll take more than two days to get your body clock adjusted to the time change? Three days? Besides, you get a chance to try out what it’s like to get up early.

Finally, we are still 45 days from the winter solstice. By that time, sunrise will be around 7:15 a.m. here. But in western parts of the Eastern time zone, sunrise will be around 8:15. If we didn’t change the clocks back, it would be around 9:15. That’s a ridiculously depressing time for the sun to rise.

In short, we go back and forth between daylight and standard time in order to give some semblance of normality to people’s days. Getting up and there’s daylight. That makes sense. Complaining about clock changing doesn’t.

3. Nate Silver is a guy people shouldn’t really feel sorry for.

He has revolutionized the reporting of data as news. While that might seem like trivia to some, the ability to cut through numbers to find facts is cherished in journalism – it’s one more path to truth, which – contrary to what Trumpian media critics believe – is the goal of everyone in the profession.

But the fact that numbers are not supposed to lie puts Silver in a tough spot.

Of all the projections of Tuesday’s election, Silver’s are the ones least favorable to Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t seem to sit well with her supporters in the media, some of whom believe that Silver is so afraid of being wrong in this election that he’s manipulating the numbers – and that is inspiring Trump’s team to rally his supporters in an effort to find a path to victory.

Trust me, there is no one who wants Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com numbers to show a Clinton landslide more than I do. I’m the one who wants to admit ten more states so that Trump could lose all 60.

But the reason anyone cares what Silver’s team is projecting about the election is his accuracy record. He’s missed maybe one state projection in the last two presidential races. His analysis and weighing of polls by their quality has always been first rate and based on science, not anecdote or emotion.

And, if Clinton wins, Nate Silver will not have gotten it wrong. He’s just more conservative about his projections than the others who are doing the same sort of poll analysis and crunching.

If the numbers are telling Silver that Clinton’s chances of winning are 64.2% (as of this posting), his track record up to now warrants respecting that analysis. Yes, I wish the percentage was 94%, and I really hope his analysis is just slightly off on a few states – say Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio.

But thank goodness there’s a Nate Silver who exercises caution, judgment and an understanding of science and math.

You don’t have to like what he’s telling us about Tuesday. You do have to respect it.

1. It’s Saturday, November 5, 2016. The election is three days away.

2. The American electorate is in a foul mood. I know this from taking my own temperature.

There are two reasons why.

One is that there’s a perception of an obviously large percentage of the population that things aren’t going their way. They feel as though their jobs have gone away or are in danger. If they’re trying to make it own in a small business, there are too many obstacles: taxes, hiring rules, regulations. And they believe people they don’t think work as hard as they do are getting “free stuff” that they don’t get.

Then, there’s the other side. People like me. We’re sick of the hatred, of the petty jealousy, of making people feel as though they’re less than they are. We’re sick of bluster and bullying. We’re sick of the idea that being politically correct is weak and stupid – that, maybe, the world’s problems would ratchet down a notch if people were more considerate of others.

There will be no resolution of these poles of disgust on Tuesday. Unlike other elections, when the nation tries to come together for the new president, there will no reconciliation, no matter who wins.

That’s obviously disappointing to the Americans in the middle who just want to go about their lives. That’s not going to happen. Sorry.

So what might be useful, for both sides, is to take some measurement of how the United States stands on November 5, 2016. Because, assuming we get to 2020, that will be a rational basis about which to judge the 45th President of the United States as she/he seeks re-election.

Here we go:

• As of the summer of 2016, the U.S. economy was growing at an annual rate of 2.9%. Economists say Ideal growth, the best level at which the economy is growing without spurring inflation, is 3%.

• As of October 2016, the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.9%. There was a time in the early 1990s when people thought full employment was a 6% unemployment rate. In early 2009, right after President Obama took office, the rate spiked above 10% in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

• As of today, the major U.S. military commitments around the world are in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they are not nearly as large as they were before Obama took office. We’re hunting ISIS and al-Qaeda, whose nihilist rantings inspire sick-minded would-be terrorists. 

• As of this crisp autumn day, the average price of a gallon of gas is $2.22 a gallon, according to AAA. A year ago, it was $2.21. Last month, it was $2.23. That’s some amazing consistency. It’s also a little more than half the record high price of $4.11 a gallon set in July 2008.

