Commentary

BRADLEY R. GITZ: As we sink even lower

Writing about the presidential election has become painful. Even thinking about it depresses.

Not just because so little of what we have witnessed conforms to entrenched theories of how campaigns are supposed to unfold, but also because the tawdry nature of the spectacle has become destructive of faith in reasoned political discourse and democracy.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does. We keep waiting for moments of dignity and affirmation that never come.

There have certainly been plenty of other low points in the 240 years since Thomas Jefferson took up the task of articulating grievances against the king, but we should be forgiven if our faith in self-government is at low ebb.

Yes, a country that survived a bloody civil war, the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler, and a nuclear arms race can survive Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. An understanding of history can at least partly immunize against excessive despair over the here and now.

Still, there is a difference between a nation overcoming the inevitable challenges of the human condition, including wars, depressions and natural disasters, and a nation which, as part of its once-glorious tradition of self-government, knowingly and with nonchalance inflicts great wounds upon itself.

It was perhaps possible to know, beforehand, that Richard Nixon was corrupt and that Jimmy Carter was inept, but those qualities became sufficiently visible to a majority only after they assumed the presidency (and in Nixon's case, after he'd actually won a second term, by a landslide no less).

But with Hillary and Trump, we know, and have for a long time known, just about everything we need to know, and in that knowledge should have come a certainty of unfitness for our highest office, perhaps any public office.

In Hillary's case, there is an apparently deeply rooted mendacity and inability to tell the truth, from which a never-ending series of scandals flows; in Trump's case the emotional maturity of an especially obnoxious 9-year-old, compounded by coarseness, ignorance, and a potentially dangerous volatility.

There are many qualities we should seek in a prospective president, but also certain tendencies, such as those displayed by Trump and Hillary, that should be outright disqualifying.

The most frequently given answer to the question of why Trump or why Hillary is that Trump isn't Hillary and Hillary isn't Trump. They are so bad that each is the other's best argument.

Accompanying the question of how we got ourselves into this fix is a sense of despair over the inability to find a way out. It hasn't been just a bad dream, and there is at this point almost no chance of waking up on the morning of Nov. 9 with something other than a president-elect Hillary (most likely) or president-elect Trump (still possible, particularly if, as many suspect, more people than usual are lying to pollsters).

The idea that Trump, following his latest disgrace, might suddenly withdraw was particularly reflective of last gasp desperation, containing as it did a rather large logical contradiction: that an indecent man in trouble because of yet another indecency will somehow find it within himself to do the "decent" thing.

Thus, in the world's oldest democracy, the democratic process will have paradoxically produced an outcome that the vast majority of the citizenry abhors.

While Democrats will, in likely victory, get the dubious reward of having to defend Hillary for four more years, at further cost to their honor and integrity, the bloodletting and recrimination on the Republican side, already coming into view, will be sufficiently intense as to threaten the party's survival.

Everything favored the GOP this year--the difficulty of a party holding the presidency for three consecutive elections, a stagnant economy, the centrality of immigration, terrorism and crime as issues, and of course the unprecedented weakness of the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Republicans had to try especially hard to lose, and they somehow managed it.

Just about any of the other contenders from the primaries would have been leading by double digits in the polls by this point--Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Scott Walker for sure, even Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and maybe Arkansas' own Mike Huckabee. What might have been; nay, what should have been, will haunt Republicans, assuming there remains such a species, for decades to come.

Those who supported Trump will forever have to defend that position; those who opposed him will be accused of disloyalty and subversion of his candidacy and made scapegoats for his defeat (The Donald, for his part, will accept no blame, because he's not a "loser," even when he loses). It is difficult imagining the two camps co-existing within the same party amid all the bitterness and accusations and counter-accusations sure to come.

There will be no winners or silver linings to take consolation from this time around.

Gerald Ford called Watergate "our long national nightmare." But he used that phrase when it was ending. But for many of us, the nightmare of this campaign will continue long after Nov. 8. And it consists of just a couple of simple, barely imaginable phrases: President Hillary Clinton or President Donald Trump.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 10/17/2016

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