"He was insanely excited. I was sleeping in, and he comes crawling on top of the bed like a little kid. He’s like, 'Honey, we got to get up. We got to get there.' When he got that look, well, he was hard to resist."

Said Helen Comperatore, describing her husband Corey, "a man she met in kindergarten, started dating in high school and had been married to since just after he turned 21."

Quoted in "Revisiting Butler, one year later/President Trump is still processing the attack that nearly took his life, while a victim’s widow mourns" (WaPo, free-access link).

The article is by Salena Zito, adapted from her new book, "Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland" (commission earned).

Salena Zito was there that day: "'Saleeeeena,' Trump said, exaggerating the middle of my name. 'Look at her hair, everyone — doesn’t she have the best hair in journalism? Possibly in America.'"

"I have argued for years that the conservative-populist coalition was born in 2008 when John McCain became the Republican nominee."

"These voters either stayed home or voted against their interests for Barack Obama because of his candidacy's historic and aspirational nature. By 2009, their breakaway began, and the anti-establishment Tea Party movement was born. The 2010 midterm elections demonstrated the coalition’s strength, but it felt the same way toward Mitt Romney as it had for McCain — nice guy but didn’t inspire them.... Democrats shed their blue-collar and rural voters that had been part of their coalition and went full elite progressive. The 2014 election was the result, an even worse bloodbath for Democrats than 2010. Two things were missed in the coverage of 2016. First, Trump was never the cause of that election — he was the result of a coalition that had been building for a decade, made up of suburban-educated voters, blue-collar and rural voters, and a growing number of middle-class Hispanic voters.... Now, Biden and the Democrats have been caught once again failing to appreciate why they were sent to Washington, D.C. They underestimated just how toxic their intersection with the cultural curators would be for them — with those constantly telling voters they are insurrectionists and racists and lying about voting laws in Georgia and Texas and Pennsylvania or smearing them because they don't want idiotic ideas driven into their children's skulls..."

Writes Salena Zito in "The voters revolt against our cultural curators, again" (Washington Examiner)."

What will we do without James Taranto writing Best of the Web?!

We'll have Best of the Web written by this new person, James Freeman. And we'll have James Taranto in his new Wall Street Journal incarnation, running the op-ed pages.

Here's Taranto's last Best of the Web column. Excerpt:

There is something to be said for going out on a high note, and 2016 was a great year for this column. We don’t claim to have gotten the election right—we were surprised, if only mildly, by Donald Trump’s victory—but most journalists were so spectacularly wrong that simply taking Trump and his supporters seriously was enough to put us at least in the top decile, maybe the 98th percentile, of journalistic sagacity. (In the 99th percentile we’d place cartoonist Scott Adams, reporter Salena Zito and, oddly enough, left-wing propagandist Michael Moore.)

As 2017 begins, the general mood in the so-called mainstream media is a bewildered despond, captured well in the opening of a year-end New York Times editorial:

Let’s pretend we’re in some cosmic therapist’s office, in a counseling session with the year 2016. We are asked to face the year and say something nice about it. Just one or two things.

The mind balks. Fingers tighten around the Kleenex as a cascade of horribles wells up in memory: You were a terrible year. We hate you. We’ll be so glad never to see you again. The silence echoes as we grope for a reply.

We said captured well, not written well. A cascade moves downward, not upward. Here’s an example of the correct usage: The tears of unfathomable sadness welled up in the editorialist’s eyes. She clutched a Kleenex as she prepared for them to cascade down her face....

How will we know which direction is up — or down — without Taranto's reading the web for us?

Good luck to James Freeman, and I look forward to seeing what Taranto does with the op-ed pages.

(Salena Zito is the one who wrote "Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally" in The Atlantic (back in September).)

ADDED: I went back and reread Michael Moore's "5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win." That's from back in July. Really brilliant.

"This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally."

"The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up."

Said Corey Lewandowski at the election post-mortem at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, covered by The Washington-Post in "Shouting match erupts between Clinton and Trump aides."

The Post snarks that Lewandowski was complaining that "Journalists accurately reported what Trump said."

I missed the event, but it sounds to me as though Lewandowski was saying that the media didn't understand — or pretended not to understand — they way Trump was reaching people. I presume that  Lewandowski was making the same point that was made in the widely admired and shared piece by Salena Zito that appeared in the September 23, 2016 issue of The Atlantic, "Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally":

When he makes claims like [only 41.5% of 16 to 24-year old blacks are employed], the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, “Now that’s interesting.”

The WaPo article has lots more about the Kennedy School event, with particular emphasis on the Clinton aides beating up on Kellyanne Conway. I don't think I need to say that Conway held her own, but don't look to WaPo to present her as a feminist heroine. Her performance is predictably underplayed, making the article rather boring, as WaPo, on December 2nd, sinks back behind its paywall for me.

"When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

"When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, 'Now that’s interesting.'"

From "Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally/The Republican candidate took his case to a shale-industry gathering, and found a welcoming crowd," by Salena Zito in The Atlantic.

The 70-year-old Republican nominee took his time walking from the green room toward the stage. He stopped to chat with the waiters, service workers, police officers, and other convention staffers facilitating the event. There were no selfies, no glad-handing for votes, no trailing television cameras. Out of view of the press, Trump warmly greets everyone he sees, asks how they are, and, when he can, asks for their names and what they do.

“I am blown away!” said one worker, an African American man who asked for anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “The man I just saw there talking to people is nothing like what I’ve seen, day in and day out, in the news.”

Just before [Trump] takes the stage, I ask whether there’s one question that reporters never ask but that he wishes they would. He laughs. “Honestly, at this stage, I think they’ve asked them all.”

Then he stops in his tracks before pulling back the curtain and answers, so quietly that is almost a whisper: “You know, I consider myself to be a nice person. And I am not sure they ever like to talk about that.”

"Aging hippies trashed the state Capitol."

Writes Salena Zito in an article, cited by Instapundit, called "GOP Can't Ignore Wisconsin Recall Battle."

Look, I agree that GOP should not ignore the recall battle...

Unions and the left are far outspending pro-business interests and the right on recall ads. Democrats are wise to see more at stake than a single state Senate majority and a new political map that could unseat two freshmen Republican congressmen. They know this is the first battle of 2012 — their version of 2010's surprise election of Scott Brown, R-Mass., who won a blue-state U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Democrat Ted Kennedy....

That's really important. But aging hippies did not trash the Wisconsin Capitol. There have been huge crowds at the Capitol in the last 6 weeks, and most of them weren't even trashing anything. The composition of the crowd has changed over time. It began with a lot of middle-aged state employees, notably teachers.

There was a tremendous infusion of energy from young people — especially the UW TAs. Who did the things that can be called "trashing"? Who broke windows and doors and taped up a lot of signs? I think it was the young people who became excessively impassioned about something that looked like good politics to them. They weren't hippies, though. And neither were the older state employees, who have jobs and, presumably, pretty damned conventional lives. This has been a fight over the preservation of the political clout of public employees, who love their job security and their pensions. These aren't hippie values.

Quit blaming hippies. No hippies were involved. 

Anyway, about the recall elections. Not only is it important for Republicans to take these elections seriously, as Zito states, because of the damaging losses that could occur. It's also a great opportunity. Think of the up side. Promote the budget plan as something positive. You suddenly have a Democratic-Party-made platform for touting your program. And the protesters have, for your convenience, generated a vast array of images and video to attack the Democrats' position.