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The Hail Mary toss of casting more dirt and suspicion on Hillary in her email flap could do nothing to damp down black fury at Trump, let alone have any impact whatsoever among blacks about her candidacy. If anything, it simply confirmed the conspiracy notion that GOP dirty work was at play in trying to do anything at the 11th hour of the campaign to sabotage her run to the White House.
Then along came Donald J. Trump whose irrepressible spontaneity knocks much of this rosy vision about improv and democracy into a cocked hat. Presidential historian Jon Meachum calls Trump “unabashedly improvisational.” David Axelrod describes him as “an improvisational performer, long on chutzpah and borscht belt put-downs but short on facts.” We’ve all seen it.
Clinton knows full well the perils ahead. The biggest threat is the Congress that she’ll have to go to with her big spending package. A GOP-controlled Congress will be as hostile to her big budget and tax increases as it was to Obama’s. With a big White House win, Clinton is on far more solid ground when she tries to follow through with the pledge. This will give her the breathing space needed to get parts of her jobs, education, healthcare, and infrastructure overhaul programs through.
Duterte won the Philippine elections last May in a field of five candidates. Running on a platform of implementing law and order and ridding the country of drugs, Duterte has made good on his promise. However, human rights activists and lawyers and sectors of the international community, including President Barack Obama and UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon, have raised concerns over the extrajudicial killings, numbering over 3,500 as of September 22.
In the 21st century, the gold is the news media, and they cannot help but train their gaze 24/7 upon Donald Trump. Back in March, The New York Times estimated that “over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history.” Practically everything the man said is quoted.
The time and hassle obstacles pretty much guarantee that the likely fill-in candidate would be GOP VP contender Mike Pence. Now the RNC voters don’t have to choose him just because he is the VP candidate, but the time factor, the fact that he got generally high marks for his one debate joust with Democratic VP contender Tim Kaine, and the fact that he’s a GOP party insider, make him a near shoo-in for the fill-in spot.
But beyond a VP debate, that still leaves the dangling question whether VPs really do count for much in the larger political equation. Yes and no. No in the sense that voters don’t vote for VPs, they vote for presidents first and foremost. Most know that a VP does not make policy, if lucky maybe consulted on a policy question, and certainly does almost nothing to implement it. It’s not exactly a ceremonial position but other than stepping in in the event of a catastrophic illness or death of a president, it’s not far from that.
Millennials, between the ages of 18-35 and numbering about 76 million, are a powerful voting bloc. But many are still trying to come to grips with the trauma of a Sanders-less presidential election and are thinking of wasting their vote as a protest of some sort. That would be a colossal mistake, for they can play a critical role in propelling Hillary Clinton to victory over Donald Trump in this most consequential of elections.