Hillary Clinton – backward and in heels

July 30, 2016

From the moment I became aware of Hillary Clinton when her husband, Bill, ran for the presidency, I thought she would someday be the first woman president of the United States. The superbly orchestrated Democratic National Convention did nothing to change that perception.

She is not, and never will be, the seductive speaker her husband is. Nor will she ever strike the delicate balance between the intellectual and the visceral that President Barack Obama has achieved, inspiring us not only to hope but to continue striving. She lacks, by her own admission, the temperament for that, being more comfortable, as she said, with the “service” part of “public service” than the “public” portion. Indeed, her naturally secretive nature, at the heart of the overblown email scandal, is no doubt exacerbated by her husband’s ability to feel everyone’s pain – particularly that of nubile women. ...

‘Love Trumps Hate’

July 26, 2016

OK, let’s address the 800-pound elephant in the room right away – the Democrats’ email scandal.

Never write anything you wouldn’t say in public. Never send an email containing sensitive information that should be exchanged in person. And make sure that when you exchange information in person, that that person you exchange it with can be trusted.

Remember: The best-kept secret is the one you share with no one.

I don’t care if the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails, or if the dog ate their homework. It was stupid of Dems in disarray to try to micromanage the process and weight it toward frontrunner Hillary Clinton – and, if they were going to do that, they shouldn’t have put it on the oh-so-secure internet, should they?

Having said that, I was immediately struck on night one by the difference in tone between the two conventions. ...

My big fat Republican wedding

July 20, 2016

The Republican National Convention is like a bitter wedding in which the guests start ignoring the bridal party to entertain themselves by showing vacation pictures on their iPhones.

It is a measure of just how dysfunctional the convention is that for two and half days it’s been dominated by Melania Trump’s plagiarizing of Michele Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. Whether or not you accept the official, improbable explanation that has Trump speech-writing employee Meredith McIver falling on her Times New Roman sword, the fact is that the Trump campaign could’ve sailed past this by simply admitting that Mrs. Trump plagiarized the First Lady because she admires her – boy, is that going to be a great Dem bumper sticker. ...

The hair up there: Trump and the age of transition

July 17, 2016

We live in wondrous, terrifying, complex, fascinating times. In the United States, we are about to embark on two political conventions – the Republican July 18-21 in Cleveland and the Democratic July 25-29 in Philadelphia – that offer productive change and stasis, the future and the past, though not in the ways you might imagine.

The motif of the presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, represents the same old-same old inside Washington, while Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is the fresh, brash outlier. But in fact, we’ve been looking in a mirror, and it’s the opposite. Clinton and the Dems, with their inclusive approach to race, gender and ethnicity, signal the future, and Trump – with his appeal to angry, white, working-class men – the past. ...