Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race
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They knew these values weren’t reserved for one race . . . They knew these values were exactly what drew immigrants here, and they believed that the children of those immigrants were just as American as their own . . . America has changed over the years. But these values my grandparents taught me—they haven’t gone anywhere. They are as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, and every faith. They live on in each of us.
The best such speeches link these qualities to the party’s nominee. Obama did that:
That’s the America I know. And there is only one candidate in this race who believes in that future, and has devoted her life to it; a mother and grandmother who’d do anything to help our children thrive; a leader with real plans to break down barriers, blast through glass ceilings, and widen the circle of opportunity to every single American . . . And no matter how daunting the odds; no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits.
That’s the Hillary I know. That’s the Hillary I’ve come to admire. And that’s why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America—not me, not Bill, no one.
The best such speeches contrast the nominee with her opponent. Obama did that, too—with devastating irony.262
And then there’s Donald Trump. He’s not really a plans guy. Not really a facts guy, either. He calls himself a business guy, which is true, but I have to say, I know plenty of businessmen and women who achieve success without leaving a trail of lawsuits, and unpaid workers, and people feeling like they got cheated.
He took on not just Trump, but Trumpism:
He’s just offering slogans, and he’s offering fear. He’s betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election . . . [H]e’s selling the American people short. We are not a fragile or frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order. We don’t look to be ruled . . .
America has never been about what one person says he’ll do for us. It’s always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, ultimately enduring work of self-government.
And then came an arrow to the heart of Trumpism:
Anyone who threatens our values, whether Fascist or Communist or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
But there was yet more, for he ended by placing his hopes for America in Clinton’s hands:
Time and again, you’ve picked me up. I hope, sometimes, I’ve picked you up, too. Tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me . . . This year, in this election, I’m asking you to join me—reject cynicism, reject fear, to summon what’s best in us; to elect Hillary Clinton as the next president of United States, and show the world we still believe in the promise of this great nation.
Once again, we had seen the very best of Barack Obama on center stage—the easy command, the interplay of wit and a deep seriousness, the incandescent smile, the soaring appeal to hope over fear. And then a classic moment of political theater—suddenly Hillary Clinton appeared beside him.
The place erupted. All that was left—all that now mattered—was Clinton’s acceptance speech on Thursday evening.
Or so one thought. On Thursday Khizr Khan—a Muslim immigrant whose army officer son had been killed in Iraq—provided one of the most stunning moments of any convention in recent memory.
With his wife beside him dressed in traditional Muslim garb, Khan spoke movingly of their grief and loss. Then he rebuked Donald Trump for betraying all his son had died for:
“Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution?” Pulling out his own pocket edition, he said, “I will gladly lend you my copy.”
Asking Trump if he had ever visited Arlington National Cemetery, he instructed: “Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.
“You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”
The quiet power of that statement still lingered in the air when it was time for Clinton to speak.263
Even by the harrowing standards of her public career, this was a daunting challenge. In coming to her aid so powerfully, Obama had set the bar sky-high—while a serviceable public speaker, by her own reckoning she lacks the rhetorical gifts of the last two Democratic presidents.
More difficult, perhaps, was to embody the human and caring Hillary Clinton summoned by the last three nights, and yet capture the historic moment with a resolve that reassured her fretful and suspicious countrymen in a fractious time. All that, and still more: the delegates had passed through conflict to a communal sense of promise it was now her purpose to sustain.
It was of much benefit, then, that she was introduced by a final witness to her life, her own daughter.
Since childhood, Chelsea Clinton had lived in her parents’ harsh spotlight. At times, this must have felt unendurable. But she had endured it, and more, and now this served her mother well.
With ease and warmth, Chelsea spoke of “my wonderful, thoughtful, hilarious mother,” telling anecdotes of Clinton’s deep pleasure and engagement in being a mother and grandmother. A political commonplace, perhaps. But it was obvious that, unlike Trump’s kids, Chelsea actually knew her mother as a parent, because her mother had actually been one. And done it well.264
At last it was Clinton’s turn.
She met the moment with an air of confidence. And, more than usual, she spoke of what lies beneath her sometimes opaque surface: “The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part. I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.”
But she, too, had a story—a modest family, a mother who was abandoned by her parents as a young girl, whose first grade teacher saw that she had nothing to eat, and brought extra food to share. “The lesson she passed on to me years later stuck with me: no one gets through life alone.”
She remembered that, Clinton told the delegates, when she met a young girl in a wheelchair on the back porch of her house, prevented by her disability from attending school. “I couldn’t stop thinking of my mother and what she went through as a child. It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough.”
