Dear America,
I had set my mind to watching the debate last night, and when 9:00 rolled around, I tuned in. Right from the beginning, I found myself cringing every time one of them spoke, and by 9:30, I had turned on my Roku and was binge watching a British detective series. They are both such ugly human beings that, though I dread a Trump presidency and I thus intend to vote for Clinton, I find myself yearning for Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. Hell, I'd even take Richard Nixon. They were like two high school candidates for student body president rather than two aspirants to the presidency of the United States. The sniping...the condescension...the outright incivility that both of them displayed was so crass and unbecoming that I was embarrassed for us, America. I was too embarrassed to watch the two people, one of whom will be our president come January 2017, even speak to one another. The edge was Hillary Clinton's in my mind, simply because she cogently articulated coherent and detailed policies--to the extent that time allowed for detail, that is--and the facts on which she based them, while Trump just made conclusory statements about what he planned to do, to the extent that he plans anything, and about what would result from it. But regardless of whom I found more credible, neither of them should expect an invitation from me to come to our house for dinner. As I was switching to Netflix in dismay, if not disgust, I found myself thinking that Bill Clinton would never have conducted himself the way his wife did, and while I don't even like Bill Clinton much, I at least could stand to listen to him, even as he was saying, "I did not have sex with that woman...Monica Lewinsky"...which everyone knew was a lie. It was all so unseemly last night--so shabby. As I heard Orson Bean put it on the Tonight Show one time about forty years ago, the air was full of shab.
Let me concede that I have thought that Hillary Clinton should put the wood to Trump, as we used to say in my juvenile softball-playing days, but I never thought about the details of doing so. Sure Trump should be confronted with his "business practices," which most of us would call greedy and, if not outright fraudulent, fraudulike if I can be allowed to coin my own phrase. And as to his revisionist attitude to everything he says, I thought he should be required to eat some of those words too. I also thought that he should be confronted with the fact that the "economic policies" he claims to advocate aren't new; they are just retreads of Reagan's supply-side, trickle down economics, which are what got us to 2008 and the crash. It is demonstrable that making the rich richer doesn't make the rest of us richer by any stretch of the imagination and that tax cuts don't bring about economic growth, as least as you can measure it in terms of jobs and earnings for those who actually work for a living. And there are several other areas in which Trump should be required to explain himself in terms that his constituents will understand for what they are rather than what he wants them to be, but there are ways to do such things. It wouldn't have required rancor and disdainful quips to get at them, but, while Clinton did direct some such questions to him, her demeanor probably made Trump's supporters feel sorry for him...and dislike Clinton even more. I could hear Bill croaking, "Donald, I heard you say that declaring bankruptcy was just a part of doing business. Is that the way you plan to run the country?" He'd be smiling almost saccharinely as he said it, and a world would be disarmed by his charm while Trump just repeated the odious sentiment for which he was being subtly castigated. Hillary has been with Bill for over thirty years. Why hasn't she picked up any of his good traits.
Be all this as it may, the election is still up for grabs because our choice is between two characters who look for all the world like playground bullies who are prone to seeing the world as they will rather than as it is. The fact is that registered Republicans will almost all vote for Trump and registered Democrats will vote for Clinton. The election is in the hands of the independents who haven't yet decided, which I recently heard are about 11% of the total electorate. Of those maybe 10 million voters, maybe as many as half won't vote. The other half will be divided between three rubrics. The first is those who will default to the liberal candidate and the second is those who will default to the more conservative one. Thus, roughly 3 million plus a few will decide for the other 97 million of us, and what will they base their choices on?
That's what scares me: which evil will they choose. Either way, we lose. The only question is, are we just going to lose, or are we going to hell in a hand basket.
Your friend,
Mike
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