Our Train-Wreck Presidential Campaign
We can all see this one coming, can’t we?
Our current presidential campaign – the one being waged by two of the most distrusted and disliked major-party candidates in recent memory – is on track to render the eventual winner a failure. It’s a “take no prisoners” campaign – full of personal insults, wild charges, stupid statements and dangerous language.
For the Democrats, Hillary Clinton is a proven liar. She has lied about her personal email accounts and lied about what the FBI director said her about her personal email accounts. She is a lousy campaigner with no personal charisma, and polls show most Americans don’t trust her.
But she’s a lucky person, indeed, because she’s running against perhaps the only Republican she can beat in November. Donald Trump is running a campaign that appears to showcase only that he’s a liar and perhaps unstable.
How else to explain his denigration of the Gold Star family who lost their son while he was serving the U.S. Military in Iraq? How else to explain his put-down of John McCain, who was captured in Vietnam? How else to explain his “invitation” to the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails and release them? How else to explain his comments about Ted Cruz’s father possibly being involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination?
Of course, Trump’s supporters blame the so-called “mainstream” media for “distorting” Trump’s very words. And some of those supporters – including some prominent right-wing radio talk-show hosts – are already getting the “stab in the back” theory ready in case Their Man Trump loses. One of these talk-show fanatics said he was going to “point the finger” at McCain and Lindsey Graham and John Kasich and others who failed to support – or fully support – Trump.
And Trump himself is already floating the idea that if he loses, the election will have been “rigged,” though he declines to specify how that might happen.
Yet one of these candidates will win and become president. And whoever triumphs in November will almost certainly fail in office because half the country will want them to fail. We are so amazingly polarized in this nation that the word “compromise” has disappeared from our political lexicon. Democrats and Republicans no longer simply disagree with each other – they hate the other side.
I blame much of this hatred on talk radio, which for decades now, has not just criticized Democrats, but demonized them. Day after day, national radio talk-show hosts (you know who they are) have blow-torched every Democratic president. Fox News opinion shows have delighted in attacks against any and all Democrats. And, yes, let’s not forget MSNBC on “the other side” – their left-wing hosts have done much the same thing to Republicans.
Is any of this good for our nation? I think not, because if our next president – no matter who he or she is – fails in office – the United States fails, as well.