Final Days, Awful Choice: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Nov. 3, 2016 — Rule of thumb for a presidential campaign where the two candidates have the highest unfavorable ratings in the history of polling: If you’re the center of attention, you’re losing.
The Case for Trump: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Oct. 17, 2016— Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him.
Tuesday Will Bring No Peace to the United States: Rex Murphy, National Post, Nov. 4, 2016 — The day of reckoning is at hand. Most of the world is on the verge of nervous collapse as the Americans prepare to go to the polls and force themselves to the painful duty of determining whether their aversion to Donald Trump is stronger than their distaste for Hillary Clinton.
1776: Would You Like to Reconsider?: Andrew Roberts, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2016 — The American primary system, which has thrown up two presidential candidates who are despised by 60% of Americans, is broken and urgently needs to be reformed.
What a Spectacle this Election Has Been: Conrad Black, National Post, Nov. 4, 2016
Americans Have a Chance to Dethrone the House of Clinton: Deroy Murdock, National Review, Nov. 5, 2016
Crisis of the Conservative House Divided: Steven F. Hayward, Weekly Standard, Oct. 31, 2016
The US Elections, 2016, Panel Discussion (Video): Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Nov. 3, 2016
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, Nov. 3, 2016
Rule of thumb for a presidential campaign where the two candidates have the highest unfavorable ratings in the history of polling: If you’re the center of attention, you’re losing. As Election Day approaches, Hillary Clinton cannot shake the spotlight. She is still ahead in the polls, but you know she’s slipping when she shows up at a Florida campaign event with a week to go accompanied by the former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado.
The original plan was for Clinton to pivot in the final week of the campaign from relentless criticism of Donald Trump to making a positive case for herself. Instead, she reached back for a six-week-old charge that played well when it first emerged back then but now feels stale and recycled. The setback and momentum shift came courtesy of FBI Director James Comey. Clinton’s greatest hurdle had always been the Comey primary, which the Democrats thought she’d won in July when he declined to recommend prosecuting her over classified emails. This engendered an outpouring of Democratic encomiums about Comey’s unimpeachable integrity and Solomonic wisdom.
When it was revealed last Friday that there had been a Comey recount and Clinton lost, Solomon turned into Torquemada. But, of course, Comey had no choice. How could he have sat on a trove of 650,000 newly discovered emails and kept that knowledge suppressed until after the election? Comey’s announcement brought flooding back — to memory and to the front pages — every unsavory element of the Clinton character: shiftiness, paranoia, cynicism and disdain for playing by the rules. It got worse when FBI employees began leaking stories about possible political pressure from the Justice Department and about parallel investigations into the Clinton Foundation.
At the same time, Clinton was absorbing a daily dose of WikiLeaks, offering an extremely unappealing tableau of mendacity, deception and the intermingling of public service with private self-enrichment. It was the worst week of her campaign, at the worst time. And it raises two troubling questions: Regarding the FBI, do we really want to elect a president who will likely come into office under criminal investigation by law enforcement? Congressional hearings will be immediate and endless. A constitutional crisis at some point is not out of the question. And regarding WikiLeaks, how do we know it will have released the most damning material by Election Day? A hardened KGB operative like Vladimir Putin might well prefer to hold back whatever is most incriminating until a Clinton presidency. He is surely not above attempted blackmail at an opportune time.
There seems to be a consensus that Putin’s hacking gambit is intended only to disrupt the election rather than to deny Clinton the White House. Why? Putin harbors a deep animus toward Clinton, whom he blames personally for the anti-Putin demonstrations that followed Russia’s rigged 2011 parliamentary elections. Moreover, Putin would surely prefer to deal with Trump, a man who has adopted the softest line on the Kremlin of any modern U.S. leader.
In a normal election, the FBI and WikiLeaks factors might be disqualifying for a presidential candidate. As final evidence of how bad are our choices in 2016, Trump’s liabilities, especially on foreign policy, outweigh hers. We are entering a period of unprecedented threat to the international order that has prevailed under American leadership since 1945. After eight years of President Obama’s retreat, the three major revisionist powers — Russia, China and Iran — see their chance to achieve regional dominance and diminish, if not expel, U.S. influence. At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.
Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies who are here to dispatch tribute to their imperial master in Washington. It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, Oct. 17, 2016
Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary to his present deprecation of them. Is it all that surprising that some in his party and some independents, who felt offended, swear that they will not stoop to vote for him when in extremis he now needs them? Or that party stalwarts protest that they no longer wish to be associated with a malodorous albatross hung around their neck?
