Hillary Clinton: a presidential compromise
- By Jesse Anderson
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 25, 2016
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton(R) participate in the third and final presidential debate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) in Las Vegas, Nevada, the United States, Oct.19, 2016.(Xinhua/Yin Bogu) |
With less than three weeks remaining before the U.S. presidential election, it would be reasonable for an outsider observer to expect American voters to be in a state of anticipation and excitement.
And though there are certainly some voters still harboring such emotions - those still convinced of the possibility of a Trump victory, for example - the majority of Americans seems to have begun to experience a kind of election season-fatigue and are now simply waiting for the ballots to be counted and the increasingly probable Clinton victory to be announced.
It's an anti-climactic last lap to what has been the most unpredictable election year in recent memory. However, it's also a foreshadowing of the post-election calm for which more and more people are longing.
This might sound surprising given the ongoing controversies surrounding the main candidates, Clinton and Trump; yet, the fact is that they are both so polarizing that the respective scandals in which they're currently involved - the sexual abuse accusations against Trump and the drip-by-drip release of Clinton-related documents by WikiLeaks - are unlikely to have any major effect on the election outcome.
With everything that's already come out and been digested by the public regarding Clinton's e-mail server controversy, WikiLeaks would have to supply something seriously damning to have any major impact; as for Trump's chances of proactively convincing large numbers of Clinton voters to cross over at this late stage, well, they're effectively nil, especially after his hot-mic incident.
It's worth noting, however, that if you were able to gauge the total amount of enthusiasm generated by each candidate's group of supporters and use that as the deciding factor in the election, Trump would likely come out on top - even if Clinton were to win the popular vote by the eleven-point lead recent polls have given her.
This means - and this is something one reads and hears over and over again online and in the media - that many people voting for Clinton see her as little more than the better of two bad options, and her election won't feel like a victory so much as a concession.
It's a somewhat depressing thought that the election of America's first female president might be met with such scant fanfare, especially when compared to the nationwide celebration that followed Barack Obama's historic election in 2008.
There's no question that many American voters, both left and right, see this election year as a lost opportunity. Among Republicans, there's one camp that can't believe someone like Donald Trump made it through the primaries to become the party's nominee in the first place, and that now considers this election as giveaway to the Democrats.
In the second camp you have the people who enthusiastically welcomed Trump's nomination, seeing it as an important message to establishment politicians that people want a change in the system. Unfortunately for them, Trump has proven to be too divisive and too fatuous a candidate for most Americans to take seriously.
For left-leaning voters, this year's lost opportunity was Bernie Sanders, whose campaign had several important similarities - none of them policy-related - to Trump's. Both candidates had legitimate claims to being outsider politicians and both were able to generate huge amounts of enthusiasm among certain voter groups.
In the end though, his ideas sat too far outside mainstream American thinking, and Clinton, considered by many to be more electable, won the Democratic nomination.
So the end result of an election season that has been filled with talk about America's desire for fundamental change in the political system will in all likelihood be a win for Hillary Clinton, a politician who is about as much of an insider as they come.
And while her victory will bring closure to an election many Americans are eager to put behind them, the thwarted expectations of voters who'd wanted an upending of traditional U.S. politics will leave a vacuum - one that it's reasonable to assume will need to be filled in the near future.
Clinton's presidency will be a technical win for the Democrats, but for many Americans, on both sides of the political spectrum, it will represent a temporary sidestepping of an unresolved disaffection with the American political system.
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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