Clinton contra Trump: el estado de la cuestión a día de hoy

Tras la celebración de las Convenciones Republicana y Demócrata, respectivamente, las perspectivas para Hillary Clinton y Donald Trump son las siguientes, según, por ejemplo, la media de las encuestas que recoge Pollster.com para el Huffington Post:

1) En primer lugar, cualquier efecto positivo que pudiera haber tenido la Convención Republicana parece haberse disipado por completo para Donald Trump, que en estos momentos parece tener un apoyo que ronda el 40% (recordemos que Mitt Romney, hace cuatro años, obtuvo el 47% de los votos, e incluso John McCain obtuvo un 45,5%).

¿Qué es lo que está llevando a Donald Trump a una expectativa de voto tan baja? Fundamentalmente tres factores:

- El propio comportamiento del candidato, que de manera rutinaria provoca controversias que dinamitan su posición ante los electores indecisos. Quizá la más llamativa de las últimas semanas ha sido la pelea que ha mantenido a través de los medios con la familia de Humayun Khan, un soldado musulmán americano fallecido en Irak cuyos padres aparecieron en la Convención Demócrata y atacaron a Trump por sus planes de impedir la entrada a cualquier musulmán en Estados Unidos. Semejante medida, además de manifiestamente racista, es descaradamente inconstitucional (la Primera Enmienda de la Constitución es manifiestamente clara en ese sentido, y el padre de Humayun, de hecho, blandió una Constitución durante su discurso). Por otra parte, no hay mejor manera de enfrentarse a la opinión pública norteamericana que ofender a la familia de un soldado muerto en acto de servicio.

- Ligado íntimamente a lo anterior, el hecho de que diversos miembros del Partido Republicano están manifestando abiertamente su negativa a votar por Donald Trump e incluso su disposición a votar por Hillary Clinton. Richard Hanna, congresista por Nueva York, ha manifestado que votará por Hillary Clinton (aunque se retira este año, por lo que no tiene nada que temer de sus electores). Adam Kinziger, congresista por Illinois, ha manifestado que no votará por ninguno de los dos. Meg Whitman, que fue la candidata republicana al Senado por California en 2010, ha manifestado que no sólo votará a Hillary, sino que hará campaña por ella.

Por su parte, Trump ha manifestado claramente que no apoya a algunos de los candidatos republicanos a la reelección este año: John McCain, que fue el candidato a la presidencia en 2008 y que se enfrenta a una primaria potencialmente competitiva este 30 de agosto, no ha conseguido que Trump le apoye (de hecho, ya tuvieron un rifirafe monumental al principio de estas presidenciales cuando Trump dijo que McCain no era un héroe por haberse dejado capturar por los norvietnamitas en los años 70).

- La combinación de estos dos factores es muy importante en un sentido concreto, que invoca Jonathan Bernstein en este excelente artículo suyo de hoy mismo: aunque la mayoría de los votantes republicanos votarán acríticamente a su candidato en noviembre, los republicanos más moderados o menos partidistas han de ser persuadidos, y el mecanismo de persuasión más efectivo es el posicionamiento favorable de su senador y/o congresista. Ausente dicho apoyo a Trump, un votante republicano dudoso se cuestionará su voto al magnate inmobiliario (¿por qué tengo que apoyar a Trump si mi gobernador/senador/congresista/figura pública que respeto republicana no le apoya?). Aquí se encuentra el fundamento para una auténtica hemorragia de votos para Donald Trump.

2) Por su parte, Hillary Clinton está ahora en la cúspide del efecto favorable de la Convención Demócrata. Veremos si en los próximos días ese efecto se disipa o, ayudada por los errores no forzados de Donald Trump, se mantiene. Por una parte, el 47% que aproximadamente le dan las encuestas está lejos del 51% que obtuvo Obama hace cuatro años, pero no es menos cierto que el propio Obama, tal día como hoy hace cuatro años, estaba por debajo de esa marca (y Romney estaba cuatro puntos por encima). Clinton aspira a producir en los próximos tres meses un efecto de consolidación similar al que logró Obama en 2012. Para ello tiene una ventaja y un lastre: la ventaja es el hecho de que Obama es, a día de hoy, un presidente razonablemente popular:
La desventaja es que ella misma es más bien impopular:
Aunque eso no es nada comparado con la impopularidad de Donald Trump:
En cualquier caso, el objetivo de Hillary Clinton en las próximas semanas es consolidar la ventaja que mantiene respecto de Donald Trump, ir captando a los demócratas que apoyan a Obama pero todavía no están persuadidos de apoyarla a ella, a los seguidores más recalcitrantes de Bernie Sanders, que la consideran demasiado centrista, y continuar con la campaña silenciosa que está manteniendo para captar a votantes republicanos moderados aterrorizados por la xenofobia e incompetencia general de Donald Trump. Como se puede ver, el segundo y el tercer objetivo son difícilmente compatibles, así que habrá que ver como consigue Hillary Clinton captar al centro y a la izquierda a la vez.

