Well,
we are now down to two – Trump and Clinton.
And I assume the Obama administration will shield Hillary from
indictment for her mishandling of sensitive emails, just as they did for
General Petraeus. I have read and signed those clearance nondisclosure papers
that Clinton also signed, and I know for a fact that if you or I had done a
quarter of what either of them did, we would be in federal prison, but part of
the current Washington corruption is the protection of insiders like Clinton
and Petraeus from the laws the rest of us are bound by.
So
we will probably have a choice between an unlikable unindicted felon (Hillary)
and a bombastic, unusually expert persuader with unknown policies (Trump). Or
looked at another way, between a member of the incestuous, corrupt Washington
insider establishment (Hillary) and a rich, arrogant Washington outsider
entrepreneur (Trump).
Not
voting, or voting for some unelectable marginal third-party candidate just
means abdicating from the choice. We will live with the consequences however we vote
or don’t vote, so we might as well try to decide between these two, unappealing
as the choice may be.
Hillary
will clearly just be another four years of the Obama administration, except
that she is more hawkish, and so somewhat more likely to commit more American
lives and money to the black hole that is the Middle East mess. Since the
Clinton Foundation continued to get huge donations from foreign governments
even while she was Secretary of State, the corruption that pervades the Clinton
Foundation activities will no doubt continue, and perhaps expand now that she
is president.
Though
like all the candidates she talks big on the campaign trail, she will probably
only tinker with problems at the edges, and her solutions will always involve
more government, and more money. She shows no signs thus far of understanding
the problems that globalization and automation are producing in the nation,
even though Sanders has been pressing those very issues on her.
If
she wins, I predict it will be by a very narrow margin, and her win is unlikely
to carry very many new Democrats into Congress, so she will face the same sort
of Republican obstructionism that Obama has faced, which will severely limit
what she can do.
Trump
is largely an unknown. The Washington establishment, both political and media,
Republican and Democrat alike, are (belatedly) mobilizing to oppose him because
he is an existential threat to their cozy insider world. He will have his work
cut out for him to withstand their attacks.
I see that the Washington Post
has assigned a team of 20 reporters to dig into Trump’s past and write a series
of articles about him. Naturally no such
review of Hillary Clinton’s past activities is planned.
And
if you watch the media talking heads, or read the opinion columns, it is clear
that the vast majority of the “professional pundits”, humiliated by their
repeated underestimation of him, are spinning any story they can find to sell
the notion that he is unelectable. There is even a note of desperation in some
of them. I see outlandish claims that a
Trump victory would bring an immediate recession, or put us into (another) war.
Sounds like desperation to me.
What
we do know about Trump is (a) he is very, very good at persuasion, which after
all is a large part of the president’s job (persuading Congress, persuading the
nation, persuading foreign leaders), (b) he is pragmatic rather than
ideological (which drives ideological conservatives up a wall), (c) he is less
an internationalist than the establishment (who label him, unfairly, as an
isolationist), and therefore less eager to spend America lives and money
solving foreign problems, and (d) he is a pretty good businessman (a few bankruptcies
among his many ventures are a sign he has kept his various enterprises
prudently protected from one another, not a sign that he is a bad
businessman). And (thus far at least) he
has probably not been bought by any major special interests. I personally count most of those points in
his favor.
Of
course running a government is not the same as running a business, as many of
his detractors have been pointing out.
But then running a government is not the same as being an actor and
union leader, but that didn’t stop Ronald Reagan from being at least an adequate
president. And being just a community organizer
didn’t seem to stop Obama from being at least an adequate president.
So
there is a case to be made for voting for Trump on the grounds that it would be
hard to do any worse than the current system has been doing, and he at least
might shake things up a bit. The underlying unknown is whether electing Trump
would make any impact on the current incestuous, corrupt, dysfunctional
Washington ruling elite, or whether they would survive a Trump administration
and continue as usual afterward.
What
is also clear is that both political parties are in deep trouble internally.
The reason Democrats are stuck in this election with a candidate as weak and
unlikeable as Hillary is that they have been decimated downballot in state
elections over the past eight years, so there are hardly any promising new
faces coming up through the Democratic party ranks. And Republicans are engaged
in a vicious civil war within the party which is crippling them, and is the
reason a candidate like Trump could emerge as their nominee. Both parties have gotten so far out of touch
with the voter’s concerns and the nation’s real problems that their traditional
bases are dissolving out from under them.
I
still don’t know what I will do on election day, but this is part of the thought
process I’m going through now.
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