That question of payback gains importance if the race in the last weeks once again narrows. Trump had by mid-September recaptured many of the constituencies that once put John McCain and Mitt Romney within striking distance of Barack Obama. And because Trump has apparently brought back to the Republican cause millions of the old Reagan Democrats, various tea-partiers, and the working classes, and since Hillary Clinton is a far weaker candidate than was Barack Obama, in theory he should have had a better shot to win the popular vote than has any Republican candidate since incumbent president George W. Bush in 2004.
What has always been missing to end the long public career of Hillary Clinton is a four- or five-percentage-point boost from a mélange of the so-called Never Trump Republicans, as well as women and suburban, college-educated independents. Winning back some of these critics could translate into a one- or two-point lead over Clinton in critical swing states.
Those who are soured on Trump certainly can cite lots of understandable reasons for their distaste — well beyond his sometimes grating reality-television personality. In over-dramatic fashion, some Against Trumpers invoke William F. Buckley Jr.’s ostracism of John Birchers from conservative circles as a model for dealing with perceived Trump vulgarity. He is damned as an opportunistic chameleon, not a true conservative. Trump’s personal and professional life has been lurid — as, again, we were reminded by the media-inspired release of a hot-mic tape of past Trump crude sexual braggadocio. The long campaigning has confirmed Trump as often uncouth — insensitive to women and minorities. He has never held office. His ignorance of politics often embarrasses those in foreign- and domestic-policy circles. Trump’s temperament is mercurial, especially in its ego-driven obsessions with slights to his business ethics and acumen. He wins back supporters by temporary bouts of steadiness as his polls surge, only to alienate them again with crazy nocturnal tweets and off-topic rants — as his popularity then again dips. He seems to battle as much with GOP stalwarts as Clintonites, often, to be fair, in retaliation rather than in preemptory fashion.
All these flaws earned Trump nemesis in his disastrous first debate, which was followed by marked dips in his polls. He seemed not to have prepared for the contest, convinced that he could wing it with his accustomed superlative adjectives and repetitive make-America-great generalities. He so obsessed over Clinton’s baited traps and contrived slights about his commercial reputation and his temperament that he allowed her to denigrate his character with impunity — even as he missed multiple opportunities to chronicle her spiraling scandals and contrast his mostly conservative agenda with her boilerplate, Obama 2.0, “you didn’t build that” neo-socialism. Trump’s second debate performance was far stronger, and stanched his hemorrhaging after the Access Hollywood revelations, but it was not the blow-out needed to recapture the lost momentum of mid-September — nor will it yet win over Never Trump Republicans and independent women.
The counterarguments for voting Trump are by now also well known. The daily news — riot, terrorism, scandals, enemies on the move abroad, sluggish growth, and record debt — demands a candidate of change. The vote is not for purity of conservative thought, but for the candidate who is preferable to the alternative — and is also a somewhat rough form of adherence to the pragmatic Buckley dictate to prefer the most conservative candidate who can win. The issue, then, at this late date is not necessarily Trump per se, but the fact that he will bring into power far more conservatives than would Hillary Clinton. No one has made a successful argument to challenge that reality.
Nor is the election a choice even between four more years of liberalism and a return of conservatism; it’s an effort to halt the fundamental transformation of the country. A likely two-term Clinton presidency would complete a 16-year institutionalization of serial progressive abuse of the Constitution, outdoing even the twelve years of the imperial Roosevelt administration. The WikiLeaks revelations suggest an emboldened Hillary Clinton, who feels that a 2016 victory will reify her utopian dreams of a new intercontinental America of open borders and open markets, from Chile to Alaska, in the manner of the European Union expanse from the Aegean to the Baltic…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
TUESDAY WILL BRING NO PEACE TO THE UNITED STATES
Rex Murphy
National Post, Nov. 4, 2016
The day of reckoning is at hand. Most of the world is on the verge of nervous collapse as the Americans prepare to go to the polls and force themselves to the painful duty of determining whether their aversion to Donald Trump is stronger than their distaste for Hillary Clinton. They are caught between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, writhing painfully on both horns of the fiercest dilemma democratic voters have, perhaps ever, to face.
As to predicting the outcome, no fool am I. Looking at it over the last year or so, this election of our friends down south has had more twists, turns and novelties than the wildest amusement park. It participates of a logic all its own. The introduction of Trump to the world of politics has produced a twilight zone, where the normal dynamics, the conventions and rituals of modern media-driver democratic politics, have been blistered and battered beyond recognition and perhaps even beyond repair.
