A Virtual Deadlock on the Last Day

Today, Monday, is the last day. Tomorrow is payday, Election Day or — as some would have it — Armageddon: the triumph of Donald Trump and unreason or the triumph of Hillary Clinton and reason. Take your pick.

These last days, like every day since the start of the 2016 presidential election campaign, back in the summer of 2015, have been topsy-turvy days of highs and lows and angst and anxiety. We have watched the two candidates crisscross the continental United States (does anybody go to Hawaii or Alaska?) to zero in on so-called battleground states, part of a campaign lexicon of combat and warfare.

There is no question that this has been the most combative, most fractious, most vulgar, most ill-tempered campaign in a long time — since 1968, at least.

While the actual and philosophical stakes are large in this election, neither candidate measures up to the stakes in terms of weight and size, in ability to inspire, rhetorically or by sheer example. Yet both candidates have gifts. Clinton has experience, a grasp of policy, an inherent optimism and thought-out, practical solutions. Trump’s approach, such as it is, is one of outrageous rhetoric, his “solutions” shrouded in hyperbole, epigrams and slogans.

In any other year, the choice would be as obvious as it should be. If we think in terms of experience, there shouldn’t be a question. But this year, experience is seen as the old guard, which is more than suspect and deeply mistrusted. If we think in terms of personal behavior, style, character and temperament, the choice should once again be obvious.

But that’s not the case. Clinton and Trump are in a virtual deadlock kind of race, in which Trump still has a path to victory. Given that this is also a race in which America has a chance to elect its first female president, thus catching up with a good part of the rest of the world — otherwise anointing a businessman with little experience in the mechanics of policy or world affairs — its importance cannot be downplayed.

The last ten days or so of the campaign have been typical. We had an announcement from the FBI that a new trove of Clinton emails had been discovered, necessitating a second investigatory look, an October surprise that stunned Clinton’s camp and invigorated both the Trump campaign and the ferocity of its rallies. Trump immediately called the email issue “the worst scandal since Watergate” and continued to goad his minions to scream “Lock her up!” at every stop.

There was a leak from someone inside the FBI that telltale emails had been found and that there would soon be an indictment, duly reported by a Fox News reporter and duly picked up by Trump. It turned out to be false. And not only that, FBI director James Comey announced yesterday that nothing had been found in the new emails that would change the initial FBI judgment in the earlier report. Trump questioned these results, and once again began to talk about rigged elections.

None of this now seems to matter as much as before. Clinton seems to be holding a very small but consistent lead that, while not unassailable, remains steady.

This does not take away from the stress and anxiety felt by the body politic, nor the damage that has already been done by a campaign that has been conducted almost entirely on the basis of personality, charges and countercharges and in a style that calling it uncivil just doesn’t cut it.

In recent days, Trump, according to one story, had less access to his Twitter account, lowering the temperature somewhat, although just yesterday (or was it today?) he said it was “time to deliver justice to Hillary Clinton,” once again implying that she was an accused criminal.

Trump has had a soggy, disturbing and wretched effect on almost anything and anybody he has come in contact with in this campaign. Look what he has done to what could be a triumphant thing, the possibility of a female president. By dint of the discovery of a videotape that shows him expressing a crudely sexual and anti-female attitude while talking with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood,” Trump managed to make all talk and debate about gender be about how he treats women. This may be a boon as a campaign weapon for Clinton, but it takes away from discussions about the ability of women to handle any job, including the presidency.

Trump has come out most recently with a very effective video ad, one in which he speaks in sentences and not just slogans or tongues. In it, he walks among cheering crowds like a senator of some sort, holding up babies and talking about job losses and bad deals and how he will Make America Great Again, his most cogent slogan, but also one that begs the descriptive word ‘again.’ On the surface, this is an effective piece of work. It surely has emotional force for the audience he’s courted all along: working-class white males, a good number of whom are hardly working at all and suffering.

The ad would be effective, except for one thing — or rather hundreds of things. In order to believe a word of that ad, or respond to its imagery, we would have to completely wipe from our minds and memories everything we have seen and heard about and from Trump throughout this campaign: all the insulting of women, the disabled, minorities; his empty promises of charity and tax-return releases; his audacious phrasings like “There’s no one who respects women more than me.”

You would have to erase everything that Trump has shown us himself: the neediness coupled to arrogance, the never-apologize stance, the ignorance about world affairs, the meanness and the transparent bullying. He has not exactly hidden the qualities that have turned off millions of people.

He has been lifted up to the prominence he has gained — just a kiss away from the presidency — by his ability to dominate the airwaves, by that constant need for a Trump fix every day. Familiarity might breed contempt, but it also breeds, well, familiarity.

Most important of all, he has managed to convince that audience of hardworking working-class and middle-class Americans who ignore his failings that he is one of them, that he is authentic, that he cares and knows how they feel. This has allowed him to appeal not only to his base, but to the basest prejudices that exist in the country.

On Election Day, we’ll see just how much of that base spirit has risen to the surface.