The date was Oct. 2, 2012. The day’s top political story? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for permanent immigration reform. Elsewhere on memory lane, do you remember Romney’s biggest gaffe on women? It was during the second presidential debate. He was excitedly describing his diversity hires from his days as governor of Massachusetts and said, “We had binders full of women.” With those six words, Romney created an instant internet meme and one of the most popular Halloween costumes of 2012. Four years later, his successor spent the weekend trashing a former Miss Universe and then called the New York Times to complain about how his opponent said bad things about the women her husband slept with. Oh Mitt, we hardly knew ye!
It’s all such sweet, innocent nostalgia now, but it wasn’t always thus. As we approached the 2012 election, those of us on the left side of the aisle saw Romney as the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. We couldn’t imagine anything worse than a Romney presidency. Now we can. He is still the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. But if Hillary Clinton’s numbers suddenly go south, and if we could make a quick deal with the devil, well, Hail to the Chief, President Mittens!
During the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has been vacillating between two of his current obsessions: the body size of the 1996 Miss Universe, and intimate details of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal life. The two are linked only in the byzantine torture chamber that is Trump’s mind. HRC caught the Donald off guard during last week’s debate when she introduced Alicia Machado, the beauty pageant winner and one of his many body shaming victims. Trump left the debate sputtering about how he might have to “get nasty,” as if he’d been teaching a Dale Carnegie course all these months. He later clarified, in the call to the Times, that his new appeal to women will be to drudge up Bill Clinton’s affairs and “reveal” how Hillary criticized some of the other women in her husband’s life. That would be an October surprise only to someone who has never heard a country-western song or read the Starr Report, whichever came first. Then, a few hours later, he reversed course and complained to a Pennsylvania rally that Hillary has never been loyal to Bill.
In the beginning, Donald Trump was a joke, the Pat Paulsen candidate of 2016, someone who parodied the antiseptic, polished, focus-group-tested rhetoric of real politicians. In one of the cruelest twists of political fate our country has ever seen, the joke caught on. Many of us stopped laughing a long time ago. This campaign is no longer about issues or public policy. It’s about human decency and dignity and civility. It’s about showing respect for people you disagree with, or who come from different backgrounds, ethnicities or experiences. This qualification for office was unwritten and unspoken but has always been there, and until now, was always followed. We Americans argue about everything else – taxes, foreign policy, education, the environment, – but we have always shared the desire to be led by a decent, dignified president. Prior to August of 2016, every presidential nominee, regardless of party affiliation, met that standard.
Trump does not. He is mean, vindictive and cruel. He delights in name calling, in hurting anyone who differs with him. He embodies the very worst of our current culture and its screaming, divisive discourse of verbal abuse and incivility, of dismissing contrary views with brutal, painful attacks on those who hold them. Sadly, this election is not about any of the vital policy matters facing this country. We don’t reach those issues, because this election, first and foremost, is about only one thing: keeping a man who delights in hurting people out of the White House.