Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  And yet one hears repeatedly the Susan Sarandon school of political analysis—if Sanders voters abandon Clinton, and Trump wins, the revolution will come that much quicker.

  How? She doesn’t know. In what form? She doesn’t say. At what cost? She has no idea.

  The notion that Donald Trump would provoke just the kind of revolution Susan Sarandon wants is, in candor, hallucinatory. Far more likely Trump would drive us deeper into division, distrust, and despair, a downward spiral from which there will be no common idea of how to escape. I’m reminded of one of the more chilling chapters from the Vietnam War—when an American officer, having ordered his troops to decimate a hamlet and everyone in it, explained that “sometimes you have to destroy a village in order to save it.”

  No, thanks. We should save the village by making it better for all who live there.

  Here, a word about third parties as a medium of self-expression.187 Certainly, one can vote any way one likes. But all that voting for Ralph Nader helped buy us was eight years of Republican rule. Can anyone look back at those years and say that President Gore would have made no difference? Only Ralph Nader, which captures the problem nicely. This is not the year for progressives to walk away—any more than 1968, when the disenchanted followers of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy helped elect their polar opposite, Richard Nixon.

  Instead, the only realistic way for Bernie’s legions to save the village is by continuing what they started. Keeping engaged with the Democratic Party—which, however imperfect, is the only realistic vehicle for positive change. Fighting for a platform that embraces progressive goals. Supporting candidates who reflect their values. Pressing for changes in the nomination process. Making themselves ever more important within, and to, the party. Holding it to its promises. Combating Super PACs and strengthening the role of small donors. Accepting that, in politics, one never gets everything one wants. And never forfeiting their purchase on power in exchange for impotent anger.

  As for Bernie Sanders himself, I believe that he will act on the truth he stated so clearly—that Hillary Clinton is infinitely preferable to Donald Trump.188 And so should those who look to him for leadership. Not simply because it’s true, but because it matters to the future of our village.

  PART III

  The Donald, Hillary, Narcissism, Racism, Political Insanity, and the Surprising Fatefulness of Two Conventions

  By early May, a wounded Hillary Clinton was set to face off against a triumphal Donald Trump.

  Breathless commentators forecast that the “candidate of change,” however erratic, was set to defeat the tired candidate of the incumbent party, in a country that too many Americans believed was headed downhill. In this desperate fourth quarter of the mind, many argued, Trump was a political Hail Mary. And then portents swiftly accumulated that this construct was complicated by Trump’s internal makeup.

  For securing the nomination had not made Trump a statesman, positioning himself as presidential for the larger electorate awaiting him in November. Far from it. Trump seemed to have no second act at all—raising grave questions about what drove a persona he seemed unable to change. Particularly startling was his constant pursuit of petty personal grievances, his seeming addiction to the toxic tropes of bigotry, and the mendacious exploitation with which he responded to tragedies like the slaughter in Orlando. His inner world seemed to include no one but himself, forever looking in the mirror.

  To me, all this marked Trump as a man far too damaged to become our 45th president.

  So I set out to explain why—first pretty much on my own and then, abruptly, in the company of established journalists who came to believe, as I did, that avoiding the question of Trump’s inner landscape was not responsible journalism, but its antithesis.

  But the drama was far greater than one man’s psychodrama. Trump had hijacked a major political party whose leaders, by and large, acted like hostages in thrall to a dangerous madman—parsing, rationalizing, enabling, and sometimes joining in as he dragged them ever deeper into the ever-growing fever swamp of racism, lies, and dishonesty that seemed calculated to sicken the country they purported to love. There was justice in this, for they had been tiptoeing in the very same swamp for years, and now were flailing in the quicksand beneath, shouting to all who would hear that Trump would save us from Hillary Clinton.

  However damaged, Clinton was a different matter altogether. Having at last dispatched Sanders, she dusted herself off, took the measure of Trump, and set out to use him as a foil to fortify her candidacy and unify her party. It was an edifying sight. Relentless competence may not be heartwarming, but when the alternative is a thrill ride run by a man with attention deficit disorder, it is surely reassuring.

  With good reason. Every time the chance for a breakthrough fell in his lap—notably the Clinton emails—Trump fumbled it. Clinton ground steadily on, the political equivalent of a football team playing on a muddy field, eschewing the long but risky pass for a punishing ground game.

  Her steadiness kept paying off—in the consistency of her themes and in the method and even the predictability of her choice for vice president. In contrast, Trump threw fits of pique at petty targets, including other Republicans, and his selection of Mike Pence partook of farce. By the end of July, Trump needed a unifying convention to boost his chances; Clinton a humanizing convention to make her more acceptable to those devoted to Sanders or unsettled by Trump.

  Even so, few anticipated that both conventions would provide such riveting spectacle.

  Why Hillary Clinton

  MAY 17, 2016

  In Mario Cuomo’s famous dictum, politicians “campaign in poetry and govern in prose.”

