No, Mr. President. We’re not tired of winning yet

We learned these things from the suburban Atlanta congressional race last night.

Money does not win elections. By all accounts, the Democrat Jon Ossoff significantly outspent the Republican winner — by one account, $31 to $23 million.

Donald Trump is still not as toxic as Nancy Pelosi. Winner Karen Handel tied Pelosi and Ossoff together like a reverse Ben Carson surgery. How does a political party show it is captive to the status quo in a change atmosphere? By making Pelosi and Hillary Clinton the face of the party.

It’s the culture thing. Ossoff was an implant, a foreign body. Didn’t even live in the district. (The U.S. Constitution does not require it; individual state law can.) Republicans pointed out that Ossoff got most of his cash from California and New York. Just 14 percent came from Georgia, compared with 56 percent of Handel, a NY Times analysis showed.

Anti-Trump is not a winning message. As much of a hot mess the man may be, Trump wants jobs back in America, backs the police, shoots down Syrian aircraft, appoints a damn good supreme court justice, and a pretty good cabinet, and freaks out the culture elites.

Most of the news media remains Democrat-occupied territory. Sure, Fox was giddy that the Republican won. We quickly switched to MSNBC.

Just before the commercial break, Lawrence O’Donnell announced that Ossof had conceded. “When we return,” O’Donnell continued — no doubt reading a TelePrompTer programmed hours earlier, “Republicans are in trouble across the nation.”

James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal caught enough of the previous hour at MSNBC to note:

Rachel Maddow seems to have been so distraught over the emerging defeat in Georgia that she abandoned the subject and resumed “connecting the dots” among people President Trump or his acquaintances may have known. Your humble correspondent did not stay on the channel long enough to know if she made it all the way to Kevin Bacon, but found it useful to learn her unequivocal if unspoken statement about Georgia.

So, MSNBC is yin to the yang at Fox. But CNN purports to be down the middle. Except Don Lemon was even more ornery than usual. Most of his panel either fretted about what could save the Democrats or put on a brave front about moral victory.

Yes, it has been a Republican district since Newt Gingrich in 1978, albeit one that had given Trump only a 1.5% advantage. Not THAT Republican. So Karen Handel outperformed, beating Ossoff by four percentage points.

And no, Handel did not run away from Trump. The President campaigned for her in Georgia and tweeted his support.

It ain’t going to get any better for Democrats. They thought they had the wind at their back. The Trump administration is lawyering up, we’re hearing more from Trump’s personal lawyer than Sean Spicer. The mainstream media are scrambling over themselves to become the next Woodward and Bernstein. But in a year and a half, the nation will have found there is no there, there.

By November 2018, Congress may have actually reformed the tax code and lowered taxes. Who knows, it may have passed and the President have signed Repeal and Replace without it proving to be the mass extinction event predicted by Democrats.

They know that fear is always more powerful than fact.

Josh Kraushaar writes in National Journal:

Here’s why their math is more daunting today. Democrats need to net 24 House seats next year to gain a majority. Georgia’s 6th is the 28th most-Democratic district that Republicans hold (based on Hillary Clinton’s vote percentage in 2016). For Nancy Pelosi to become speaker again, Democrats would need to nearly run the table in more-favorable districts.

Democrats will draw the wrong lessons. The Ruckus and Act Up! crowd are breaking out their black Antifa masks. No more Mister Nice Guy, The Nation vows.

Corporate Democrats and the whole corrupt culture of consultants who suck the life and drain the principles out of any progressive movement need to be fought, not “friended”—even on Facebook.

The Nation’s prescription: more “economic justice” (aka: socialism).

Finally, we learned: Don’t screw with Paul Ryan.