′Love Trumps Hate’ has become one of Hillary Clinton’s official campaign slogans. It’s a clunky pun but you get the point. Hillary stands for love — i.e progressive global values, equality, that sort of thing. Donald Trump represents white nationalism, bigotry, all the nasty stuff. Love is good; hate is bad. Trump must be trumped, so that history can keep marching in the right direction.
The trouble is, Americans don’t love Clinton. The feeling they have for her tends more towards hate, actually. Clinton’s ‘favourability ratings’ are famously bad. Between 30 and 40 per cent of Americans say they have a ‘highly unfavourable’ opinion of her. To give you a sense of how woeful that is for an aspiring leader of the free world, Barry Goldwater (the Republican candidate in 1964) and George McGovern (the Democrat in 1972), who are usually cited as the most disastrous presidential nominees of all time, scored 20 and 26 per cent respectively. If she wins on 8 November, Clinton will be the most disliked president-elect ever. And that is a small ‘if’, thanks to the epic anti-popularity of Trump (he scores a whopping 44 per cent on the unfavourableometer) and the self-destructing beast that is the Republican party in 2016.
Some people might take perverse comfort in the fact that, whether it is Trump or Clinton, a widely reviled figure is about to become the most powerful human on the planet. It suggests that elections are not always mere popularity contests; almost the opposite, in this case. But most of the world is a little disturbed. What does it say about the future of civilisation that the West’s foremost nation is about to elect a leader it can’t bear?
Clinton’s candidacy has enjoyed a reasonably good summer.
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