Rule of thumb for a presidential campaign where the two
candidates have the highest
unfavorable ratings in
the history of polling: If you’re the center of attention, you’re losing.
As Election Day approaches, Hillary Clinton cannot shake the
spotlight. She is still ahead in the polls, but you know she’s slipping when
she shows up at a Florida campaign event with a week to go accompanied by the
former Miss Universe, Alicia
Machado .
The original
plan was for Clinton
to pivot in the final week of the campaign from relentless criticism of Donald
Trump to making a positive case for herself. Instead, she reached back for a six-week-old
charge that played
well when it first emerged back then but now feels stale and recycled.
The setback and momentum shift came courtesy of FBI Director
James Comey. Clinton’s greatest hurdle had always been the Comey primary, which
the Democrats thought she’d won in July when he
declined to recommend
prosecuting her over classified emails. This engendered an outpouring of
Democratic encomiums about Comey’s unimpeachable integrity and Solomonic
wisdom.
When it was revealed last
Friday that there had
been a Comey recount and Clinton lost, Solomon turned into Torquemada. But, of
course, Comey had no choice. How could he have sat on a trove of 650,000 newly
discovered emailsand kept that knowledge suppressed until after the
election?
Comey’s announcement brought flooding back — to memory and to
the front pages — every unsavory element of the Clinton character: shiftiness,
paranoia, cynicism and disdain for playing by the rules. It got worse when FBI
employees began leaking stories about possible
political pressure from
the Justice Department and about parallel
investigations into
the Clinton Foundation.
At the same time, Clinton was absorbing a daily dose of
WikiLeaks, offering an extremely unappealing tableau of mendacity, deception
and the intermingling of public service with private self-enrichment. It was
the worst week of her campaign, at the worst time.
And it raises two troubling questions:
● Regarding the FBI, do we really want to elect a president who
will likely come into office under criminal investigation by law enforcement?
Congressional hearings will be immediate and endless. A constitutional crisis
at some point is not out of the question.
● And regarding WikiLeaks, how do we know it will have released
the most damning material by Election Day? A hardened KGB operative like
Vladimir Putin might well prefer to hold back whatever is most incriminating
until a Clinton presidency. He is surely not above attempted blackmail at an
opportune time.
There seems to be a consensus that Putin’s hacking gambit is
intended only to disrupt the election rather than to deny Clinton the White
House. Why? Putin harbors a deep animus toward Clinton, whom he blames personally for the anti-Putin demonstrations that
followed Russia’s rigged 2011 parliamentary
elections.
Moreover, Putin would surely prefer to deal with Trump, a man
who has adopted the softest
line on the Kremlin of
any modern U.S. leader.
In a normal election, the FBI and WikiLeaks factors might be
disqualifying for a presidential candidate. As final evidence of how bad are
our choices in 2016, Trump’s liabilities, especially on foreign policy,
outweigh hers.
We are entering a period of unprecedented threat to the
international order that has prevailed under American leadership since 1945.
After eight years of President Obama’s retreat, the three major revisionist
powers — Russia, China and Iran — see their chance to achieve regional
dominance and diminish, if not expel, U.S. influence.
At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced
head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has
neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a
pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to
calamitous miscalculation.
Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that
international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It
depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing
of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding
self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany,
Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies
who are here to dispatch tribute to their imperial master in Washington.
It took seven decades to build this open, free international
order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a
high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.