Thus her work with the Children’s Defense Fund to ensure that kids with disabilities have the right to go to school. “But how do you make an idea like that real?” she asked rhetorically. “You do it step by step, year by year.”
That experience, she asserted, underlies her reputation as a bit of a grind: “I sweat the details of policy. Because it is not just a detail if it’s your kid, if it’s your family. It’s a big deal. And it should be a big deal to your president.”265
She did not need to mention Donald Trump.
Instead she spoke of her plans to make the lives of Americans better. Unlike Trump, she has a lot of them. Appointing justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights. Fighting climate change, and creating clean energy jobs. Comprehensive immigration reform to grow the economy and keep families together. Profit-sharing for workers.
Raising the minimum wage to a living wage. Equal pay for women. Investing in infrastructure. Making college affordable for all. Education and job retraining to help those displaced by the global economy. Easing credit for small businesses.
And what of ISIS? As president, she promised, she would strike their sanctuaries from the air, support local forces on the ground, and strengthen our intelligence to prevent attacks at home. “It won’t be easy or quick,” she allowed, “but make no mistake—we will prevail.”
Here, at last, she got to Trump. Quoting him to lethal effect—“I know more about ISIS than the generals do”—she told him, “No, Donald, you don’t.”
Then she went to work disqualifying him as commander in chief: “Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he’s gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he’s challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally.
“Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”266
Nor did she neglect Trump’s hypocrisy. “Please explain to me what part of America First leads him to make Trump ties in China, not Colorado. Trump suits in Mexico, not Michigan. Trump furniture in Turkey, not Ohio. Trump picture frames in India, not Wisconsin.
“Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again—well, he can start by actually making things in America again.”
But then Trump, she argued forcefully, is antithetical to the spirit of America itself: “Americans don’t say ‘I alone can fix it.’ . . . He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.”
As for Clinton herself, she quoted her mother’s Methodist credo: “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.” By the testament of others, spelled out in the four nights of the convention, her public career was built on such an effort.
Then the speech was over, and history made. Smiling, for long minutes Clinton basked in the celebration—the cheers and tears and balloons falling—and also, it seemed, the relief and satisfaction of a job well done.
By most observers’ reckonings, it was. The speech lacked Obama’s eloquence—that is not her gift. But it did its work, and so did the convention. The idealistic young woman Americans had met at last now lived within the battle-tested candidate who, perhaps, they finally knew a little better.
Advantage Hillary Clinton.
PART IV
Russian Hackers, a Media Awakening, Videotapes, Charges of Groping, Claims of Voter Fraud, Three Debates, a Dogged Democrat, and a GOP Candidate Cracking Up Until an FBI Director Throws Him a Lifeline
By August 2016 the contagion was spreading, and the fever swamp was consuming us all.
The storylines were as compelling as they were heretofore unimaginable. It was no surprise that Barack Obama came from the wings to center stage, using all of his gifts to boost Hillary Clinton and savage Donald Trump. But then a confluence of events gave Michelle Obama one of the single most riveting moments of the campaign—a denunciation of Donald Trump unprecedented for any first lady, one which spoke to any woman who had ever been harassed or assaulted by a man.
With grit and doggedness, Hillary Clinton endured fresh questions about her emails and the Clinton Foundation while, remarkably, the Russian government siphoned stolen emails through WikiLeaks in an effort to bring her down. Her antagonist, Donald Trump, accused her of being corrupt, inept, sickly, and, quite possibly, brain-damaged—not to mention calling her an enabler of her husband’s own behaviors.
Yet she pushed on with a rare determination that masked, one sensed, a steely anger. Under pressure, her mettle became more obvious, her stability and confidence ever more reassuring. But by the time of the first debate, the mutual loathing between the two candidates was palpable.
As ever, the agent of contagion was Trump. So erratic was his behavior that serious journalists begin questioning his mental stability—a break with tradition, if not a breach of journalistic decorum. So incessant were his lies that sober institutions like the New York Times began calling them out. And so rabid were his followers that they viewed any criticism as part of a conspiracy against Trump—and them—perpetrated by worldwide elites.
No matter what, they believed him. They believed him when he claimed that America was flooded with ISIS operatives from Syria; that thousands of illegal aliens were poised to vote against him; that statistically non-existent voter fraud was rampant; that America’s electoral machinery was rigged. They believed his incredible denials when a growing list of women accused him of sexual predation. And when he departed from all tradition by refusing to commit to honoring the election results, they applauded.
