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

by Richard North Patterson

  I should be clear. America is not Italy in the 1920s. We have a Constitution, and our traditions are democratic, not authoritarian. Trump cannot transform our institutions by himself; one doubts that he’s even considered the difficulties. Still, as president this man on horseback can do America great harm.

  He can overreach, provoking a Constitutional crisis. He can mire us in a dangerous drift caused by his own incompetence and incomprehension of our institutions. He can use the levers of government to intimidate the media and harass his host of enemies, real or imagined. He can plunge us into disaster through ignorant and impetuous decisions. He can deepen the violence and severity of our racial divide.

  Quite possibly, he would do them all. And his failure to make good on his magical promises would surely create further anger and alienation among his followers, fracturing our society in a way that threatens our stability and our capacity for self-governance.254

  No responsible political party would give us this man.

  Yet the GOP left Cleveland bearing the stamp of Donald Trump—the party of white identity and populist economics, led by a demagogue on horseback. That, sadly, is likely sufficient to rally most Republicans in such fearful and polarized times. The party’s soulless gamble is that the souls of enough other Americans have shriveled sufficiently to drink from its poisoned chalice.

  It is Hillary Clinton’s job to persuade them they should not. And so she came to Philadelphia needing the very good convention that she is quite capable of putting on—one much more positive in tone and substance than the Republican festival of rage.

  In this disturbing and volatile season, Clinton has the aura of experience and competence to reassure an electorate that, in the words of public opinion expert Peter Hart, is not “aspirational . . . but one that would just be satisfied to find peace and quiet.” But twenty-five years of relentless partisan attacks, accentuated by her own missteps, have planted misgivings about her trustworthiness.

  Part of her difficulty is that after two terms of a Democratic president, Clinton embodies the status quo for those who desire change. But the email controversy has become a magnet, attracting iron filings of other doubts and discontents, its power reinforced by James Comey’s damaging exoneration.255

  The act at its heart was never indictable, but its incaution was a serious mistake.256 And her shifting explanations provide an echo chamber for the further controversies that dog her, like Benghazi, long after the central question has been resolved in her favor.

  This curse cannot be exorcised by November—the narrative that she is careful with the truth is too deeply embedded, a GOP mantra. So she must find alternate avenues of trust, including to younger voters, and this convention is where she must start.

  One theme is to remind voters that she cares about issues that are important to them, and has for decades. Another is that she actually has solutions that—unlike Trump—she can describe in a credible and persuasive way. Still another is that, as a senator, she enjoyed good and productive relationships with Republicans, and that she cares to do so as president.

  A convention is the ideal setting for expert witnesses—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren—who can vouch for her as a caring and capable leader. Here Bernie Sanders is critical. She needs his voters, and they need to be reminded of all the ways that she has embraced the themes of his campaign. And Sanders needs to say repeatedly and emphatically, as he did last night, that Trump should never be president.257

  Another crucial partner is Tim Kaine. Here Trump was helpful—his selection of a garden-variety evangelical conservative as his running mate helped free Clinton’s hand to make a pragmatic choice.

  In this context, Kaine was a smart and solid pick. While the left is riled by Kaine’s support of financial deregulation and the TPP, Trump’s Halloween convention should help consolidate progressive support. And Kaine’s record as a civil rights lawyer, opposition to the death penalty, advocacy of gun control, and strong relationship with the black community in Virginia commend him as a liberal of conscience.

  His résumé bristles with attributes. He has been a mayor, governor, and senator. He is widely respected and universally liked, with a reputation for integrity and good judgment. He speaks fluent Spanish. He knows foreign policy. He can help carry a swing state. He is a former chairman of the DNC. And, critical to a candidate who cares deeply about governance, Kaine is qualified to serve as president.

  Finally, he is an affable white guy from a modest background—an observant Catholic whose idea of religion was doing missionary work in Honduras instead of, like Pence, burning gay rights and reproductive freedom at the stake of theocracy. He can appeal to the center in a way that Pence does not.

