WASHINGTON — Good riddance to Campaign 2016, the election that put the “ugh” in ugly.
Headed for history books a week from Tuesday, the duel between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became a battle of “nasty women” and “bad hombres” vs. “deplorables” and voters who are “irredeemable.”
A beauty queen, a Gold Star family, an ex-president and his baggage, the FBI director, even the pope were drawn into the fray.
At times, the campaign rhetoric has been so raunchy it’s forced middle-school civics teachers to censor their lesson plans. Thank Trump for that.
But Americans can’t say they weren’t warned.
On June 16, 2015, minutes into a rambling campaign announcement speech, Trump was labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.
He’s been horrifying or delighting people with provocations ever since.
Eleven Republicans were already in the race when Trump joined the field, with five still to come. It was reasonable to view the impolitic Trump as an improbable choice for the Grand Old Party.
Clinton, by contrast, strode into the Democratic race two months earlier with a commanding resume and a sunny announcement video that instantly made her the presumed heir apparent for her party’s nomination.
She looked poised to shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” she couldn’t quite reach in a 2008 race against Barack Obama.
This time, it was Bernie Sanders who crashed her party and put the lie to the conceit of a cakewalk to the nomination.
In the end, no matter who wins, the next president will be one of the most unpopular ever.
“If the central promises of modern politics are peace and prosperity, we really haven’t had either for a long time,” said William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who served in Bill Clinton’s administration. “That created an atmosphere of discontent and protest that affected both political parties this year.”
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The Republican primaries gave us “Jeb!” Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and so many others that Republican debates had to be divided into two segments to cram everyone on a stage.
It wasn’t just Trump who went low in the primary scramble.
Rubio (“Little Marco” to Trump) mocked the New York businessman’s “small hands.” That triggered Trump’s reassurances during a debate that there were no problems with his genitals. Bush called Trump a liar, a whiner and a jerk.
None of it could trump Trump, with his fusillade of insults and bluster.
For all of that, it was Trump, incongruent in his suit and red ball cap, who best channeled the anger of many Americans fed up with establishment politics.
On the left, it was Sanders, a grumpy socialist, who stirred passions with his political “revolution.” The young voters who’d powered Obama’s campaigns gravitated to him, not her.
Clinton struggled to explain her use of a private email setup and what the FBI director called her “careless” handling of classified information. WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign that U.S. intelligence officials said were hacked by the Russians. They reveal plenty of angst inside her campaign about how to control the damage from her email practices and her equivocations about them.
She soldiered on.
The notion of electing the first woman as president had its appeal, but never generated the electricity attached to the election of the first black president.
Still, Sanders could not find a pathway to the nomination despite winning 22 contests. And Trump proved his lead in preference polls was for real.
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After claiming the Republican nomination, Trump picked a fight with an American Muslim family whose son was killed while serving in Iraq. He questioned the fairness of an American-born judge of Mexican heritage. He made flip comments about what gun-rights advocates might do to Clinton if her Secret Service agents weren’t armed.
Clinton made her own errors. She dismissed half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” and “irredeemable,” and only partly backed down when the comments became public.
Her September stumble after attending a memorial for victims of the 9-11 terrorist attacks fed into Trump’s questions about her stamina. It turned out she had pneumonia, which she’d hidden from nearly all of her staff.
Then came three debates, a proverbial train wreck that voters couldn’t look away from, setting records for viewership. A new bombshell dropped just in time for the second one: 2005 video of Trump making predatory comments about groping women.
Trump apologized, but waved off his “locker-room banter” and said he’d never really done what he’d claimed in the video.
A parade of women came forward to accuse him of making unwanted sexual advances.
Then some skittish Republicans bailed on him.
His response? Go nuclear against Clinton. In the front row for the second debate, Trump seated three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual impropriety, and Trump claimed with thin evidence that “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”
In the final debate, Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, attacking the fundamentals of democracy.
“Horrifying,” said Clinton.
“Stop whining,” Obama said later.
• • •
As Clinton’s edge strengthened in late polls, Democrats dared to begin to exhale. Then the FBI said yet more emails had emerged and were being examined.
Less than half of voters still had a favorable opinion of her. Even fewer were impressed with Trump.
Princeton historian Julian Zelizer said the toxicity of the campaign will be remembered not simply as a fluke wrought by Trump but as part of a trend.
“More and more of the electorate sees themselves as almost living in two separate worlds,” Zelizer said. “When this happens, you tend to vilify the opponent.”
Near the end, a yard sign spotted in Arlington, Virginia, spoke to the ordeal the campaign had become.
It didn’t promote a candidate but rather a natural disaster: “Giant Meteor, 2016, Just end it already.”
