Dear America,
It's the day before election day and if attitude is a portent of the results we can expect, Hillary Clinton is about to become our first woman president. Clinton has seemed to emerge from the miasma of negative campaigning in the past few days, even before the most recent Comey epistle, and she is quite firmly ensconced on the high ground. As to the Trump campaign, the story is quite different. I watched CNN for a few hours last night as a series of their news luminaries were questioned by the usual suspects: Wolf Blitzer, Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper. Kellyanne Conway, who became Trump's campaign manager in August, replacing the second campaign manager Trump had hired and fired, seemed at the time to be the closest to thing to a sincere and honest human being that Trump had been associated with to that date. Corey Lewandowski had been a shill for Trump, and still is, and Paul Manafort, Lewandowski's successor, was quite nearly possessed of integrity. When he was fired I assumed it was because of that integrity, and when Conway was hired in his stead, I thought was perplexed because she seemed as candid and forthcoming as I had perceived Manafort to be, but she evolved, or perhaps devolved would be a better choice of words. At first she was just an apologist for Trump and his hench-people. It was to be expected; what can you do when you are working for Donald Trump, the mad tweeter.
But as time passed, it appeared that she began to believe in what Trump was doing, and she started to participate herself. As they say these days, she "drank the KoolAid." Thus, last night she was as combative, evasive and bent on distraction as any of the rest of Trump's surrogates. When interviewed by Anderson Cooper, she essentially declined to respond to legitimate questions about tactical choices being made by the campaign, and she eventually resorted to the same kind of deflective jibing that Trump uses to avoid having to defend the positions he takes and the near mythic hyperbole on which his campaign is based and in which he indulges perpetually. While she was circumspect when she was first involved in the Trump campaign...before she became the campaign manager when she was just a credible talking head for Trump... she has become just another shill for Trump trying to slip the shackles of rational thought in his defense, and seemingly being content to do so. With Cooper, she used misdirection, the sort of "well, your mother wears combat boots" defense that Trump has engaged in probably since he actually was back on the playground, deliberate obtuseness and refusal to admit what everyone knows in order to claim that Trump was being unfairly used by the media while Clinton was being coddled, even by the FBI. And she wasn't alone in all this.
In a panel discussion moderated by Lemon, Lemon almost had to pillory Corey Lewandowski to get him to answer a question about Trump's demeanor in the frequent phone calls Lewandowski shares with him. And when he did answer the question it was all puffery. On other topics, Lewandowski was like a broken record touting Trump and his prospects as if the world wasn't really turning and all was right with the campaign. It was the same with a woman bearing the unique name, Scottie Nell Hughes. As fervent as Lewandowski, and as committed to denial of reality, Hughes was nearly unintelligible in her refusal to acknowledge facts and insistence on repetition of the Trump line. But their ardor was oddly contrasted by the relative calm and rationality of the Clinton surrogates on this panel and elsewhere during the evening while the shab of the day before seemed supplanted by a sense of resigned desperation in the Trump camp. Of course, I am a partisan myself, and I have to admit that I am biased, but the relative aplomb of the Democrats on CNN last night was reassuring. I have been dreading election day since the first Comey letter hit the fan and Clinton's momentum vaporized, but at last I am feeling almost cheerful in contrast to the lugubriousness that hung over me like that little cloud that follows the Charlie Brown character, Pig Pen, everywhere. To quote James Brown in both word and tone, "I feel good" again.
So now all that remains is the vote itself, though the aftermath of this election seems likely to be as unpleasant as the campaign itself was. An ego like Trump's doesn't slip its tail between its legs and do what Trump committed to doing a few weeks ago: go on a long vacation. We are going to suffer through Trump's wounded pride right along with him, and I worry that some of his more ardent fans will do more than suffer along. But we can cross that bridge when we get to it. I'm sure the FBI knows who the real threats are, and we can hope that they will do something worthwhile for a refreshing, post-election change. Are you listening, Jim? Maybe you can still save your ass.
Your friend,
Mike
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