THERE is a strong argument that US politics is seriously lost. Except for their die-hard supporters caught up in the razzmatazz and ballyhoo that turns elections into some sort of sporting contest, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least appetizing candidates ever thrown up by a political system that has lost its bearings. And sadly for American voters, it they want to stop being lost and find their way, Clinton and Trump are not the place the start. As Election Day approaches, the polls are showing that Trump is once again closing on his Democrat rival. Time and again, the pollsters were completely wrong when he was campaigning for the Republican nomination. They would well be wrong now. Figuring out what is happening, is not too difficult. The Trump campaign is not narrowing the gap, it is the Clinton campaign is shrinking its lead. Trump's Islamophobic, sexist, racist bigotry is well known. There hardly seems any thing worse that can be revealed against this deeply flawed personality. But Clinton's campaign always had a thin veneer of respectability which went with her position as the pre-eminent Establishment candidate. No leading Democrats have disowned her because of her lies and duplicity, which suggests of course that this is what the Establishment expects of its creatures. It is even closing ranks around the Clinton email scandal. The origin of these albatross that has come to hang around Clinton's neck was simple enough. For what she took to be efficiency, when she became secretary of state, which bypassed Sate Department secure communications and ran her own email server. Besides breaking the rules, this was as unwise as it was insecure. But it was not this arrangement that has damaged Clinton but the way in which she has outright denied and then partially admitted and then confessed some more of what she had done. And the nature of some of these insecure mails was highly explosive and may well have been read by foreign hackers. At no point did Clinton stand front and center and admit to the full extent of the error she had made. This is indeed just not her way. She has flip-flopped on a range of policies from abortion to gay marriage but insists that she has always been consistent. And in a way, she has indeed shown a remarkable consistency. She was regularly failed to answer straight questions but rather answered another question altogether. In this, she is the archetypical politician. By contrast Trump rarely seems to equivocate or follow the political line developed for him by his team. His motor mouth tells it as it is in his prejudiced head and many moderate Americans are appalled. But maybe there is also a grudging admiration for someone who does not seek to conceal his gross opinions. At least, compared with tricky Clinton, Trump appears to be straightforward, even though he wobbled over revealing his tax affairs. If Trump wins the White House it will be because voters cannot stomach the untrustworthy Clinton. And if it is President Trump, US politics will have been stood on its head, and US international relations with them. After all the primaries and hustings, American voters have ended up with a choice between two of the least-regarded candidates in their political history. The system has played them false.