In this Oct. 19 photo, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump debate during the third presidential debate at UNLV in Las Vegas. Headed for history books, the duel between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became a battle of “nasty women” and “bad hombres” vs. “deplorables” and voters who are “irredeemable.”
http://www.limaohio.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2016/11/web1_07bb62448a2b45dbb0958102acb719a9-07bb62448a2b45dbb0958102acb719a9-0-1.jpgIn this Oct. 19 photo, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump debate during the third presidential debate at UNLV in Las Vegas. Headed for history books, the duel between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became a battle of “nasty women” and “bad hombres” vs. “deplorables” and voters who are “irredeemable.” Mark Ralston | Pool via AP
Donald Trump’s long ride down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in June 2015 wasn’t huge news at the time. It only merited a page 16 story in his hometown newspaper, The New York Times. But his 45-minute speech laid out a road map for the next 500 days. It had denunciations of rapists from Mexico, the promise to build a border wall, complaints that the United States doesn’t win anymore, assertions that the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil before the Islamic State group got it, criticism of President Barack Obama’s health law, pledges to get lost jobs back from China and elsewhere, rants against “stupid” trade deals and many more themes Trump has hammered on ever since.
RAISE YOUR HAND
Trump jolted the first Republican debate in August 2015 when he was the sole candidate among 10 men on the stage to raise his hand to signal he wouldn’t pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. The best he could offer: “I can totally make the pledge if I’m the nominee.” (The GOP field was so crowded then that seven more Republican candidates were relegated to an undercard debate.) This was the same debate where Trump mixed it up with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly over his history of intemperate comments about women, foreshadowing a running campaign theme. Trump answered Kelly’s question about whether he was part of the “war on women” with a riff against political correctness.
THOSE ‘DAMN EMAILS’
Clinton got a gift from Bernie Sanders in the first Democratic debate in October 2015 when he seconded her dismay at all the focus on her use of a private email setup as secretary of state. “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” Sanders said. That took some air out of the controversy but it never fully went away. Then in June, FBI Director James Comey announced he would not recommend charges against Clinton over the email issue, but said she and her aides had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information. The issue took on new life when the FBI announced just 11 days before the election that it was investigating whether there is classified information in newly discovered emails. Trump called it “bigger than Watergate.”
SMALL HANDS. EWW.
A Republican debate this past March strayed into cringe-inducing territory when Trump brought up GOP rival Marco Rubio’s mocking reference to his “small hands” and then volunteered some reassurance about the size of his genitals. Trump told his debate audience and millions of TV viewers, “He referred to my hands, if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you, There’s no problem, I guarantee.” The arbiters of good taste had a problem with that.
CEILING: SHATTERED
She wore white, the color of suffragettes. Clinton stood before voters at the Democrats’ Philadelphia convention in July and at last claimed the presidential nomination of a major party for women. “I’m so happy this day has come,” she told cheering supporters. “Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between. Happy for boys and men, too. Because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone.” Clinton had finally shattered that “glass ceiling” she cracked in the 2008 campaign.
THE ‘DEPLORABLES’
Clinton drew laughter when she told supporters at a private fundraiser in September that half of Trump supporters could be lumped into a “basket of deplorables” — denouncing them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” No one was laughing when her remarks became public. Clinton did a partial rollback, saying she’d been “grossly generalistic” and regretted saying the label fit “half” of Trump’s supporters. But she didn’t back down from the general sentiment, saying, “He has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices.” Soon enough, Trump had the video running in his campaign ads, and his supporters were wearing the “deplorable” label as a badge of honor.
A REAL STUMBLE
There are always stumbles in a presidential campaign. Clinton took a real one in September when she became overheated while attending a 9/11 memorial service in New York. It turned out she was suffering from pneumonia, a condition she’d hidden from the public and most of her aides. That gave Trump an opening to press his case that Clinton lacks the “stamina” to be president. But she had a sharp rejoinder in the fall debate with Trump, saying: “As soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.”
‘YOU CAN DO ANYTHING’
Trump’s living-large persona is part of his appeal for many people. But the leaked release in October of a 2005 video in which Trump boasted about groping women’s genitals and kissing them without permission threw his campaign into crisis. Politicians in both parties denounced Trump and some said he should drop out of the race. Trump apologized, but wrote off his videotaped comments as mere “locker-room banter.” He denied engaging in the kind of predatory activity he’d laughed about. But a string of women came forward to say he’d made unwanted sexual advances toward them.
HE WENT THERE
Trump toyed throughout the campaign with bringing up allegations about Bill Clinton’s past sexual misconduct. Trump went there in a big way in October at the second presidential debate, seating three of the former president’s accusers in the front row for the faceoff. “Bill Clinton was abusive to women,” Trump said. “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”
HE WOULDN’T GO THERE
As Trump’s standing in the polls faltered, he cranked up his claims that the election was being rigged against him. Asked in the final presidential debate if he would accept the results of the election, Trump refused to go there. Pressed on the matter by the debate moderator, Trump said: “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.” It was a startling statement that raised uncertainty about the peaceful transfer of power after the election. Even the Republican National Committee disavowed Trump’s statement.
