Uncertainty Reigns As We Count Down to Nov. 8

Can you believe this?

Here we are, five days and change until Tuesday, Nov. 8, when the body will choose who will become the next president of the United States.

The choice is between Democrat Hillary Clinton, who may never again write an email for the rest of her life, and Republican Donald Trump, who just the other day suggested that those voters who had already cast a vote in early voting or by mail vote again.

Know what?

It is entirely possible — maybe not likely, but possible — that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. In which case, he’s not likely to suggest that the elections are rigged.

Last Friday, this campaign had its October surprise with less than two weeks to go, and it was, as surprises go, a big one. The surprise was oddly familiar. On that day, FBI Director James Comey announced that he had sent a letter to the majority and minority heads of Congress to report that the FBI was resuming its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. This because a new batch — apparently thousands — had been discovered during the course of an investigation of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Huma Abedin, who has been Clinton’s top aide, including during her tenure as Secretary of State.

The details appear to be deliberately and carefully vague in their wording as to whether the emails are pertinent or significant and as to how long it would take to examine them and if the examination could be completed by the time of the election (probably not, according to experts).

The effect was electric. Clinton said she had been “blindsided.” Trump practically danced in the aisles even where were no aisles and called the developments “the biggest scandal since Watergate” — once again displaying his genius for hyperbole.

The polls now show a race that appears practically even on a national level, Clinton having once had as recently as ten days ago a double-digit lead in one poll.

Today, there is no escape from it. The opportunities that normal life offers for solace and day-to-day joys seem more and more infrequent. It’s fair to guess that the market for sleeping pills is hot these days. Whatever you’re doing — reading, dancing, sleeping, walking the streets, working or not — this race has become a straightjacket. “I have this recurring dream,” a friend told me, “that I’m going to wake up and the race is over.”

My son called me Friday. He never calls on Friday. He lives in Orlando, in Florida, one of those “must-win” states. He is an ardent progressive, and on matters political we are mostly in agreement. “What is it, the cats or Trump?” I asked. “Trump,” he said. “This thing with the emails.”

I know what he means. We have been living to one degree or another, not in Wayne’s World, but Trump’s World, ever since he announced his intention to run for president of this fair country. The announcement was as intemperate as everything that followed with its reference to the wall, Mexicans as rapists and “I’ll make Mexico pay for it.”

Everything that has happened since has been a dramatic departure from electoral politics as usual. Ordinarily, that might be a good thing. Certainly, the electoral process with its endless primaries, high-drama debates and parade of unworthy candidates with the media lifespan of a bumblebee has been a process aching for dramatic reform.

But Donald Trump was different in a different way. Abetted by constant media coverage, he mounted a campaign of the kind that has only been seen in movies: “All the King’s Men,” “A Face in the Crowd,” the sadly ignored “Bob Roberts.” The campaign, run on rallies and Instagram and Twitter, was a campaign spurred by lies, damnable lies, presented as jokes and never retracted. Trump’s campaign was a weird form of heated populism, which he pitched to a part of the electorate often ignored, denied, displaced and violently displeased with government in all of its assumed control of people’s lives.

In spite of a deluge of almost daily controversies that in normal political times would have sunk any other candidate, Trump flourished because he attacked political correctness with inchoate, stark and almost obscene vulgarity and relish, which his audience saw as plainspoken authenticity.

Against this, a flock of lesser Republicans, many of them with actual policy credentials and achievements, flapped hopelessly, either joining the Trump Show or fading away, returning to invisibility. Against this, even Clinton had trouble getting heard. She was a candidate formidable in knowledge and experience, which also brought with it a trail of political baggage from all her incarnations as attorney, first lady of Arkansas and the United States, standup spouse to the embattled President Bill Clinton, United States Senator from New York and Secretary of State.

Trump, while nominally a businessman with experience in both building and bankruptcy, used his skills as shaman and showman and former host of the television reality show “The Apprentice” to dominate the media coverage.

So here we are. The shaman has a shot. He haunts us with a mouth made for exaggeration and untruths and a body made for posturing. He is the poseur among us: the hand over the chest, the fingers put together just so, the chin senatorial as if copied off a bust of some ancient Roman.

The really mystifying thing is that he presents himself as a rebel when he is merely a bomb thrower, when he can say with a straight face that “there is no one who respects women more than me,” when he adopts the mantle of authenticity. This is a man who lives in a tower, descends from his own plane, professes to be the most giving among givers whose charitable offerings are hard to document, a man who rates women by the numbers.

He haunts us. At a recent Sunday mass, I was listening to the invocative Gregorian chant and the parable about Jesus and the poor man who went to heaven while the rich man languished, like a one-percenter. Something made me wait for that familiar voice to say: “Wrong. Wrong. The rich guy should go.”

Trump, for once, wasn’t there. But he remains among us, in our daily thoughts.

Today, uncertainty reigns. That may still be the case when we wake up next Wednesday.