The next president will serve only one term

If Trump would make a disappointing President, then Clinton has already made a disappointing candidate. The fact that she is behind in some polls to a walking political biohazard, this close to election day, cannot just be excused by smearing US voters as sexist. At times she has been a weak candidate whose most compelling feature has been that she would be the first woman president, an aspect of her campaign which ought to be near-irrelevant. Some forty-four per cent of Clinton’s supporters say their vote is against Trump rather than a vote for her. Another second-rate Clinton campaign was challenged too easily, first by the implausible Bernie Sanders and then by the ludicrous Donald Trump.

As she showed in 2008 when she was the frontrunner against Obama, she is not a closer. She has made poor choices, like tethering herself to the compromised Huma Abedin, and despite fantastic debate performances against Trump, she has failed to knock him out of the race. Republicans, with the worst candidate conceivable, have run her too close for comfort. She’s no Obama, and President Clinton would enter the White House with horrific trust/likeability ratings. The reality is that the Clintons have been in the public eye for too long, upset too many people, and in four years of office Clinton is more likely to make that position worse than she is to improve it, because government involves compromise. If presidential campaigns reveal character, then Clinton’s character has been shown to be formidable, but still not particularly appealing to millions of Americans.

If the Republican party can screw their heads on to select a younger, talented candidate who won’t offend sections of the base and can reach out to black and Hispanic American voters, Hillary Clinton should be easily dislodged from the White House. The Republican Party has a solid core of dependable voters prepared to stick through even the most difficult times. Second-term presidents are not as common as they might seem today. Only about a third of presidents in the past two centuries were successfully re-elected.