I finally organized a field to reality for some of my professors, and grad students, who so enjoyed opining about a Wisconsin they never saw.  I brought them down by Milwaukee, ain'a, for a fish fry and frozen custard and major-league baseball and bowling at the country's oldest bowling alley and more fun with the working class of West Aliens (in West Allis), where the drummers of the bands set up on the pool table to make more room to dance the polka.

The profs and other grad students -- all from the East Coast -- were freeked at the sight of smokestacks, even before we got to the city borders. . . .

But these are the sorts who have written flawed histories of Wisconsin, claiming that it was Progressive -- only Madison was -- and opining on MSNBC about a librul working class here.  Uh huh.

By the way, these also are the sorts who -- owing to the longtime dominance of UW-Madison's journalism school -- have created an estimated 90 percent of theories about mass media.  I watched how this happens:  Prof and grad students sit in a bar in Madison and come up with a theory.  Prof needs publications so sobers up and cleans up theory in better language than bar talk.  Prof assigns seminar of grad students to go out and conduct the study to get the evidence.  Grad students only have bikes so only can conduct study on others in Madison.

Towanda: "We need to know not only about hacking but also about all sorts of other ways that the voting process could have been corrupted in Wisconsin, for example, from many reports here. [...] We need to know this not only on principle but also pragmatically, politically -- if ever we are to win the Rust Belt again . . . for the White House and for Senate seats."

... we ought to first heed the often crude but nevertheless prescient political wisdom of a true master at the sometimes dark art of American retail politics, Lyndon B. Johnson:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Accordingly, in the face of economic dislocation in the Rust Belt, Trump repeatedly banged out the tune of white people's fear and resentment on the cheap barroom piano that's our mainstream and cable news networks. And once again, it resonated with white Americans who were content to look for scapegoats, rather than focus on solutions.

Time and again, we Democrats tend to underestimate just how potent race-baiting is in American politics, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. This is especially the case in the outer suburban rings of metropolitan areas and the rural hinterlands where homogeneity is the norm, rather than the exception.

And stripping persons of color of their innate humanity has become the primary modus operandi of the GOP for the better part of the last five decades, to the virtual exclusion of reason and accountability. And there's no easier or better way to do so, than to foster their party base's resentment over the gradual erosion of white privilege, ever since the Supreme Court first ruled on Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

That's why there's no resultant outcry from white citizens in Wisconsin and elsewhere, over the various proposals and measures put forth by GOP legislators and governors which seek to target both citizens of color and the poor in an obvious effort to limit the franchise and suppress the Democratic turnout.

For that matter, that's also why we didn't hear white people as a whole speak out in indignation when Trump and others questioned Barack Obama's very citizenship, and further sought to raise doubts about his academic credentials. (Note to Obama critics: The guy graduated with honors, which really tells you all you need to know about his grades.)

Even if some of these white working class folks had voted for Obama, I can't say for certain that they ever really accepted him as their equal. If he made it to Harvard Law School, AM squawk radio hosts contend, he was obviously the recipient of affirmative action and special treatment, which of course is reverse discrimination against whites.

People can roll their eyes and scoff at such obvious nonsense, but such inflammatory arguments do in fact play very well in Peoria and other white-bread communities where residents are not necessarily receptive to the notion of inevitable change. A palpably corrosive effect of our own latent racism is our failure to accept, however grudgingly, the fact that people of color can and do attain personal success entirely on their own because of their own knowledge and skills.

Moreover, we ought to realize that this is nothing really new. I was in high school in Southern California when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in University of California v. Bakke 438 U.S. 265 (1978). I saw firsthand even back then how many white people reacted viscerally to the idea that people of color needed affirmative action to counter institutional bias and level the playing field for everyone, and how quickly the California GOP harnessed that resentment for their own short-term ends.

To be perfectly honest, at this point in time, I'm still trying to figure out how we can reach disaffected white voters over the near term. For the most part, given that over 60% of white Americans responded to race-based entreaties to vote for the Republican nominees in the last two presidential elections, the repeated appeals from Democrats to the better angels of white people's nature appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

Or is that really the case? Maybe those appeals aren't being heard, because our message of continued progress and inclusion never reaches its intended target in white working class communities -- or at least, not at a volume sufficient enough to be considered as a viable alternative to the GOP's race-based and misogynist pandering to white male resentment.

Therefore, if I'm to look at our present situation and predicament pragmatically, I first have to take heart in the fact that while Hillary Clinton may have lost in the Electoral College, she's actually won the popular vote by a rather decided margin. (As of 8:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 28, she's up by 2,323,116 votes, and that margin may be close to 3 million by the time it's finally concluded.) In fact, since Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, I have to believe that the Democrats' core message of inclusion, fairness and collective progress is for the most part a pretty sound one.

