It is noteworthy that the leading candidate in each party also is the least popular. “The negatives” of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are very high, and while they have a grip of sorts on their party’s nominations, each is heartily disliked by a significant portion of their own party as well as by most of the supporters of the other party. There have been a few recent elections in which observers wondered how our system could produce such poor candidates. “We can do better,” they said. Those words have never been more true than they are this year. We are on the verge of having two such unpalatable candidates simultaneously, and it might not be a bad thing if both of their candidacies “aborted.”
By John Shaffer For a topic that supposedly was “settled” back in 1973 when the US Supreme Court decided that the issue ultimately was a matter for the federal government (and not the states) to decide, abortion has knocked for a loop the campaigns of the front runners in both parties. First, Donald Trump, for whom no issue seemed important enough for him to have paid any attention to it prior to his campaign for the White House, agreed with an interviewer’s premise that “the woman” should face punishment for having an abortion. No credible pro-life candidate, spokesman, legislator or social critic holds that position. Therefore, and quite understandably, Mr. Trump’s ignorance allowed abortion rights advocates to use his words to club the entire pro-life movement. Mr. Trump realized how much damage he had done - not to the pro-life position (which he cares about, if at all, strictly for its political usefulness to him, rather than out of any profound objection to abortion) – but to his own candidacy, so he uncharacteristically backed down and tried to take it all back. His shallow grasp of the issue left him flummoxed; it should go without saying that any candidate should be alert to the near-certainty that his words are going to be studied and parsed and deconstructed and interpreted, so he should be darn sure that he doesn’t speak carelessly about matters he is unfamiliar with. Of course, that would restrict Mr. Trump’s words to reality TV, beauty pageants, the life of the rich and famous, and ways of enriching himself at someone else’s expense. Speaking of enriching oneself at someone else’s expense, Hillary Clinton also was tripped up by her own words on abortion. She takes a back seat to no one in her defense of abortion, so when she said: “an unborn person has no Constitutional rights,” boy – did things sizzle! Not from the anti-abortion folks, who never expected Hillary to give them the time of day – but from the pro-abortion folks, who were more than mildly upset that she used the term “unborn person,” which grants humanity to the unborn, something the pro-abortion people strive mightily never to do. They use the terms “the fetus” or “the product of conception” or “the contents of the womb” or a similar derivative. That way they can pretend that the thing they are killing never was alive at all.
It is noteworthy that the leading candidate in each party also is the least popular. “The negatives” of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are very high, and while they have a grip of sorts on their party’s nominations, each is heartily disliked by a significant portion of their own party as well as by most of the supporters of the other party. There have been a few recent elections in which observers wondered how our system could produce such poor candidates. “We can do better,” they said. Those words have never been more true than they are this year. We are on the verge of having two such unpalatable candidates simultaneously, and it might not be a bad thing if both of their candidacies “aborted.” Comments are closed.
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