RUTHFULLY YOURS

It isn’t nice to delight in another’s misery, but in the case of Hillary Clinton an exception can be made.

Fairfax correspondent Paul McGeough, just two days ago assured his SMH and Age readers with the full measure of his magisterial authority:

On Wednesday, Americans will awake from a nightmare. Donald Trump will not be their president.

But relief will be short-lived. It will be more a “ha, ha, gotcha” moment appropriate to a lingering Halloween mood; because Trump is likely to be a sore loser, ready to inflict serial new nightmares on the US before he’s done with politics.

What’s all this based on? The losing part is a gut feel, supplemented by the late polling and high turnout numbers in early voting, especially on a Latino surge that is especially ominous for Trump.

And those nightmares to come? That’s based on what I suspect will be Trump’s inability to walk away from the crater of his campaign, without attempting to make it into something else – remember his claim that he always makes success from failure?

Americans woke up as usual. The Fairfax rags continue sleep-walking to their doom.

Quadrant Online spent the day watching Americans exercise their franchise in a presidential election that has already re-written the rule book. Can Donald Trump, the abrasive, egomaniacal outsider the Establishment loves to hate, pull it off? To borrow from Obama: Yes he did!

WEDNESDAY, 10am: So it’s President Trump, who should end up with around 300 Electoral College votes.

As I type, Hillary Clinton is preparing to make her belated concession speech. The TV footage of her walk to the waiting limo, Bill by her side, showed a woman wearing a fawn pant suit* and a supercilious smile. It is the same grin one sees on public figures who find themselves in court, where the defeated presidential candidate may well find herself.

Yes, she has been “cleared” of the email scandal, sort of, by the Eastern District investigators based in Brooklyn. But there is another probe being conducted across the East River by the Southern District, where the focus is on pay-to-play allegations involving the Clinton Foundation. This office is run and staffed by people who were hired by Rudy Giuliani, a Trump surrogate and hot tip to become Attorney General. The Brooklyn operation, by contrast, is run and staffed by people hired for the most part by Loretta Lynch, who was appointed to that post under Bill Clinton and subsequently elevated to Attorney General by Obama.

Does one need to be terminally suspicious to see why the foot-dragging email probe took so long and why, having identified a rash of violations, the Brooklynites deemed them unworthy of prosecution?

Now the Manhattan crew will be able to get the co-operation they have been requesting from across the river. Expect a grand jury to be convened and, if the leaks and whispers are correct, charges brought.

Should that happen there will be both justice and poetic justice in the wind. Throughout their public lives the Clintons have used and discarded those who might and did help them — Whitewater associates, the future trader who made Hillary a small fortune in the cattle market by assigning profitable trades to her account after the market closed.

Now, denied the White House, the Clintons aren’t of much use to anyone.

This is going to be marvelous theatre, count on it.

*rather than do a McGeough, let it be admitted that the footage of Hillary and Bill just screened on CNN was, as it turns out, from the archives. The colour of her pant suit is not yet known, but she will be wearing that felon’s smile. It is all she has left to hide behind

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WASHINGTON DC, 7.30pm: Once upon a time, in a more innocent age, Americans liked to crow that their electoral system was the fairest, best and most reliable in the world. Mind you, they said much the same about the cars that poured out of Detroit as well, only to be disabused of such ill-founded confidence by the plagues of Toyotas, VWs and other imports that, with the help of a bloody-minded United Auto Workers, humbled Ford and General Motors while seeing Chrysler sold off to Fiat.

Democracy might prove more vigorous, though no less prone to breakdowns, if today’s 170-mile tour of Pennsylvania and its polling places is any indication.

Unlike many other states, Pennsylvania obliges its citizens to vote on Election Day and not a second earlier. Today, in Philadelphia, that heavily black city was queueing with a patience that would have put a Londoner to shame. The City of Brotherly Love, it need hardly to said, always go Democrat, although you have to wonder why. Time after time, mayors and City Hall pols, hangers-on, judges, police, state legislators, local officials and union leaders have traded their offices first for monetary gain and later, in the case of the less careful, for jail cells. Corruption in Philly is as much a part of the local culture as the cheesesteak and it has been that way for quite some time, at least since the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens observed that the city was corrupt and content to stay that way. That was back in 1903 and the contentment yesterday was palpable.

Ever the gentleman, Ronald Reagan would have disapproved of his party’s latest presidential candidate’s language and vulgarian demeanour, but he would also have recognised a man whose message, like his own, resonates with an electorate sick of business-as-usual politics.
Monday night in Washington DC, election eve, and who, apart from the pollsters, knows what to think? Hillary by two-to-four percent, that seems to be the final consensus of all their sampling, weighting, adjusting, tickling, divining and projecting as the grand kabuki drama of this year’s presidential race staggers toward its climax 24 hours from now and the foot-stomping, snarling and grimacing is done. Or do you ‘go with your gut’, as a Trump acolyte put it this afternoon while picking through a bargain bin of marked-down Hillary ’16 T-shirts at a shop on E Street specialising in electionabilia.

“Would they be discounting them if she had a chance?” wondered Emily Shernhoff, 47, who was visiting the US capital from Iowa and wanted some small-change gifts for Democrat friends back home. “They want the White House,” she began, paraphrasing an old gag, “but all they’ll get is a lousy T-shirt.”

As theories and auguries go, the 70% discount on Hillarywear seemed as good as any, possibly better than most. At the counter, the young black woman ringing up my purchases endorsed that particular prognostication more than somewhat. Who would win tomorrow’s vote, she was asked, going by the merchandise her store has been moving?

“Trump,” she said. “We’ve sold a lot more of his T-shirts than hers.”

So that must be why Hillary’s T-shirts are discounted.

“No, Trump’s are marked down too.”

I took the full-price unit back to the shelf, found the bargain bin and saved myself $12. At the counter once again, it was hard not to smile. The handsome T-shirt, in Republican red and bearing the Trump name above his campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, bears a label proclaiming it was made in Honduras – imported tariff-free under the NAFTA pact that the man whose cause it espouses has vowed to “renegotiate”, if not scrap altogether.