"What do I tell my daughters?" asked a feature story in Fortune after the stage had been all set for the historic occasion. The champagne had been chilled, the caviar all set to serve, the ice cream-and-cake was already waiting in the fridge ready to be cut and served. And then ... . dawn broke and with it little girls' hearts from coast to coast. "I was supposed to wake her up around midnight with happy tears and champagne," recalled one prematurely jubilant mom and then . . . along came Donald Trump, the grinch who stole everyone's presidential election.
"It was like waking up Christmas morning," wrote Noemie Emery in the Weekly Standard, "to find that someone had stolen the furniture. Santa had taken away toys, not brought them, stockings had been stuffed with coal."
"What this taps into is the most primal parenting fear." So said one parent quoted in the Washington Post's Style section.
It would have been more interesting if less romantic to simply say that a lot of folks, even if they weren't wild about Mr. Trump, had voted for him anyway in preference to the former first lady of Arkansas, former senator and secretary of state, and generally former everything Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What folks should have been telling their daughters to prepare them for the great awakening and letdown was that life as it is lived is no fairy tale in which Prince Charming comes along just in time to rescue fair damsel. Not because life is so unfair but but because it may be all too fair, HRC got just what she deserved, and so did the country. She (and her opponent) ran the most deceptive campaigns since Richard M. Nixon had dominated the stage with surpassing and strangely effective ease. Much as he was despised--for he was never an easy man to love or admire--Mr. Nixon reduced the number of American troops trapped in the Vietnam War and generally succeeded in what he dubbed the Vietnamization of that war. Oh, if only Hillary Clinton had done as well in her time!
Yes, HRC has many fine qualities in addition to her more dubious ones. But it's hard to appreciate them as she tries to manipulate the rest of us. She can be as hard-working as Donald Trump, for example, in her more dubious causes, mainly herself. But the bill of indictment she's forged over the many years is long and impressive, if not in the way she might like it to be. In the end, too many of us see right through her. So instead of a choice between the lesser of two evils, this election became a choice between a candidate who made Tricky Dick look straightforward and one capable of outdoing him at every devious turn.
From the moment she stepped into the all too revealing limelight, Miss Hillary has compiled a monumental record for both greed and cupidity. Remember how she claimed to have made $100,000 in commodity trading, namely cattle futures, when it was all just a matter of manipulating the market? Why, she had picked up all that financial acumen at her daddy's knee! And that was just the beginning of her maculate career.
It was the lack of any need to deceive or steal that remains the most impressive feature of the Clintons' co-presidency. Many a crook could have gone straight without all the trouble it took to cover his tracks. It's a puzzlement, but one that still mystifies honest men. Maybe every dishonest pol is a con man at heart, and the one he cons most readily and repeatedly is himself. Or herself.
Editorial on 12/05/2016