  While Hillary Clinton has effectively secured her party’s nomination, her primary campaign has been difficult and distinctly unpoetic. By personality and inclination, Clinton is prose. Which, fortuitously or not, makes her a fit for the temper of these fractious times, where patience, pragmatism, and a mastery of policy count for more than soaring rhetoric and promises that cannot be kept.

  Our politics is trench warfare. The Republicans are dug in, protected by a bulwark of gerrymandering and demographics that means that, out of 435 congressional districts, all but thirty-five or so are electorally impregnable. So, too, are roughly forty-five red state senators—not enough to make a majority, but sufficient to sustain a filibuster. And the machinery of polarization—including a media that tells right-wing voters what they want to hear—blocks transformational change.

  We may not like it. But our quarrel is not merely with our current noxious politics, but with the founding fathers who, fearful of popular excesses, gave us political institutions ideal for dividing power and resisting change. Unwittingly, they embedded within our Constitution a system that is now exploited by a GOP mired in stasis and self-interest. The political front moves, if at all, by inches instead of miles.

  In this environment things like single-payer health care are casualties of war. The question is how to carve out territory where progress, however incremental, is meaningful and lasting.

  Take Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act. Imperfect and incomplete as it may be, Obamacare has delivered health insurance to about 20 million Americans, with the greatest benefit to the poor, minorities, and struggling workers. Not only was this important—in the Hobbesian world of our politics, it was optimal.

  From the day he entered office, Obama had to claw for every inch of political turf in the face of unrelieved opposition to any legislation he offered. Often, he had to stretch the limits of his executive authority to achieve anything at all.

  In short, we elected a man who campaigned in poetry, and found that prose was writ in mud and paid for in partisan bloodshed. One doubts that today he would campaign quite as he did in 2008—indeed, he did not do so in 2012. Now Hillary Clinton is campaigning as she must govern—as a combatant, not an innocent, whose greatest weapon will sometimes be a veto.

  She understands that progress in health care,
infrastructure, financial regulation, tax reform, the environment, and limiting money in politics can only come through a mastery of detail and a keen sense of the potential, and limits, of presidential power. She is coming to the job prepared.

  As a politician, she is like that congenital A student we all knew in high school—steeped in policy, enthralled by detail, and conscientious to a fault. Give her something to read, and she will read it and remember. When it comes to knowing her job, Hillary Clinton does not believe in faking it.

  She has specific plans to improve the lot of embattled Americans, including women and their families. She has a well-conceived program to regulate the financial sector—a priority she spelled out a year before the crash of 2008. Indeed, there is no area of pressing need where she is not stocked with proposals that, mercifully, have an actual chance of moving forward.

  Importantly, her agenda can be paid for without busting the budget, primarily by increasing taxes on the wealthy. One can quarrel with the details: certainly, it is easy to imagine more sweeping and ideal solutions than some that she proposes—indeed, Bernie Sanders often does.

  What is impossible to imagine is passing them. And there is no reasonable doubt that a Clinton presidency will focus on building a fairer and more inclusive society. These things account, at least in part, for Clinton’s decisive lead in the primary vote and pledged delegates: critically, Clinton enjoys broader support among Democrats than does Sanders—including from minorities who will be critical in November.

  Then there is national security, an area where she must combat Donald Trump’s empty bluster. To this task Clinton brings a sophisticated grasp of diplomacy, military strategy, and counterterrorism.

  To be sure, the Iraq vote was a mistake that Trump, as has Sanders, will make her reckon with—it helped lead to a foreign policy disaster, and it will not suffice to say that she had lots of company. And, for some, Clinton is too inclined to interventions in the Middle East that, inevitably, have as many unintended consequences as those that we intend—assuming, of course, that we can realize even those.

  But Iraq was fourteen years ago. And it is too easy to second-guess more recent decisions in a region where both action and inaction can be equally problematic—and which ISIS uses as a launching pad for terrorism and terrorists.189 Over time, Hillary Clinton has acquired the knowledge to be president in a dangerous and ever-shifting global environment.

  She has thought about this environment in detail and with care. Foreign leaders respect her. She is prepared to deal with issues as disparate as climate change, cyber warfare, and international drug cartels. Her plan for combating ISIS is thorough and considered. She understands counterterrorism and the threat of nuclear proliferation—including nuclear terrorism. She has the sophistication to maintain and build alliances, but also to understand their limits.

  During their primary contest, Bernie Sanders has cited Iraq as proof that his judgment is superior, and that experience alone is not enough. But the latter truism is no substitute for an ongoing absorption in the complications of a complex world. That was never a priority for Sanders and, when it comes to picking a president, this matters.190 And being right on a single vote in 2002, however critical, is no guarantee of mastery of difficult issues in, say, 2018.

  In any event, the alternative to Clinton in November is not Sanders, but the ignorant, xenophobic, chronically offensive, Putin-loving moron Donald Trump. She is as fit to be president as Trump is not. The gap is daunting—the wrong result would be dangerous to America and the world. But to win Clinton must address her own weaknesses as a candidate, reflected in uncomfortably high negatives, and rooted in difficulties that cannot be wished away.

  Some derive from twenty-five years of being pounded with lies, distortions, and half-truths, rooted in a pervasive double standard. In a way, this Darwinian experience is oddly reassuring. Hillary Clinton is tough—if she hasn’t cracked by now, she never will.

  But other problems are self-inflicted. In terms of credibility, the speeches on Wall Street cost her much more than she was paid, and her failure to perceive that suggests a certain tone deafness. Her reasons for not releasing the transcripts are so unpersuasive as to suggest discomfort with the speeches themselves. Similarly, the email problem has grown bigger with each shifting explanation.

  Put simply, she does not excel at changing stories or admitting error.191 And, yes, Iraq truly is the gift that keeps on giving, especially when coupled with the suspicion that Clinton’s positions are too often calibrated to suit the public mood.

  The latter, of course, is commonplace. That’s how candidates get elected, and the flip side is the tactical flexibility needed to get things done. But, in Clinton, the air of contrivance is exacerbated by the fact that she is not, as events have compelled her to admit, a natural. Too often she exudes caution and, at times, wariness—understandable, to be sure, but unhelpful in conveying passion or authenticity.

  All this feeds the perception, fair or not, that, in the immortal word of Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Clinton is “untrustable.” There is irony here—by any reasonable measure of truth telling, Clinton’s assertions during the campaign are, relative to other candidates, accurate and grounded in fact.192 But the perception has hurt her nonetheless—including among young women who have forgotten the hard and bitter fight that enabled a woman to run for president at all.

  Another problem is that Clinton will need enthusiastic support from a Democratic electorate that is divided in a couple of different ways. One divide is between Clinton past—as examples, the crime bill and welfare reform of the ’90s—and this Clinton in the very different present. Both Clintons are addressing this, and must continue to do so in a way that reaches progressives, minorities, and the young: the alternative, after all, is not some beau ideal, but Donald Trump.

  The second divide is between the pragmatic governing philosophy of Hillary Clinton, and the idealistic all-or-nothing populism of Bernie Sanders. Practicality is harder to sell than visionary phrases, and reality is not always a place where all voters want to live.

  She cannot make these problems go away. What she can do is continue to remind voters that a president owes them reality, not fantasy—a critique even more apt for Trump than for Sanders. And then—through command, specifics, and an added dollop of passion—persuade the majority of Americans to trust her as president.

  This is not the stretch that some might think it. In debate, she is smart, informed, unyielding, and even compelling—one can see her as our president in tough moments. That’s a form of trust not easy to come by. And her mastery of policy will be a bracing contrast to Trump’s abysmal ignorance. Part of her campaign must be focused on that—relentlessly disqualifying Trump on the issues and, critically, as the unpredictable and unstable megalomaniac that he is.

  A second element is convincing Americans that behind her programs is a deep desire to make their lives, and the country itself, better—including a strong and persuasive indictment of the influence of big money in politics. She need not be Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—or, for that matter, Bernie Sanders. What she does need—and what many Americans still want from her—is an animating vision of the better place she wants America to become.

  Given her immersion in pressing issues from college on, by now this should not be all that hard.193 Clearly she is thinking about this; so are others who want her to be president. By email Sam Brown—whose concern this has been since the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s—sketches a platform that, while not meant to be definitive, suggests a template for uniting Democrats and reaching Americans at large.

  The basic vision it serves is that only a country that values all its people can be vibrant and strong—now and in the future. With a few additions, I venture it as a starting place:

  We believe that every student in America has the right to a debt-free college education. Because the voice of every citizen should carry equal weight, we support a constitutional amendment to ste
m the influence of money in politics.

  We believe that every American has the right to quality healthcare regardless of their means. We believe in providing job retraining, education, and support for Americans dislocated by the forces of globalization.

  We believe in a society where opportunity is not defined by wealth. We believe that every American should bear their fair share of paying for our defense, rebuilding our infrastructure, and providing opportunity and security for all.

  We believe in protecting the equal rights of every citizen, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. We believe in combating the scourge of gun violence through laws that protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, while keeping guns away from demonstrably dangerous people who would use them to kill others.

  We believe that it is imperative to protect our environment and combat climate change. We believe in addressing the complex problems of immigration and providing a path to citizenship for those who wish to be good citizens. We reject scapegoating of any kind, whether it be of Mexicans, Muslims, or those who wish to seek refuge from violence and oppression.

  Is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton wants to lead that kind of country? Or that Donald Trump does not?

  Her task is to make more Americans see her as that leader—and to believe that our future is not a given, for good or ill, but a choice.194 If she succeeds, then she can bring this better country closer to reality.

  Too Sick to Lead

  The Lethal Personality Disorder of Donald Trump195

  JUNE 3, 2016

  Try this as a thought exercise.

  The year is 2005. Hungry for prominence, Senator Barack Obama resolves to jump-start his public acclaim. He hits upon a brilliant stratagem: calling Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post, he introduces himself as a press aide named John Miller. Recognizing Obama’s distinctive cadences and turns of phrase, Robinson is stunned. Reflexively, he turns on his speakerphone.