The great merger of high-celebrity culture — the Kardashian universe — with that of cynical Washington power lust has occurred, and the offspring is a strange, unfathomable amalgam of the worst, most distressing of both. Making predictions does not belong to this world — what was true yesterday may no longer be true today. And seeking predictive guidance from any previous campaigns is an errand for fools or mystics.
There are some moments from this weird cycle I shall never be able to purge from memory. Does anyone recall the early moments of the campaign when it seemed Trump might be in trouble because he said Clinton had been “schlonged” in the 2008 battle for her party’s nomination? For two days the discussions raged — was he being sexist? Rude? Lewd? By campaign’s end, however, we had the great tape of Access Hollywood and Trump and Billy Bush discussing the various super-subtle approaches famous men can deploy toward attractive women. This was the “grab them by the pussy” monologue that effectively put “schlonged” in linguistic Quaker territory.
Bernie Sanders will always be with me. A Don Quixote figure, a Knight of the Woeful Countenance, if ever there was one. His quest was forlorn from the start. Poor, innocent, socialist, geriatric Bernie – his previous big moment had been the famous honeymoon in Moscow. But Clinton had his goose in the oven from the get-go. She owned the party; she had, as now we know, friends in the media forward her questions for some of the debates; and, of course, she had early secured all the super delegates.
Then came the saddest gesture. Bernie, already hemmed in and tormented by Clinton’s ministrations with the Democratic National Committee, gave up his only sword. He dismissed all the controversy of “her damn emails.” He probably thought this was noble politics — pushing the campaign away from gossip toward “the issues.” Alas and alack, as time and WikiLeaks were to so severely prove, how he might have wished the emails did not go away. They became the single most dramatic and continuous element in the campaign, the one most corrosive to Clinton’s struggle up political Everest. Trump had no such delicacy. And here in the final days of the campaign, where the leaks are at full tide, the Federal Bureau of Investigation drops its now-famous bombshell and the result on Tuesday is really anyone’s guess.
I recall Clinton’s first dealing with the email and server. It seems a long time back. She withdrew from all government systems and installed that private server for convenience, she said. Having “two” portable devices was just too burdensome. She wanted to work from one. Oh, Hillary. Why did you start so badly. She had more “devices” during her term as secretary of state than are in Bill Gates’ hobby room. She lost them more often than she ran out of bleach. The server debacle also opened the door to her very lowest moment. It is a truth universally acknowledged, if I may twist a phrase from Miss Austen, that it is never good news for a presidential campaign when people start talking about wieners. Particularly, a Clinton presidential effort — for the Weiner factor has exerted its dark magic in ways reminiscent of her own husband’s darkest political days.
But when wiener politics brings to centre-stage the very Mother of all wieners, Anthony Weiner himself, and when the doings of that compulsive exhibitionistic erotomaniac — the estranged husband of your closest confidante and aide — somehow collide with your campaign, it is the day of the locust indeed. Weiner’s picture scandal and Clinton’s email woes intersect at the FBI, which has been investigating both. Clinton must bathe in tears every time she recalls, as Washington lore has it, that she introduced Weiner to Huma Abedin. She was Fate’s chosen instrument to bring the most ridiculous and disgraced figure on the American political scene into the very heart of her now very troubled effort to reach the White House. Schooled? It appears Trump was right.
Tuesday will bring what it may. Whatever the result, there will be no peace. The factions will rage, and the great messy tensions and anger within the American political systems will increase. But as spectacle it has been and will likely remain without rival, a farce as rich and ridiculous as Art of Nature has ever provided.
1776: WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECONSIDER?
Andrew Roberts
Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2016
The American primary system, which has thrown up two presidential candidates who are despised by 60% of Americans, is broken and urgently needs to be reformed. The only rational response to the choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is that of Henry Kissinger on the Iran-Iraq War: “A pity they both can’t lose.” For a non-American who defends the U.S. at every opportunity, I must ask: Are you deliberately trying to make it more difficult for me this year?
For all the undoubted genius of your Constitution, in 2016 it is no longer sustainable for Americans to say they have the best democratic system in the world. There have been many types of democracy—the Athenian agora model of direct participation, the Westminster-based constitutional monarchy, the Swiss referendum and cantonal model, Indian mass democracy, and so on. But it is impossible any more to suggest that the finest one is that which has thrown up Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump as the final choice for 320 million Americans.
When Chinese GDP is overtaking America’s, we are engaged in a vital ideological struggle over which political system delivers the best results: the state corporatism of the Beijing model, where there is no free speech and no democracy, or the democratic model of the West, whose leading democracy today presents its people with a choice between a preposterous, petulant monster of self-regard with deep, dark psychological flaws on one side, and on the other a proven failure whose views float with the polling data and whose word of honor cannot be relied upon.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that democracy is under threat in America. With your Constitution, Bill of Rights, First Amendment, Congress, separation of powers—and the sublime instincts of the American people—democracy is under no threat whatsoever here, for all your president’s absurd hyperbole. But the concept of democratic values as worthy aspirations for modern society certainly is under serious threat globally from a totalitarian state-capitalist model that is dangerously attractive in what it is producing for its populations, while American democracy is offering a choice between a crook and a clown.
So what is to be done? First, the Republicans need party leaders and candidates who confront people like Mr. Trump seriously from the start and do not coddle him in the vain hope that if you’re nice you inherit his supporters when he collapses. Second, it is ludicrous to have debates controlled by TV channels that want the GOP to split and the Democrats to win, and which frame their questions accordingly. Third, the talking down of America, even in an election year, has gone too far and is likely to be misinterpreted abroad. Newt Gingrich has said that if Mrs. Clinton wins, America will go the way of Venezuela. No it won’t. When Adam Smith was brought the news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, and was told that Britain was ruined forever, he replied. “There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
If we in Britain got over losing America and went on to become the largest empire in history, you can get over four years of Mrs. Clinton. The word “again” in “Make America great again” is a terrible libel on your country, which is still great on any objective criterion, albeit clearly going in the wrong direction. Self-pity is not a part of the American national character—however emotionally and rhetorically alluring it might be during election time—and you must not permit Mr. Trump’s sloganizing to allow it to find a place there.
Fourth, the percentages of support that guarantee a candidate a place in the debate should be drastically higher so that you don’t have a dozen or more people taking part and thus sometimes given no more than 30 seconds in which to try to sum up complex issues, leading to a moronically low standard of debate. If Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were forced to debate each other in 30-second bursts, answering politically loaded questions from CNN and ABC and CBS intended to embarrass them, you probably wouldn’t have got a much better outcome.
That Donald Trump has held no public office also ought to have been an automatic disqualification. I know you like the idea in America that anyone can be president, but you are really testing that dictum this year. You’ve had plenty of presidential candidates who have not previously held elected office, including William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Wendell Willkie and Dwight Eisenhower. But they all held high offices or served their country outside politics: Taft was governor of the Philippines, Hoover was head of the Belgian Relief Agency during World War I, Willkie fought the Ku Klux Klan and headed his local bar association, and Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. These were all honorable positions of importance and responsibility. Mr. Trump has been head of Miss Universe and star of “The Apprentice,” both businesses in which he owned an interest.
The Republican Party should not have allowed itself to be hijacked by a man with so minute a record of contribution to the nation, and it needs to alter its rules to prevent a similar demagogue with deep pockets and no conscience from doing it again. The Republicans need a superdelegate system of sane party elders who want to see the party win. If there hadn’t been superdelegates in the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders would be within a hair’s breadth of the White House right now…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link —Ed.]
What a Spectacle this Election Has Been: Conrad Black, National Post, Nov. 4, 2016—Squalid, garish, heavy-laden with mud-slinging and mired in corruption though the U.S. election campaign is, almost unmitigated mockery of everything that the founding documents of the United States proclaimed as they artfully reinterpreted a rather grubby colonial tax squabble with Great Britain into the dawn of human liberty, though it also is, it has been engrossing.
Americans Have a Chance to Dethrone the House of Clinton: Deroy Murdock, National Review, Nov. 5, 2016—Drain the swamp!” GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has insisted before huge crowds increasingly confident of a well-deserved, sorely needed, come-from-behind victory.
Crisis of the Conservative House Divided: Steven F. Hayward, Weekly Standard, Oct. 31, 2016—For months it has been clear that in one vital respect Donald Trump's fate in the presidential election does not matter. Win or lose, he has divided and may yet shatter the conservative movement, a fact that was evident before the Access Hollywood tape gave us a TMI moment barely suitable for TMZ. Who could have foreseen that the Great Pumpkin candidate would turn out to be a Black Swan event for conservatism?
The US Elections, 2016, Panel Discussion (Video): Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Nov. 3, 2016—Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem present: "The US Elections, 2016", Panel Discussion, Oct. 31, 2016.