In praise of Hillary Clinton

Hillary Rodham Clinton is now the first female candidate in the history of the United States. This is objectively a bigger milestone than the nomination eight years ago of Barack Obama, who might have been black, but was also a man, and thus belonging to the same gender that has held the Presidency since 1789.

How come then, that it is difficult to perceive the same kind of enthusiasm that the U.S. (and even the world) held eight years ago when Obama was nominated?

It is true, of course, that Hillary Clinton is a known commodity. She has been in the national radar since the summer of 1992, nearly a quarter-century ago.

She was an unusual First Lady, in the sense that she did try hard (although ultimately unsucccessfully) to break the floral-arrangements mold of that role (even Michelle Obama, who is a superqualified professional, has had to center on issues like child obesity and healthy eating, worthy, no doubt, but not exactly challenging for a woman of her intelligence and poise).

She endured a cad of a husband (good President, but seriously underwhelming as a life partner) with grace and dignity, which has somehow been transformed by her enemies into heartless ambition to reach the Presidency, as if she endured her husband's infidelities because of the sole goal of becoming President decades later. It is almost as if her critics cannot conceive of a love that is able to transcend one's partners infidelities (it happens every day in real life).

She has been a non-decorative First Lady of Arkansas for twelve years, a non-decorative First Lady of the United States for eight years, a Senator representing New York for eight years, Secretary of State for another four years. She is obviously qualified for the job.

As a politician, she has, of course, weaknesses: she voted for the Iraq war in 2003, which in hindsight looks like an obvious mistake (but one in which half of her fellow Democratic Senators concurred, and one in which she was thoroughly misled by the Bush administration). The e-mail business as Secretary of State shows, in my opinion, the limitations of a 62-year-old person in 2009 regarding technological issues rather than some cavalier attitude towards national security.

It is true that she seems to belong to the old school of showing American strength through military force rather than through diplomatic means, and it is absolutely true that she is an uninspiring public speaker, plodding and fake-sounding, specially after eight years of probably one of the great public presidential orators in Barack Obama.

However, the fact of the matter is that everyone who has actually worked with her in the last forty years says she is dedicated, hard-working, exceptionally well-prepared, level-headed, and with a good sense of humour. And let's be sincere: speechifying is a good asset for a President, but hardly the main core of the job, which is being the top administrator of the United States, a task that is mostly boring and involves hard work (in other ways, a task that suits Hillary Clinton wonderfully).

She probably will be an average-to-good President, somewhere between George H.W.Bush and her own husband (full disclosure: I think she will be a bit worse than Obama, who has all her good qualities, plus being a good communicator).

How come then she is not running thirty points ahead of Donald Trump, a man who has no experience whatsoever, is a racist demagogue who routinely insults Muslims, Latinos and minorities in general, who shows his breathtaking ignorance and lack of temperament to be trusted with the nuclear codes on a daily basis?

We are hearing lots of explanations about it: the fact that Donald Trump speaks to a set of voters (white working class with "racial resentment" issues) who feel their wages are stagnant in the last half century (they are, and that is their strongest point) and that they have been disenfranchised (specially since the election of a black president... hmmmm), the fact that hardening polarization means that there are not many voters in the middle, etc.

But let's just talk about the big elephant in the room, which is sheer, unadulterated ol' boy sexism: a substantial part of the American commentariat and of the American public seems to have issues with having a female Commander-in-Chief.

This, of course, will not be a surprise to any professional woman who has had to juggle the problems which being a mother, a wife and a worker involve. The fact of the matter is and remains that professional women are subject to much stricter scrutiny than professional men: they have to work harder and they receive less accolades from their colleagues and less money from their bosses.

Things get even worse when they try to balance their professional lives with their marriages. And they get even worser (I know I am inventing a word here) when they aim to become more successful than their partners (particularly, when they earn more money than them or try to get a more important position).

The fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton is resented by a substantial amount of men (and women!!!) because of her trying to achieve something that up until now had only been reserved for men. A substantial amount of Trump voters are people who just think, deep in their hearts, that a woman is being too "uppity" by trying to become President (the very same people, by the way, that thought eight years ago that a black guy was being too "uppity" by trying to become President).

We keep hearing that Trump voters have legitimate concerns (I actually think they do, on a strict economic basis). But they have chosen a mightily wrong vessel to channel them. It would be one thing if the Republican Party had a qualified white man as their nominee against Hillary Clinton (the Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz debacle shows that even a very conservative Latino was too much to ask for). But having chosen Trump, the high and even the low moral ground has been ceded. Mitt Romney was mocked four years ago for looking "like the guy that fired you from your job". Donald Trump became well-known for a TV show whose catchphrase was "You're fired!"

Hillary Clinton, because of her accomplishments in nearly forty years of public life, would be a strong candidate for the Presidency in any case. That she is a woman who has juggled her profession, her marriage and her motherhood quite successfully in the last fourty years, if anything, should be a plus, not a detriment. And her thrice-married sexist opponent, who changes wives when they begin to age, grades women on a regular basis for their looks ("she is not a 10" he will say) is literally the polar opposite of her. With all her defects, she embodies an America worth aiming to: a more equal America. Trump does not want to make America great again; he wants America to go backwards.