In recent weeks we’ve heard from disappointed primary voters on the right and left who plan to sit out the presidential election in November. Some of them say they won’t vote at all. Some promise to vote only for state and local candidates. And some say they will write in a person they prefer for president or maybe put their mark next to a Libertarian or Green Party candidate whose likelihood of being elected to the most powerful position in our country is roughly the same as a snowball’s chance of surviving a day at the equator in a time of global warming.
The concept of not voting for one of the two major party presidential candidates as an act of conscience has caught on with a few Bernie Sanders supporters who have threatened to withhold their votes from Hillary Clinton. I guess they aren’t haunted by the possibility that Ralph Nader’s 2.7 percent of the popular vote in 2000 might have swung the election to George W. Bush.
Even two of our five living ex-presidents find themselves unable to support either of the two major party candidates for president. For those who believe current American politics lack sanity, one almost hidden symptom is the decision of two once-powerful national leaders — George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — to make a point of passing on the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. They seem to be saying the major party candidates are equally unacceptable.
As an independent voter, I’ve tried to imagine how a well-informed ex-president might decide Trump and Clinton are equally unqualified to serve as president. The Bushes cannot have been troubled by the “dynasty problem” that made some of us reluctant to support another Clinton. They might have been put off by some of Hillary Clinton’s policy positions, but what policies could be more alarming than Trump’s proposals on immigration, nuclear weapons and the nature of the presidency itself? More likely, the Bushes have accepted the claim that Clinton is as dishonest as Trump.
But setting aside PolitiFact’s judgment that Clinton scored best on fact-checking among all the presidential candidates in 2016, consider two criticisms of her lack of candor: her decision to use a private email server when she was secretary of state and her claim of “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia.
Clinton has said that her predecessors as secretary of state did the same thing she did with their email, but Condoleeza Rice and Madeleine Albright made little use of email, and Colin Powell, who used a private email account for official business, did not set up a private server at home as Clinton did. In short, Clinton has been misleading in explaining her decision to use a private server. But is it really shocking for a politician who has been attacked personally and scurrilously for decades in many books, articles and films — and most recently by a tax-supported congressional committee — to go out of her way to protect her privacy?
When Clinton was running against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in the spring of 2008, she told of a memory from 12 years earlier, when she and Chelsea ran from their plane to a waiting car because of sniper fire. Film revealed Clinton and her daughter stopped to greet people on their way to the car, and Clinton told CNN she had misspoken.
But streets in Sarajevo were known as “Sniper Alley” with good reason in the 1990s, and snipers were common elsewhere in Bosnia too. It’s likely that anyone arriving in Bosnia in those days thought quite a lot about snipers. Having traveled in Nicaragua when the Contras were fighting a “low-intensity war” against the Sandinista government in the 1980s, I believe time can magnify fearful memories.
In 1988, a teaching colleague and I took a group of Denison University students to Rama, on Nicaragua’s east coast, traveling on a road guarded by armed Sandinistas. In Rama, our group went for a walk along a dusty road that passed our little hotel. A very drunk young man joined us, claiming to be an ex-Contra fighter seeking sanctuary. He stumbled occasionally but sometimes moved with surprising grace. After we were out of sight of the hotel, he revealed that he wanted to fight one of our students, who was dressed like Rambo with a headband, muscle shirt and a three-day beard. When Rambo sensibly refused to fight, the young man, shouting norteamericanos and a crude insult in Spanish, dropped into a crouch and pretended to spray us with machine gun fire.
There is no film to corroborate my account of our experience, although I wrote a bad song about it called “The Rama Trauma.” But I would not be surprised to learn other versions of such encounters are more dramatic than mine. We were all briefly terrified, and the students pressed hard to return immediately to the safety of Managua, even when our guide said it would be very dangerous to travel the Rama road at night.
Maybe Clinton’s understandable distortion of the danger she experienced in Bosnia, which she has acknowledged, and Trump’s prejudiced, insistent recycling of old rumors about Muslims dancing in the street on 9/11, offer the kind of contrast that led Dartmouth graduate Henry Paulson to make a choice some find too difficult. Imagining the consequences of electing a president of the United States who insists on telling polarizing and destructive untruths might have led Paulson, who served as secretary of the treasury under George W. Bush, to say this in an op-ed for The Washington Post: “When it comes to the presidency, I will not vote for Donald Trump. I will not cast a write-in vote. I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world.”
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. His most recent book is Finding Fox Creek: An Oregon Pilgrimage. He can be reached at nichols@denison.edu.