Presidential Election Blues

                                            There's two kinds of people
                                            I just can't stand
                                           An evil-hearted woman
                                           And a lyin' man
                                                                   Albert King
                                                                   Don't Lie To Me Blues


     When I worked in the newspaper business (my mother never knew; I told her I played piano in a house of ill repute) we did man-on-the-street interviews in election years.  We always ran across people who didn't know that a presidential election was being held.
     Flash forward to this election year. A sorry truth remains. Even at this point in the season, a great many Americans are only beginning to pay focused attention.
     On the Republican side, this has produced the Trump disaster: a comprehensively deceitful bigot with a running mate who would need major improvement to be merely an empty shirt.  A huge majority of those eligible to vote in Republican primaries didn't bother. The Republicans left the keys in the car, and it was taken by hooligans.
     On the Democratic side, the Clinton candidacy is greeted with enthusiasm by her family, close friends, and people who want to curry favor or get a job. Many more of us -- with me among them -- are grateful that she is competent but regretful that she brings so much baggage to her candidacy.
     Lingering charges of dishonesty seem to me overdone. For decades, foes have labored in vain to prove it against her. True, when caught by the spotlight at awkward junctures, she has sometimes split hairs with the truth. In this she is far from being alone, alas.  The habit is endemic in our politics. It is fair to object, and to demand better of our leaders in the long term.   In the near term, it is not fair and not useful to single her out.
     Clinton partisans say she is faulted for traits that would be respected or at least tolerated in a man. They have a point.  She can have a  hard edge. It hints any given smile may be a pose -- or a ruse.
     But as the fictional Irish bartender Mr. Dooley used to say, "politics ain't beanbag." People in positions of power have serious enemies.  They forget it at peril to themselves and, more, to their mission.  If Clinton keeps an active awareness of this, she is only appropriately armed.
     One more problem dogs her. She continues to pay a price for her husband's behavior.  She isn't faulted for what he did, at least not by sensible people.  Rather, I think, she is the target of a common hunch that she stayed with philandering Bill less for love than for ambition.
     Clinton does have one conspicuous shortcoming.  She has very little natural gift for the politics of public leadership.  She is stiff with the public and graceless as a speaker.  Sometimes a president needs to say persuasively to the American people, "Follow me."  For a President Hillary Clinton, this would be a challenge. In a Clinton presidency this would be a material weakness.
     With hate-mongering and deceit, Donald Trump's campaign will inflict lasting damage on the country.  Pundits are saying as well that he has crippled the Republican Party for the long term. This is true in part. However blame must also be laid to so-called mainstream Republican leaders, who have betrayed the public's trust with eight years of cynical sabotage against a duly elected president.
     They are the ones who left the contemporary Republican Party hollow at the core. They are the ones who elevated the example of politics as a trickster's game.
     On the assumption that something more useful would emerge, I'd say an implosion in today's Republican Party would be healthy for the country.  Meanwhile, we face several dismal months until election day.  The blues man Albert King has been dead for a while.  Somewhere, perhaps, he is glad that he's not around to be mistaken for a political commentator.