Thank the Lord, Hillary Clinton has recovered fully over the past month from her bout with pneumonia and from her self-inflicted injury from lack of candor about the illness. Her performance in the three presidential debates against the political malignancy Donald Trump has been exemplary, and less than three weeks remain until she has the opportunity to inflict on him an electoral coup des grace.
Partisan Democrats are hungering for an election night blowout in order for there to be pants-suit coattails down ballot landslide so that their party regain control of the Senate and at least cut into the GOP cushion in the House. Part of me would also like to see the GOP punished for having visited on American politics the most dangerous threat to civil society and specifically to Jewish political welfare in American history. On the other hand, I have trepidations about a repeat of the first two Obama years if there is once again a rubber stamp Democratic Congress.
What I want is for her to continue to consolidate the Obama coalition, and to continue to shrink her losses to the Gary Johnson-Jill Stein voters while making modest inroads among Independents and moderate Republicans. The goal should be a fifty percent-plus majority while holding Trump to 40 percent or ideally even less, not for the purpose of scoring a partisan victory, but for vindicating democratic legitimacy against a dangerous man who has refused to concede in advance that he will accept the voters’ verdict, and who has said he would jail Hillary and that she should not even have been allowed to run.
A year ago, I thought that Trump was an amusing but ephemeral distraction rather than the grave threat to a democratic tolerant society he represents. Richard Nixon, who left American democracy and the American presidency with a scant positive legacy, did write Six Crises with the clichéd but yet correct thesis that character reveals itself in crisis.
The full extent of Trump’s fascist nihilism became clear to me, and perhaps even to himself, only after he began to run and gather momentum.
We can only hope that Hillary will defeat him, not in a close election, but in a bipartisan landslide that will vindicate our democratic system rather than prove a precursor and encouragement to even more destructive fascist demagogues to come.
