By most measures, 2016 should have been the Republicans’ year to retake the White House.
Not counting the wartime aberration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, eight times since the turn of the 20th century America has had to decide, as it must on Tuesday, whether to keep the same party in the White House that has held it for the previous eight years. In six out of those eight presidential elections, the nation has opted for change.
Not only did the Republicans have history on their side, but they also knew the Democrats were almost certain to field Hillary Clinton, a highly unpopular and vulnerable politician, as their proposed successor to Barack Obama.
Yet, the GOP opted to shun near-certain victory. Instead, it nominated arguably the least qualified, the most temperamentally unfit and the most divisive candidate running in the entire field of 17 that entered the race for that party’s nomination: Donald Trump.
Several factors contributed to this result: the economic dislocation of globalization and the fears and frustrations it has brought to white, working-class America; the celebrity culture that has infiltrated the presidential process; the rightward lurch of the Republican Party and its years of telling supporters that the traditional media can’t be trusted.
Add all that together, and you have a candidate such as Trump — a narcissistic, bullying, pathologically dishonest nominee with zero record of governance and an almost sophomoric understanding of complex issues — emerging as the GOP nominee over numerous better qualified candidates.
Trump has neither the character nor the intelligence to handle the job for which he is running. He praises foreign strongmen such as Vladimir Putin, a former KGB head who is trying to return Russia to Soviet-style domination. Trump talks lightly about other nations acquiring nuclear weapons and about the U.S. using them itself. He proposes a tax cut that the vast majority of economists say will severely escalate the nation’s troubling debt. He panders to prejudices against immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. He has brought public discourse to a new uncivil low with his name-calling and other insulting language directed toward his opponents. And he stands accused — in his own recorded words and by the accounts of about a dozen women — of being a serial sexual abuser.
By default, that leaves us with Clinton as being the only reasonable and electable choice on Tuesday’s ballot.
Clinton admittedly has her deficiencies, too. Her trustworthiness and honesty are chronically lacking. She is way too protective of abortion rights and way too inclined to increase the size and interference of government. If she and her ex-president husband, Bill Clinton, haven’t broken the nation’s influence-peddling laws, they have skirted them mighty closely.
Still, as a former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, she has far better and more relevant experience than Trump for the presidency. She is smarter than he is. She is calmer and more measured in both thought and word. She behaves in a dignified, respectful manner — traits that used to be taken for granted in someone aspiring to represent this nation to the world.
It has been facetiously recommended to us that election workers on Tuesday should hand out clothespins to voters arriving at the polls, since much of the nation is unexcited about both major-party nominees.
Yes, hold your nose if you must, but mark the ballot for easily the better of two poor alternatives: Hillary Clinton.
