Unless there are some stunning surprises in the next couple
of weeks, this election is pretty much over. We will get Hillary as president,
perhaps with a slim majority in Congress for the next 2 years; perhaps not.
I expect it will be a difficult presidency for her. A fair
proportion of the country will be against her – all Trump supporters and many
of the Sanders supporters. I think there will be a real feeling among some
30-40% or more of the country that she is an illegitimate president, an
unindicted felon who should have been disqualified, if not fined and jailed,
for her carelessness with classified materials, but who managed to stay on the
ballot because of insider tampering with the FBI and the justice system.
And I don’t expect the Trump effect to go away. Trump himself
may well remain a political force (I read that his son has been in talks about
setting up a Trump TV network), but even if he fades back into celebrity obscurity
the voter anger that has fueled his campaign will still be there, and I expect
in the next presidential election four years from now someone – perhaps Ted
Cruz – will try to resurrect the Trump voting block.
If Clinton gets a temporary majority in both houses of Congress
it will be interesting to see if she learned anything from the Obamacare debacle,
or if she will try to force through a progressive agenda without any bipartisan
support. A temporary majority in the Senate will at least allow her to appoint
some liberal judges to the Supreme Court, but that might turn out to be about
her most effective action as president, especially if the House remains in
Republican hands.
In retrospect it is amazing that both political parties
managed to field such unsuitable candidates. By all measures the Republicans should
have won this election in a walk, especially against a candidate as unpopular
as Clinton. Yet they managed to bungle it anyway.
Well, this election has upset lots of things. It will be interesting
to see if any effective reforms come out of it in either political party.
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