A wise man once noted, “If nothing else, you can always serve as a bad example.” Unfortunately, that’s the best that can be said about the two top nominees for president.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are each uniquely qualified to reflect the worst in America today, and the main positive that can be gleaned from their characters is that by illustrating our faults we can start to work on them.
Clinton is the politician who tells the public one thing while actually doing another, without fail benefitting a special interest. Many Americans perceive, and often rightly so, that the government functions not to provide for the common defense or promote the general welfare, but to serve the narrow goals of the business and political elite.
She took millions giving speeches to Big Business and supported a Pacific trade deal, but then suddenly became anti-corporation and anti-free trade when Sen. Bernie Sanders’ populist, left-wing campaign became a serious threat to her getting the Democratic nomination. It is one of many such examples.
Clinton’s campaign has been dogged by ethical lapses involving both an imprudent attempt to avoid public records laws by using a home email server while serving as secretary of state and then making it worse by deleting many of the emails after scrutiny started.
There have also been legitimate and serious concerns about donations made by foreign governments to her family’s charity, The Clinton Foundation, while she was secretary of state. It’s easy to see the thinking of interest groups: Pay money to Clinton’s private interest to get extra consideration from her public position.
Those are not aberrations but part of a career trend. How many more scandals would America face during another Clinton presidency?
Public distrust of what the Clinton family embodies opened the door for Trump. Unfortunately, rather than seizing on that with substantial ideas, Trump has used his prominence to deepen another of America’s faults: the divide between people of different backgrounds.
No longer simply Americans, the camps are divided between red states and blue states, black and white, Christians and the secular, Fox News and MSNBC.
Trump has used his platform as the Republican nominee to cater to the fears of many Americans about a weakened economy and faltering morality. But his campaign is devoid of solutions. Instead it’s been about how great he is and how bad anyone who opposes him is.
His claims of a rigged election and media collusion are baseless, and those conspiracy theories are only further dividing the republic.
The campaign has further cemented Trump’s character — which voters should have already known after three decades in the spotlight. He is a vain egomaniac who only looks out for himself. He has done the seemingly impossible: Shown himself to be even less trustworthy than Clinton.
It’s entirely fitting that Trump’s downfall came via a recording on a celebrity gossip show to tout his guest appearance on a soap opera.
It’s amazing that no public policy idea has taken hold as a key issue during the campaign, despite massive news coverage. Everything has been focused on the unseemly personal characters of the candidates.
As such, neither is fit to endorse for president. Given such bad options, what should voters do on Nov. 8? In Mississippi, Trump will win handily, both because of a deep distrust of Clinton and a demographic that matches well with Trump’s appeals.
In that light, your vote is not going to change who wins this state’s electoral votes or the White House. What it can do, though, is help show the two parties that people want something different.
Over the past three presidential elections, Democrats and Republicans have averaged a combined 98.5 percent of the vote. How much attention would it grab in party headquarters if the number going away from them increased to 5 percent or 10 percent?
Clinton and Trump are shining a light on what our nation most needs to fix: a broken political system and a lack of unity.
A vote for a third-party or independent makes the point that our great nation needs something different from its leaders.
Charlie Smith, Indianola Enterprise-Tocsin