  In a bracing contrast to Trump’s botched unveiling of Pence, Clinton’s rollout of Kaine was a ten-strike. Trump spoke about himself; Clinton took pride in reciting Kaine’s qualifications to be president. Trump seemed indifferent to his running mate; Clinton and Kane displayed an easy camaraderie. Trump vanished after introducing Pence; Clinton’s smiles throughout Kaine’s speech underscored how terrific it was.

  In fact, a bit of a revelation. Though his presence is unimposing, he combines a likable, everyman appeal with the sense that he knows his stuff. Even when attacking Trump—which he did to great effect—Kaine’s verve did not obscure a pleasing amiability, a sense that he is quite human and accessible. He explained what he cares about, and why, with unforced passion. He made his family—parents, wife, and kids—come alive. He spoke in Spanish, firing up the crowd. And far from seeming rote, his account of Clinton’s qualities humanized her claim to leadership.

  One could not watch him without appreciating Clinton’s choice, and the care with which she had made it. Which was the biggest contrast of all—Clinton looked like a president; Trump like a petulant fool who rued his most crucial decision.

  And so, unlike the GOP, an upbeat spirit carried the ticket into Philadelphia.

  But on the eve of the convention, vexing fissures suddenly reopened, threatening to roil the proceedings: emails from within the DNC suggesting an anti-Sanders bias; renewed calls for Debbie Wasserman Schultz to go; discontent on the left with Kaine; a divide over superdelegates that lingered from the campaign; a progressive protest march that dramatized these grievances.

  The immediate solution was obvious to all but Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Obama himself was forced to request her resignation, and for a time she insisted on speaking to the delegates—a prescription for further discord—oblivious to the reality that, Ted Cruz aside, supporting actors are not entitled to a divisive soliloquy. But at length she relented under public pressure, and the next challenge for the campaign was to minimize divisions at the convention itself.

  In the meanwhile, a CNN poll showed Trump with a bounce from the GOP convention.258 And the email controversy had so revived the bitterness of Sanders delegates that, in the morning, a gathering booed Sanders himself when he urged support for Clinton. All this made last night’s opening session yet more critical, the speech by Sanders most of all.

  It began badly, with a hard-core cadre of protesters booing speakers from the floor. It took, of all people, comedian Sarah Silverman to lance the anger—a Sanders supporter, she admonished the dissidents “you’re being ridiculous” to considerable effect, and then asserted that she was proud to vote for Clinton. While this did not fully tamp down the outrage, it changed the atmosphere for the speeches to come.

  Here the Democrats had the advantage. The GOP convention was so bare of star power that it relied on Trump’s children to give polished, but curiously impersonal, testaments for their father. But the high-voltage Democrats who took the stage for Clinton were important not only for who they were and what they said, but what they symbolized.

  Cory Booker gave a fiery speech that evoked the one given twelve years before by another young black senator, Barack Obama. The first black first lady, Michelle Obama, summoned a stunning star turn that framed the case fo
r Clinton in terms of her own kids—and everyone else’s. Another woman, Elizabeth Warren, reminded her audience that the alternative to Hillary Clinton is an ignorant misogynist. All acknowledged our challenges; all summoned the hope we can surmount them. In words, but also by their example and their presence, they captured the difference between the parties, and between Clinton and Trump.

  Then, Sanders.

  Unlike Ted Cruz, he came as a rival whose mission was to unify. He did so in full voice. He reminded his adherents of all they had accomplished—not least in moving the party, and Hillary Clinton, in their direction. With clarity and passion, he spelled out how contrary a Trump presidency would be to the spirit he had helped inspire. So when he said that he was proud to stand with Clinton, the cheers drowned out the dissent.

