The worst election ever

In his first address as president, Barack Obama asked that Americans embrace their birthright with ‘solemn duty and awesome joy’. Today, most Americans will head to the polls feeling neither joy nor duty.

Never in America has there been such an ugly election campaign (and America’s already seen Bush-Cheney 2000). Never before will a new president, man or woman, be greeted with such disgust: the stats tell us Clinton and Trump are the most despised nominees since stats began.

Of course, none of this is new: The New Yorker ran a piece called ‘Hating Hillary’ in 1996, back when Bill was in the White House (and his wife had mauled her way into the cabinet). Twenty years later — a time that saw Mrs. Clinton go from Senator to Secretary — The Economist weighed in. The article was titled ‘Hating Hillary’ again.

The ill will is constant; its nature is not. The First Lady’s critics thought her a rigid, raging liberal. Today, those same critics call Candidate Clinton boring and bloodless, with no real beliefs of her own.

Part of the problem is sexism: voters that hate Mrs. Clinton have done so for a while, and they dovetail with voters that believe in traditional gender roles.

But that’s hardly the whole story. As far as scandal magnets go, Mrs Clinton makes Nixon’s men look like choirboys. There was the Billary soap opera from the ‘90s, with the First Lady starring in Travelgate and Filegate and all other such -gates.



Then there’s waves of corrupt cash: HRC ponying up State Department spots to her donors, HRC on the take from Wall Street fat cats, HRC lobbying for everyone’s favourite fossil fuel boys: Exxon and Chevron and Shell.

Americans consider Mrs Clinton corrupt and fundamentally untrustworthy because she is corrupt and fundamentally untrustworthy. In a better world, this could have been historic: the little girl from Chicago smashing through the world’s highest glass ceiling. Instead, it’s low farce: the system boosting the system.

But, like manna from heaven, she’s up against the only Republican she could ever beat. The GOP’s had its once-a-generation monsters: Strom fighting for white rights while impregnating black teenagers; Rumsfeld invading Iraq because there weren’t ‘enough targets’ to bomb in Afghanistan. But Donald Trump is a new low, even for the Republicans.

If the Clintons weren’t drama enough, this election gave us the world’s only orange racist. And the press can be thanked: when you’ve landed the Donald, why cover joyless Jeb and clueless Carson?

So started the circus: Donald mimes the disabled. Donald forces himself on women. Donald defrauds his workers. Donald declares bankruptcy. Donald doesn’t pay tax. Donald doesn’t like Muslims. Donald likes Putin. Donald encourages torture. Donald encourages Klan fans. Donald encourages Hindutva fans. Donald thinks his interviewer is menstruating. Donald thinks Mexicans are rapists. Donald is accused of being a rapist.

To the world, the US has lost its mind. But to anyone following the modern-day Republican Party or, for that matter, the American electorate, Trump’s rise is no surprise.

The GOP feeds on rage; it has for years. When Trump was not yet nominee, this column ran: ‘(There is) resentment deep in the GOP’s marrow, the class conflict that tore America at the seams (and won the Republicans elections): Nixon’s hard-hats attacking college kids; Reagan lying about welfare queens; Poppy Bush pointing out black rapists.’

But that’s not exactly it. Contrary to popular opinion, not all Trump voters are racist morons. What the papers call Trump Country is actually the rural heart and soul of America, and it is hurting. Income disparity is soaring, the recession’s recovery all went to the cities, and rural youths are committing suicide at nearly twice the rate of their urban counterparts.

Novelist David Wong summed up all the above best, ‘The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But…they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It’s not their imagination…They vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who’d be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window. It was a vote of desperation.’

And desperation breeds desperation: the fear that’s marked this election cycle each step of the way. Mrs Clinton should be sworn in by January, if for no other reason than a Trump presidency is beyond our imagination.

Though the Donald would be worse, this is bad news for Pakistan. Mrs Clinton is a hawk to the point of parody, and hawks tend to upset Islamabad. Like Mr Obama, Mrs Clinton loves predator drones (and wants to use them on Julian Assange). But where Mr Obama preferred spies to soldiers, Mrs Clinton — daughter of a naval officer — has long embraced the generals, siding with Petraeus, McChrystal and Friends more than her actual boss, the president.

Plus her attitude towards complex Muslim-majority states isn’t all that complex: Mrs Clinton wanted to invade Afghanistan, wanted to invade Iraq, and wanted to intervene in Syria. Referring to the rape and murder of Libya’s Qaddafi, she laughed, “We came, we saw, he died.” Colonel Qaddafi’s end merits little sympathy. But Hillary’s role in reducing Libya to a pile of ash merits none.

Which brings us homeward. Despite greater experience of Pakistan than either Obama or the Bushes, she buys into the dumbest Western canards. “We live in fear,” she said in a leaked recording,”‘that they’re going to have a coup, that jihadists are going to take over the government, they’re going to get access to nuclear weapons, and you’ll have suicide nuclear bombers. So, this could not be a more threatening scenario.”

‘Suicide nuclear bombers’, the latest in US fever dreams, after al-Qaeda anthrax and Iraqi WMDs.

Whatever the results, Pakistan’s in for a bitter winter. And whatever candidate wins, the world will let out either a sigh or a scream. God may bless America; its new president will not.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2016.

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