FBI IS THE WEINER OF THIS ELECTION

We probably should have seen this coming, but the quadrennial dialectic over our country’s governance, has devolved into a shambles that makes a middle school food fight look profound. Let’s review:

Four years ago this week, a divided nation, torn between giving a second term to President Barack Obama or replacing him with Mitt Romney, was transfixed on the question of whether tax cuts scheduled to expire should be renewed. Four years earlier, the closing argument between Obama and John McCain was how to best recover from the country’s economic collapse. And four years before that, when John Kerry ran against President George W. Bush, the focus was on the Iraq War – was it a mission of folly or an essential predicate for stability in the Middle East?

And now? Forget about tax policy, job creation or wealth redistribution. The endgame for this 2016 presidential campaign has us slowly twisting. . .no, make that sinking, in a quagmire of pussy and Weiner. Up until Friday afternoon, Donald Trump was having another bad week. On Thursday, Miss Finland of 2006 became the twelfth woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, in effect adding to the validation of his “Access Hollywood” claims that he uses his star power to forcibly kiss women and/or grab their private parts. She said Trump squeezed her rear end while she and Miss Australia, Miss Puerto Rico and Miss Columbia posed for a picture. And that is as close as his campaign got to a discussion of foreign affairs this week.

By Friday, however, The Donald was suddenly a born-again believer in the sanctity of U.S. elections and his chances of securing the presidency. That’s because the FBI supposedly stumbled upon some Hillary Clinton related emails while conducting an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s exchange of sexually oriented texts with a 15-year-old girl. Or, as the New York Post headline put it: “Stroking Gun”, with a kicker of “Dickileaks: FBI Reopens Email Case”.

The unfortunately named Weiner, of course, is the now the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s top aides. The FBI had subpoenaed his laptop in search of underage sexting evidence and came across emails that might be related to Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state. From a strictly factual matter, of course, the FBI did not say it was “reopening” the closed investigation of Clinton’s email. Nor did it say that it found any emails that it had not already reviewed, or even if any of them came from candidate Clinton. But none of that matters much when you are Donald Trump and trying desperately to move the conversation away from the growing parade of women he allegedly groped, fondled, squeezed and/or forcibly kissed.

“This is bigger than Watergate,” the always hyperbolic Trump said yesterday. “This changes everything.” Actually, it changes absolutely nothing. It is merely one more piece of bizarre absurdity in a campaign jammed packed with them. The most important byproduct of a national election is the conversation it creates about the kind of country we want. How people should be taxed, corporations regulated, students educated, justice distributed. There has been nothing resembling a conversation this year. Just shouting: “Lock her up!” “Build the wall.” “Nasty woman.”

The only serious policy positions in this campaign have come from the Clinton camp because, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton has spent her political life as a policy wonk. She has always been more comfortable in the deep weeds of complicated issues than pressing the flesh on a rope line. But you wouldn’t know much about her positions unless you visited her website. Trump has ignored public policy altogether, relying instead on simplistic but dangerous solutions to complicated problems: “build the wall”, “keep Muslims out”, “America first”. That lack of substantive symmetry has made serious policy conversation impossible. Saying “wrong” seven times in one debate does not qualify as a national conversation.

In lieu of substance, campaign media coverage has focused, understandably, on the elephant in the room. That would be Trump and all of the off-the-wall stuff he says and does, whether it is promoting one of his hotels, introducing women who claim Bill Clinton groped them 30 years ago or repeatedly calling Hillary “crooked” or “corrupt” without a scintilla of substantiation. As soon as the FBI director mentioned the existence of Clinton emails, Trump immediately characterized his opponent as a modern day Lizzie Borden.

Meanwhile this week, it was just another day on the Trump rally circuit. According to the Raleigh News Observer, a young black man, a Trump supporter, wandered up to the stage of the Kinston, NC get-together, intending to hand his candidate a note containing some tips on how he could appeal to more African Americans. A black face stands out in the whiteness of Trump Land. Security was called and they hauled the man away, presumably for being black at a Trump rally, while The Donald goaded him with accusations of being a paid disrupter.

When the Weiner Gate dust finally settles, we will be right back where we always have been: the worst excuse for a presidential campaign in the country’s history. And a choice between a razor sharp woman who knows policy inside and out, but has made her share of mistakes over the years, and a racist buffoon who abuses women and has never developed a serious public policy position in his life. In my book, that’s an easy decision – even if those emails spell out top state secrets in Haikou.