Frank Bruni: Hillary Clinton’s Resounding Mandate

[highplainsdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/hillary-clintons-resounding-mandate.html

I hear two observations about the 2016 presidential race so incessantly that they’re like hit songs at peak ubiquity. The lyrics are seared into my brain.

One is that the Republican and Democratic nominees leave voters with no real choice. That’s nuts, because it implies that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are equally unpalatable and it misunderstands “choice” as profoundly as Trump misreads polls. He and Clinton may not be the political buffet of our dreams. But one entree is perilous, while the other has tired ingredients in a suboptimal sauce. Salmonella or salmon with cucumber and dill: That’s a choice. I know what I’m putting on my plate.

The other observation is that when Clinton is elected — sorry, if Clinton is elected — she’ll have shaky authority and murky marching orders, because she’ll be the beneficiary of an anti-Trump vote, not a pro-Clinton one. This, too, misses the mark. Even if we grant that voters aren’t so much rushing to her as fleeing him, they’re fleeing for specific reasons. They’re expressing particular values. Those reasons and values are her marching orders, and there’s nothing murky about them.

I’d go even further and say that they amount to a mandate, which is this: to safeguard the very America — compassionate, collaborative, decent — that he routinely degrades.

-snip-

[Madam45for2923]

1. This gives Clinton a mandate to make sure our public discourse and laws never treat women as subordi

This gives Clinton a mandate to make sure our public discourse and laws never treat women as subordinate to men.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/hillary-clintons-resounding-mandate.html

Great article!