Where we're in vast need of immediate improvement is with our logistical efforts to turn out the Democratic vote in those areas where it really makes a difference. Identifying those voters isn't the problem here. Rather, it's our repeated failure to ensure that they turn out physically at the polls in numbers sufficient to counter a well-frothed reactionary Republican vote. Having examined the numbers, that looks like what happened in the Rust Belt. Our message's reach and any corresponding "Get Out the Vote" efforts really did not really materialize much beyond the major urban areas.

Let's face it, as crazy and irrational as they sometimes are, we can almost always count on GOP voters to show up at the polls in each and every election, even if it's an special election called to fill a school board vacancy. Democratic voters, for a variety of reasons, simply don't do that. And when Democrats do turn out, it's likely during presidential years, and far too many on the left are spending their time looking for a political messiah.

(Speaking as a former messiah-seeker myself, and with the benefit of wisdom that comes with age and experience, I now personally find that quest to be a complete waste of one's time, especially if that messiah is otherwise likely unelectable. As I've said before, we collectively need to develop and nurture a sense of "us" in each one of ourselves as individuals. Jousting with political windmills is entirely a personal choice, and not a very practical one at that.)

This tells me that as Democrats, we have a lot of work to do in the eminently practical area of civics education, and I see that component of our comprehensive strategy as key to our ability and capacity to turn things around politically. We need to reach out and educate our adult voters and the next generations of would-be voters about how their government actually works in practice (as opposed to theoretical); and the proactive role which each individual can assume to advance and influence public policy discussions in their own respective communities.

In other words, we must mount a sustained effort to combat civic illiteracy and electoral complacency. We have to not only show people that egalitarian progressivism is something that's worth advancing and defending, but also convince them that there is indeed a lot at stake in each and every election for each and every office.

If we really want to rid our politics of the scourge of sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity, then we need to combat it on the ground floor in our respective communities, and not wait for it to reach the top floors of our statehouses, Capitol Hill and now -- Heaven help us! -- the White House itself.

It's a long-term endeavor, to be sure, but it's one which I'm convinced will pay significant dividends for Democrats in the coming years, provided that we start now, and not dilly-dally and make excuses for further inaction on that front.

A knowledgeable and well-informed electorate is really the best bulwark against any attempts to erode or subvert democracy. And if nothing else, we'll at least provide people with the tools necessary to make informed and educated decisions at the ballot box, so that they don't repeatedly vote against their own best interests, as so many have lately done.

At this juncture, I have a lot of confidence in our party's core message. Where we failed was in seeing that this message reached those who really needed to hear it, which is our own greater and diverse Democratic base. This was an acute problem for us in those rural and working class communities of the Rust Belt, where we allowed demagogy to take firm hold in voters' consciousness by having no alternative in place to effectively counter it, and our party's support in those places collapsed accordingly.

We simply assumed that people are rational beings and as such, they would reject rather than embrace Trump's toxic nonsense. (In that regard, I also plead guilty as charged. Trust me, it's a hard lesson learned and an assumption which I'll never make again.) Again, that's clearly a problem of logistical presence rooted in our own penchant to take such things as rational behavior for granted, and not in our core message itself.

I really do apologize here for running on, as I'm wont to do when I'm seeking to formulate an argument or articulate a strategy. I just so happen to feel very strongly that a lot of the current arguments I'm hearing within Democratic circles -- of which I'm admittedly a part -- are so myopic and self-serving as to miss the point entirely.

Rather than abandon the desires and aspirations of our party's base in order to pander to whatever we think the white working class presently wants to hear, we need to aggressively expand our range of focus beyond the immediate needs and desires of Beltway Democrats.

That's the primary reason why I very much oppose current efforts by some Democrats in D.C. to seat yet another current member of Congress as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Rather, our next DNC chair should be somebody from one of the state party organizations, which for the past eight years have suffered terribly due to the benign neglect of the Beltway-centric DNC Executive Committee, of which six of its nine members have been sitting members of Congress.

We must seek to re-establish our permanent presence in those regions of the country which that Executive Committee heretofore and inexplicably decided to simply write off as not worth any real effort on the DNC's part. Reaching out to disaffected white voters in those areas, and upholding our own party base's ideals and principles, should not be mischaracterized as mutually exclusive propositions, as some in D.C. and the media are still trying to do.

I further keep talking about how people need to step up in their communities and lead, rather than look to others to do it for them. Well, as one of the Hawaii Democratic Party's so-called "elders" -- I can't believe that at 55 years, I'm now old enough that younger Dems are looking to me for guidance -- it's now my turn at bat, and I need to practice what I preach. And that's why I declared my candidacy this afternoon for one of our state's seats on the DNC.

I mean, hey -- at this point, why NOT me?