Trump was no longer running a campaign—he was dividing the country by driving a stake through the heart of our civic traditions. A candidacy that began as farce was ending as tragedy, with an outcome—and a cost—as yet unknown.
Then, at the eleventh hour—eleven days prior to the election—FBI director James Comey gave Trump a priceless deus ex machina.
And everything changed.
Coming This Fall
The Sublime Revenge of Barack Obama
AUGUST 9, 2016
Most presidential campaigns are freighted with drama: colliding ambitions, revelations of character, pivotal moments that arrive without warning. But the drama of 2016 involves much more than a clash of two candidates. For it also turns on the ideals and ambitions of America’s first black president, and how the trials of his tenure—indeed, of his life—have permeated not only the national consciousness, but his own soul.
True, much of the resolve Barack Obama will bring to electing Hillary Clinton is about legacy. But it is also about the kind of man he is, and what he wants this country to be. And that is inexorably intertwined with the entirely different man who is Donald Trump.267
First, legacy.
It is not my purpose here to make the historic case for Obama’s presidency. But his accomplishments bear at least some resemblance to those of Franklin Roosevelt in the early days of the New Deal, or of Lyndon Johnson before he crashed and burned in Vietnam.
He ameliorated the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He saved the auto industry. He extended health care to millions of Americans. He put two capable and progressive women on the Supreme Court. And he did so in the face of unprecedented partisanship and polarization.
In the area of foreign policy and national security, he took out bin Laden and decimated Al-Qaeda. He negotiated the Iran deal, and opened a new relationship to Cuba—controversial acts that, in the end, will likely be vindicated by history. And he helped design and negotiate an international treaty to combat climate change.
It is in foreign policy, as well, that the principal criticisms of his tenure lie. It can be argued that he left Iraq too soon, entered Libya too precipitously, and abandoned his red line in Syria for too little. But it is surely true that in the Middle East the consequences of action or inaction are as difficult to forecast as they are severe.
In the end, there is little doubt that history will view Barack Obama as a very consequential president—perhaps even, some may argue, a great one.268
That verdict lies ahead. More salient, for now, is to consider what kind of man he is.
I can’t claim to know him—I don’t. But four years before he became president I got at least some insight, which the trials of his presidency bore out.
The occasion was the morning after his breakthrough convention speech in 2004—overnight, it seemed, he had become a prominent and potentially unique national figure. The circumstances of our meeting aren’t important. But for roughly forty-five minutes, my wife, Nancy, and I visited with him alone.
For a number of reasons, he made a deep impression on us both. Part of this involved the difference between Obama and the numerous other political leaders I’ve known over time—not to mention Donald Trump as all of us have come to know him.
Our conversation was just that—a genuine conversation. He listened closely, attentive to nuance. It became obvious that Obama had a deep curiosity, and knew great deal about a great many things. But where another politician might work overtime to show his knowledge of whatever most concerned you, more striking were his questions and how much he took in.
My concerns were those of a more or less typical white progressive—no surprise, then, that a smart guy like Barack Obama had mastered those subjects. But then he began probing Nancy’s work as an educational consultant in underdeveloped countries—a subject about which most Americans, in
cluding our politicians, know even less than they imagine.
Not Obama. Again, he asked great questions. More surprising, it gradually became apparent that he knew quite a bit about the context for Nancy’s efforts. This, then, was not a matter of professional necessity, but genuine curiosity.
With this came a nice sense of detachment from self. Later on that summer, we went to a fund-raiser for his Senate campaign. Based on our prior acquaintance, the three of us were having an amiable and nonpolitical conversation when the representative of a women’s group shouldered us aside, claiming the space to assure Obama that her group had been pivotal to his rise.
As we watched, Obama responded with polite appreciation. At length the woman departed. With mock gravity, Nancy put a hand on Obama’s shoulder and said, “For my part, Senator, I want to assure you that I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with your success.”
Many a candidate would squirm at such an irony. Obama grinned, then broke up altogether, eyes alight with real amusement. Here was a politician who got the joke—including his role in it.
Needless to say, Donald Trump never would.
But the awareness of self and surroundings was surely bred in Barack Obama from early on. To appreciate this, one need not know him—one need simply pause to imagine his life, and what went into becoming the man who became our forty-fourth president.
Imagine being a multiracial kid whose Kenyan father abandoned him young. A kid whose peripatetic mother moved him to Indonesia to marry her Asian second husband before divorcing him. A kid returned to a distant outpost of America, Hawaii, to be largely raised by his white grandparents. A kid separated from the history and heritage of the African Americans with whom America would group him. A kid who knew that every time he stepped into a room, others would see him as a different version of “the other.”