Take that Trump! I’ve cast my vote across the ocean with hope for Hill
LAST WEEK I did the greatest thing I’ve done in years. It ranks up there up some of my greatest achievements which I will get at a later column to when I think of them. As the headline suggests I voted in the American Presidential Election and having a brain the vote was emphatically for Hillary and not Donald.
By virtue of my mother being American I have the right to vote and because of the frankly awful Republican candidates in recent years, I have always voted Democrat.
When the long rectangular envelope arrived in the post on Monday last week I was like a child at Christmas. In a house where anything paper gets chopped to pieces with a scissors by my daughter, I kept it out of arm’s reach and well hidden, until I got to fill in all the details at lunch, before paying the €1.20 postage and dispatching it into the letterbox, hand all the way in just in case.
Tuesday, November 8, could, and please God will, be a landmark day in America - a country I hold close to my heart for all its flaws - when a woman is finally elected to the position of the world’s most influential politican.
Being the American President she will have significant, if limited power. President Obama has done a wonderful job in restoring the reputation of America on the international stage and an admirable job on the home front, boosting employment numbers, introducing universal healthcare and achieving stability in Detroit ‘s car industry. He won a Nobel Peace prize in 2009 and became a beacon of hope for African Americans.
He failed in some vital areas including gun control but not for want of trying.
Hillary Clinton has not managed to harness an iota of the media interest that President Obama had when he was running for president back in 2008. Through his speeches and slogans like Yes We Can he electrified world politics and rode that current all the way into the White House for two terms beating admittedly average Republican opposition.
Nobody can accuse Donald Trump of being average: vainglorious, ignorant, spoiled, obscene, hideous, maybe, but not average. ‘The Donald’, as he no doubt likes to be called by his minions, is a ruthless businessman and a sexual predator according to many women. Within weeks of being nominated as Republican candidate for the highest office in the world he insulted Mexicans and has, through his broadstroke speeches, alienated women, children, immigrants and journalists. He likes to get his way, every minute of every day and has sycophants who enable his behaviour, which is crass, disgusting and the opposite of presidential.
One wonders if Hillary Clinton was a bland male Democract candidate like Al Gore of John Kerry, for example, but post Obama era, would she get the disdainful remarks she gets. She impressed me in the debates and I, for one, have shot a nail into the political coffin of Trump and pray to God he doesn’t get voted in next Tuesday.