  Dissent remained, and a core of bitterness lingered in the hall. But Bernie Sanders had done all he could. And so for that evening, at least, the tide of anger had subsided a bit, subdued by a spirit more generous and inclusive than anything seen in four angry nights in Cleveland. By November, that may make the difference.

  America Meets Hillary Clinton

  JULY 29, 2016

  Who is Hillary Clinton?

  For twenty-five years now, an infinity of ink and airtime has been expended on that very question, reverberating in cyberspace until it overwhelms us. But the Democratic convention asked us to consider a remarkable proposition: that a woman we thought we knew well—for some, too well—would turn out to be, as president, the best blind date we ever had.

  Getting there was no small thing. The convention opened in the sour spirit of imminent divorce, with the email crisis serving as a last bitter quarrel before someone called a lawyer. Indeed, Sarah Silverman was forced to remind the combatants to remember the kids. Even then, it took the gracious neighbor, Michelle Obama, to invoke what the kids could be, and gruff Uncle Bernie to spell out the horrors awaiting them in the custody of Donald Trump.

  But though Monday ended far better than it began, the sour spirit of schism lingered.

  Then, on Tuesday, this was overcome by hope, humanity, and even, at times, joy.

  The airing of differences—a roll call vote much dreaded in the hall—became a celebration rather than a protest, honoring all that Bernie Sanders and his supporters had achieved. And so when Sanders rose to confirm Hillary Clinton as the nominee, the mood of the convention was more festive than schismatic.

  What followed was a political masterstroke: a sequence of testimonials to Clinton’s qualities, delivered by witnesses that only a churl would shout down.

  The mothers of young black men wrongfully killed pleaded for the lives of other young men—and for the lives of police. Of Clinton, one said: “She isn’t afraid to bear the full force of our anguish. She doesn’t build walls around her heart.”

  A young woman enslaved by three years of human trafficking said: “Before there were laws to identify and protect victims . . . Hillary Clinton was fighting to end modern slavery.” A young man afflicted by dwarfism recalled how a first lady had held him while promising the care he needed and, when she held him again two years later, noticed that his back brace was gone.259

  A cop who had choked down toxic air from 9/11 reprised how Clinton had worked to get health care benefits for affected police and firefighters. A woman horribly burned in those attacks described Clinton’s calls and visits. A congressman who lost a firefighter cousin spoke of how Clinton had helped the city recover—noting, in a lethal aside, that Donald Trump had claimed $150,000 from a fund Clinton had established to help small businesses rebuild.

  In all the political debris surrounding Hillary Clinton, such stories get lost. Which made them new and, for that, more telling.

  So it was time for Bill Clinton.

  This testimonial was, by far, more complicated, inevitably invoking the public trials of their marriage.260 But only he could recall for us the young woman he met well before the country did.

  One doubts that most people knew that the young Hillary Clinton had worked to get disabled kids access to school; or helped register migrant workers in Texas; or investigated segregated academies in the South; or started a legal aid clinic in Arkansas; or worked for the Children’s Defense Fund instead of going to Wall Street. It’s a rare American who knew all these things—perhaps only Bill Clinton. Yet this was what Hillary Clinton had decided to do before anyone else was watching, or judging.

  Suddenly Clinton was a three-dimensional woman, fleshed out by anecdote—a person wholly unlike the Donald Trump we were treated to in Cleveland, a hologram from an Ayn Rand novel.

  Now the former president could confront the bloodless and calculating Hillary Clinton of GOP lore.

  In truth, like most of us, she is many things, and one could regret that years of political warfare have made her the cautious public figure we have come to know. But her husband reminded us not to judge her by the malign shorthand of politics, or even by her own mistakes. The Republican version is, indeed, a “cartoon”; the “real” woman Bill Clinton introduced is real too.

  That woman, he reminded us, had a gritty lifetime of working for change—often against the odds and in the face of determined opposition. “Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard . . . She is the best change maker I’ve ever known.”

