I’ll bet Hillary, flaws and all, will trounce Trump

Does Hillary have flaws? You bet. The fact that the Clintons have made themselves multimulti-millionaires by speaking to some savory — and some unsavory — groups can’t be disputed. Hillary, knowing that she was running for president, spoke to the very bankers who many people thought should have been punished for their behavior in the 2008 meltdown. She announced when challenged that she need the money. That’s just what I am talking about. Some of the charges against her are obviously trumped up (no pun intended) or blown out of proportion. Benghazi, Vince Foster, and being a crook come to mind. All of this has taken a toll as proven by the very close race that we see shaping up for November.

Hillary and Bill make mistakes, some worse than others. Every politician I know who has fallen from grace has been a victim of their own arrogance. The American public knows that about Hillary. They believe she is a spokesperson for the very bankers from whom she took the money. I have heard WAMC listeners again and again saying that she is a tool of corporate America. That may or may not be the case, but face it, America was corporatized a long time ago. The one percent gives vast amounts of money to politicians to have their way with them. Hillary’s war chest is obscene and this is not a Barack Obama-type appeal to everyone to throw a few dollars into the campaign. Hillary and Bill have always run a money machine and it is clearly already at work. Now we see one Hillary commercial after another appearing on TV.

As for Trump, the sheen has been washed from the apple. His uniqueness is suffering. In the old days, all he had to do was to show up and the TV ratings would go through the roof. Now, things are different. Americans are growing bored with the guy. They’ve heard it all before and they are getting nervous about this intemperate man having his finger on the nuclear button. The icing on the cake was the first day of the convention when it was revealed that the speech writer for Mrs. Trump had lifted Michelle Obama’s convention speech and recycled it for her own use. The point here is that if Donald Trump gets to be president, he’ll have his finger on the button and this kind of sloppy nonsense will be intolerable. In fact, there is so much dissonance among Republicans that if it looks like Trump might actually win the presidency, my bet is that some major Republicans will announce that they are voting for Hillary Clinton. Trump, of course, will say, “See, this is just proof that the whole game is rigged and that this is a case of ‘the establishment strikes back.’”

Then, too, there will be the inevitable debates. Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton or Barack Obama but she knows her policy. My bet is that she will clean Trump’s clock. As of today, I do believe that things are looking up.

Sunday Freeman columnist Alan Chartock is a professor emeritus at the State University of New York, publisher of the Legislative Gazette and CEO of the WAMC Northeast Public Radio Network. Readers can email him at alan@wamc.org.