• As of 2015, the most recent year available, violent crime rose 3.9% from the prior year, according to the FBI. There were 15,696 murders last year, more than 71% of them as a result of firearms use. However, the violent crime rate is down by about a sixth of what it was ten years ago.

• As of this moment, a woman’s right to end her pregnancy is guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. That decision has been in effect for 43 years.

• As of this particular Saturday, the right to marry the adult you choose, whether of the opposite or same sex, is guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision. That decision has been in effect since June of last year.

• As of the latest report by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, 58,495 bridges – nearly 10% of all in the United States – are deficient. In Rhode Island, the state with the biggest problem, 23% of its bridges are in really bad shape.

• As of October, 11 of the past 12 months have set high-temperature records, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Only a late-reported cold snap in Antarctica prevented June from being the 12th month.

• As of November 5, 2016, the right to trial by jury and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That was meant to avoid chants of “Lock her up” and “Execute her” by vigilantes.

• There’s also a Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment – guaranteeing that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – is only one of ten in the Bill.

As of now.

It’s November 4, 2016, the eighth anniversary of Barack Obama’s election as President, the 100th birthday of Walter Cronkite, and four days before the election.

Today’s edition of 20 Questions Friday deals with the matter at hand. These are questions you can ask yourself or anyone who’s undecided or anyone deluded into thinking that Trump should get their vote.

Enjoy the weekend.

— Today’s October jobs report show the unemployment rate at 4.9%. What will it be on Nov. 3, 2020, the next scheduled Election Day?

— The U.S. economy is growing at an annual rate of 2.9%. Do you really think an advanced economy can grow much faster than that?

— The Dow Jones industrial average, even after seven days of worrying about this election, is just shy of 18,000. How much do you think it’ll drop if Trump wins?

— Do any of their hundreds of customers look at the nice people who run my favorite authentic Mexican takeout place in Park Ridge, N.J., and see rapists and drug dealers?

— Does anybody raised by responsible parents ever mock or put down people with disabilities?

— Are people captured while fighting for the United States just weak links in a chain that it’s just as well, or are they patriots we honor and support, even if we disagree over the war in which they fought?

— Do you think women have minds and hearts, or are they just the sum of your assessment of their physical parts?

— Has anyone who takes the relationship with his or her spouse marriage seriously been threatened in any way by the legality of same-sex marriage?

— Do you take consolation every April 15 that – while paying taxes can be painful – at least you know that some soldier is getting a paycheck, some pothole is going to get filled, some aid is going to a place ravaged by disaster and that some of the research to fight cancer can continue?

— Have the libel laws in this country, dating back to the precedent set in the trial of John Peter Zenger in the 18th century, worked well enough to maintain the freest news media in the world?

— It’s been more than three weeks now. Where’s that “imminent” Trump lawsuit against The New York Times about the stories of women claiming he committed sexual misconduct?

— Do you really think Melania Trump’s pet cause if she became First Lady would be cyber-bullying when one of the most notable cyber-bullies would be in the White House living quarters?

— How honest can the first presidential candidate in 40 years to hide his tax returns be?

— Do you really think that the cretins backing Trump would want to stop at railroading Hillary Clinton into prison? Why not Bill? Or her aides? Or President Obama?

— Shouldn’t the person who leads our country in times of crisis be thicker skinned than to be offended by Alec Baldwin’s impression on “Saturday Night Live”?

— Are any of you who hire landscapers ready to mow your own lawn when the workforce used in many cases ends up on a one-way ticket to Ciudad Juarez? Are any of you with elderly family members ready to spend hours tending to them because their caregivers are on their way back to a place they fled?

— Has Trump said anything about the Iraqi assault on Mosul now that it’s making faster progress than expected? Do you think maybe he doesn’t know more about fighting ISIS than the generals masterminding this campaign?

— Do you think Chris Christie can speak to the issue of government integrity when both the prosecution and defense in the Fort Lee Bridgegate trial said he was responsible for snarling George Washington Bridge traffic for spite?

— Are the lives of the people who support Trump as joyless as his rallies look? Has anyone ever associated the word “joy” with Trump?

— Will next Wednesday be windy, the result of collective exhaling that American democracy barely survives, or will it be a cold, gray portent of the future?