  The evening ended with a reminder of one way that is true beyond doubt—a montage of the forty-four presidents who came before her, followed by Clinton herself. Lest we forget, the images said, history had just materialized before our eyes. No one there would object to that.

  And so, on Wednesday, the Democrats offered what the GOP could not: a compelling sequence of expert witnesses who could tell us, from their own experience, what kind of president this historic figure would be—and why electing Donald Trump would be a mistake of historic proportions.

  Former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta—Obama and Clinton’s partner in taking out bin Laden—began the ongoing theme of compare and contrast. Clinton was knowledgeable and able; Trump an irresponsible amateur who, just that day, had asked the Russians to hack us in order to help him become our president.

  Then came Joe Biden. Everyone knew Joe’s story. For forty-five years, he had connected the party to the struggles of ordinary men and women. And he had suffered setbacks of his own, some quite terrible. He had lost part of one family to a tragic accident; helped meld the survivors into another close-knit clan. He had twice run for president and lost, suffering embarrassment along the way. Yet he had persevered, becoming an esteemed and able vice president. And just when he imagined reaching for the prize one last time, the death of his beloved son stole his heart for the chase.

  So he stood where he had imagined speaking for himself, and spoke for Clinton in the way only he can: “If you live in the neighborhoods like the ones Jill and I grew up in, if you worry about your job and getting decent pay, if you worry about your children’s education, if you’re taking care of an elderly parent, then there’s only one—only one—person in this election who will help you . . . That’s Hillary Clinton’s life story.”

  But “[t]hat’s not Donald Trump’s story . . . He is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break . . . He has no clue what makes America great. Actually, he has no clue, period.” Including about our safety: “No major party nominee has ever known less or been less prepared to deal with our national security.”

  When Biden left the stage, he was bathed in warm and poignant applause. For everyone knew this about Joe, too—it was his final star turn in elected office, and he had given Hillary Clinton his all.

  The counterpoint to “middle-class Joe” was a billionaire who is all Trump is not—Michael Bloomberg.

  As an independent, Bloomberg affirmed, he does not adhere to either party. But he knows Hillary Clinton to be capable, caring, and collegial—even when they disagree, she always listens. He does not doubt her fitness to be president.

  Then he tore into
Trump’s only claim to leadership. “New Yorkers know a con when they see one. Truth be told, the richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy.” “I built a business, and I didn’t start it with a million dollar check from my father.” “Trump says he wants to run America like he’s run his business. God help us.” And then he raised perhaps the most crucial issue of the campaign: Trump’s glaring personality disorder. “Let’s elect a sane, competent person,” he implored us—a stinging contrast between Clinton and Trump.261

  Then Everyman appeared again in the person of Tim Kaine—but with a résumé that suggests that he can spot a leader. He got right to it. Evoking his son, a Marine newly deployed overseas, he said, simply, “I trust Hillary Clinton with our son’s life.”

  As for Clinton’s life, he argued that we should judge a political leader by a simple but telling criterion: whether they had a passion for lifting others well before seeking office. Then he drove home the message of Tuesday night—Hillary Clinton has a lifelong passion for helping families and kids.

  In contrast, Kaine told us, “Donald Trump has a passion for himself.” As one pointed example he asked, “Does anyone here . . . believe that Donald Trump paid his fair share of taxes?” Then he catalogued all the ordinary people Trump has victimized in business—an impressive list, to be sure.

  Thus far every speaker had added to the cumulative force of endorsement and indictment. But it was left to Barack Obama—once Hillary Clinton’s rival—to close the evening on her behalf.

  He did so in a way that evoked the best of convention speakers, Ted Kennedy and Mario Cuomo. And, perhaps, surpassed them.

  The best such speeches speak to the best of us. Obama did that.

  His Scotch-Irish grandparents, he recalled,

  didn’t admire braggarts or bullies. They didn’t respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead they valued traits like honesty and hard work. Kindness and courtesy. Humility; responsibility; helping each other out . . . True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids.