Hillary Clinton is going to become the next
president of the United States. Some commentators right now are trying to
suggest that Trump is going to be a challenging opponent to her. This is wrong.
There is a good reason why Clinton and those close to her have said that they
look forward to competing against Trump. This is not mid-campaign braggadocio;
they know full well that he is a vulnerable opponent in a general election
campaign, especially compared to those that Trump competed against in the
Republican primary. Yet, some end-of-May, beginning-of-June polls show the two
candidates running neck-and-neck. This makes some Democrat-supporters nervous.
They shouldn’t be, for a lot of reasons. William Saletan sums up many of them
quite well here. At the heart of the piece is the key: “Solve your
enthusiasm problem, get Democrats to the polls, and you win.” Also, see here.
Whatever anyone thinks of the likelihood
that this happens, it highlights something important: this is the Democrats’
election to win or lose. More than any presidential election in recent memory,
this one is very much in the hands of one party. The Republicans have committed
themselves to a candidate whose down-sides are so enormous, that they seem to
have passed into some kind of ethereal, pre-political public subconscious.
Everyone knows they are there, but only subliminally. Hence they are not
mobilized quite the way they should be in discussions of politics that emphasize
prediction. The Democrats have every reason to win this election.
They can only lose it by screwing up, not by some hidden bullet that the
Republicans can fire at Clinton. All the bullets have already been fired at her, as her supporters are so fond of pointing out, over
the course of a quarter of a century.
A Clinton-Trump contest is polarizing
almost by definition. If, against all odds, Sanders had somehow wound up being
the nominee, the same thing would have been true. Some on-line commentators, including Saletin, have mentioned that Sanders’ history on the far left of the political spectrum,
dating back to the 1960s, includes positive statements about communism and
communists that Republicans would be only too happy to mobilize in a general
election campaign. Of course they would, and with Donald Trump as the
Republican nominee, I doubt that it would matter. Trump has induced many young
people, especially Latinos, to get involved in politics who would probably not
have cared much about this race otherwise. The point, again, is that, whatever
ideas and proposals are mobilized after the Democrats’ convention in
Philadelphia, personalities are going to loom larger than usual. However
polarizing Clinton has been, the Republicans have selected a candidate who will
be a liability for them in the 2016 elections.
That I find Trump to be a cruel, hateful
bigot means a lot less than that millions of Americans feel that way. Clinton could definitely screw up
somehow, but I bet that she won’t, at least not to the extent or to such a
magnitude that it would cancel out the fact that the Republican Party has
chosen a nominee so grotesque, so beyond the pale that, for the first time in
my adult life, the fascist label actually has some resonance that transcends
standard liberal fear-mongering.
