Your Excellencies, the Presidents
Now that the preliminaries have been settled, and our quadrennial comedy of presidential politics enters its final six months, it is time for an assessment. Short of divine intervention it seems a certainty that the two contenders will be Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Why anyone would care which of these candidates might actually win the election is a mystery that only a good writer might solve. You however, are stuck with me.
These two candidates have entirely different personalities, different motivations, and different assets going for them. The Donald is the personification of the poor little rich kid who has no talent, no athletic ability, and not much brain power. But he is not stupid. He owns the marbles for the marble game, the football for the sports games, plus the playing field, the cheerleaders, and he can even tell the teachers and the parents what to do. He just wants to be the captain of it all, the one who calls all the shots. He also owns all the critical tools, he hand picks the writers, and he expects nothing but rave reviews. He is a legend in his own mind, a bull always in search of a china shop to wreck.
Hilary also has overblown expectations. After a lifetime of being called smart, she has come to believe that fiction. She is a boring speaker, frumpy in appearance, struggles to smile, and she shows almost no originality in anything she does. She has little charisma, lacks wit, and exudes no sex appeal at all. For the life of me I can’t recall a single act or statement that she ever made as either a senator or secretary of state of lasting value. Why anyone would want to pay her $250,000 for 30 minutes of one of her stammering pointless speeches is beyond my comprehension. But she is a survivor.
If George Wallace were still with us, he would have his “tweedle dee” and his “tweedle dum” to kick around. Since he is no longer with us, that task has fallen to me by default. Donald will likely continue to do combat as the guy leading the charge. He will use his bellicose delivery to fire insanely fictitious shots in all directions at Hillary, each projectile handed to him by his writers. Any that result in damage, direct or collateral, will be repeated until election day. He will continue to show his disdain for the press, accuse Hillary and her entire entourage as “low energy” weaklings, while reciting language from the streets to keep his base energized. He will likely open his wallet near the end and finish the campaign with a huge influx of dollars blasting Hillary with every insulting morsel his team identifies as effective.
Hillary, on the other hand, would show a glimmer of brain power if she assembled a team of combatants to counter punch Donald. She would be stupid to do direct combat with him. Then she could criss-cross the country while appealing to women, Blacks, Latinos, students and other elements in her base with the messages they want to hear—jobs, wages, equality, and opportunity while paying careful attention to the polls.
The outcome will be close, as it nearly always is. The Donald can shrug off a loss with the announcement that it was all in fun, but now he has got to get back to work making his next 5 or 10 billion dollars. Besides, Air Force One and the White House are too low class for him. After all, he has his reputation to maintain. I doubt if he has a plan in case he should win.
Hillary will fall into a depression with a loss. Her sense of entitlement is the natural offspring of her delusional acceptance that she is a smart cookie. She and Bill would be relegated to finding meaning in their foundation that is a monument of themselves, by themselves, and for themselves. Like Donald, she hasn’t a clue that the office of president is little more than window dressing in a world that is too complex for either of them. It is all pomp for Donald and all circumstance for Hillary. Life, as they do not know it, will go on.
I have already written a solution to the problem in a poem I will post next Saturday. Unfortunately, wishful thinking that probably won't come true, either.
Ron