Until the presidential campaign got helplessly mired in the failings and missteps of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the long-awaited clash between the left of center and conservative approaches to American governance seemed to be at hand. Mrs. Clinton embraced and in many respects promised to add to the former while Mr. Trump urged a pullback in specific areas and a general shift toward the right.
Unfortunately, attention soon began to focus on the candidates themselves rather than the positions they advocated. This is not to say that aspects of a candidate’s makeup are not valid campaign issues. It is just that the hope for a principled debate soon became dimmed.
In our view, therefore, readers must consider all of the issues – personal and substantive – and decide for themselves which candidate, when all is said or done, comes closest to their own perspectives and which candidate can be trusted to carry through on campaign promises.
As far back as May, The New York Times – which has strongly endorsed Mrs. Clinton for the presidency and roundly condemned Mr. Trump – featured an astonishing news analysis headlined “Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her.”
In pertinent part the analysis noted:
For more than a year, Hillary Clinton has traveled the country talking to voters about her policy plans…. But as the Democratic primary contest comes to a close, any hopes Mrs. Clinton had of running a high-minded, policy focused campaign have collided with a more visceral problem.Voters just don’t trust her.
The Clinton campaign had hoped to use the coming weeks to do everything they could to shed that image and convince voters that Mrs. Clinton can be trusted.
Instead they must contend with a damaging new report by the State Department’s inspector general that Mrs. Clinton had not sought or received approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.
It is not just that the inspector general found fault with her email practices. The report speaks directly to a wounding perception that Mrs. Clinton is not forthright or transparent.
After months of Mrs. Clinton’s saying she used a private email for convenience, and that she was willing to cooperate fully with investigations into her handling of official business at the State Department, the report…. undermined both claims.
Mrs. Clinton, through her lawyers, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general as part of the review….
And then there were all those instances when Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails were subpoenaed by Congress, some of which went “missing” and then there was a scrubbing of others that remained; her claim that she exercised due care for official documents and never transmitted “classified” information but also said she didn’t recognize the “classified” marking. She was criticized in Congress for these actions, and for her erroneous claim that her lawyers had vetted all of her e-mails and separated official e-mails from non-official ones. And of course many attorneys have expressed the opinion that the FBI report on Mrs. Clinton’s clearly points to criminal liability on her part and that the FBI broke with procedures in giving her a pass.
Similarly, with respect to the terrorist attack on an American facility in Benghazi while she was secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton insisted for five days that the attack was the result of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video movie. Yet it emerged afterward that she was aware it was a planned Islamic attack against an American facility (and this despite President Obama’s assurances that Islamic forces had earlier been driven from the area).
Then came the cascade of information about her habit, as secretary of state, to grant special access to people making large grants to the Clinton Family Foundation and offering her husband extraordinarily lucrative speaking engagements.
Most recently, there was WikiLeaks material quoting her to the effect that she believes elected officials must often take two positions on issues, one for public consideration and one for private, serious consumption.
For those reasons Mrs. Clinton became the main issue, not her agenda.
As for Mr. Trump, a recently uncovered 2005 tape of his employing crass and sexist language created a firestorm and made his character a central concern for many voters. Actually, from the start his campaign was defined largely by the pointedly general rather than specific observations on policy questions that marked his speeches and, significantly, his tendency to speak more forcefully and emphatically than many had been accustomed to hearing in polite company.
For example, as a way of stemming crime on the part of illegal immigrants and the ability of terrorists to slip into our country, he called for a temporary halt on Muslims entering the country and a severe tightening of our border with Mexico. In the process he referred to many illegal aliens as sexual predators. He also spoke of the need to plan for the deportation of those already here illegally.
Mrs. Clinton, a compliant mainstream media, and many Republican officials roundly condemned such blunt talk and succeeded in painting Trump’s proposals as ludicrous and not thought through. Yet to do more than broadly call for such measures is impossible without an intimate knowledge of the federal agencies involved, something one gets from actually being in office.
To be sure, Mr. Trump used excessive language in describing illegal immigrant lawbreakers, opening himself to criticism in that regard. But the issue he raised is a valid one, deserving more ventilation.
With respect to foreign/military affairs and trade policies, Mr. Trump’s arguments for more robust America-oriented approaches have been ridiculed by Mrs. Clinton as naïve for not taking into full account that other countries have their own interests to pursue. Yet Mr. Trump’s point is that the U.S. cannot and should not continue to promote the interests of other countries without paying due attention to its own.
One of the more disturbing issues raised by some of the WikiLeaks documents concerns quotes from Mrs. Clinton indicating that she supports open borders, which would mean the end of the America we have come to know. Allowing groups of foreign nationals unrestricted access to our shores means the end of any incentives for newcomers to blend into our society.