It's Over

It's over.

I wondered if sharing this Roy Orbison song was too on the nose, but it ran through my head as I forced myself to watch these last two weeks of election coverage. The temptation was too much.
As a presidential candidate, and the likely instigator of what must be the ugliest election I've ever seen, Donald Trump has been able to persist through one perceived miscue and campaign faux pas after another. Now it appears that the meltdown is all but complete. Leaked video footage of Trump making lewd and beyond appalling remarks in a 2005 "Access Hollywood" appearance cemented the floating perception that he was a hopeless misogynist. After a succinct apology in the second presidential debate, at least a half-dozen women have stepped forward to accuse Trump of lewd behavior. His foothold with woman voters, shaky as it already was, has collapsed. Just about every demographic except white males have abandoned Trump as this point, if they were ever on board to begin with. Worse yet, it reinvigorated the national discussion on sexual assault that hurt the Republican Party as a whole in the 2012 election.

One might wonder why these women haven't stepped forward until now. I suppose my response to that is why does timing matter? The women that have accused Trump of sexual harassment have their entire livelihoods at stake; the man being accused could let these accusations bounce off like Teflon. The man is a multi-millionaire and a presidential candidate, after all. There are parallels here to the downfall of comedian Bill Cosby; where the sitcom star was a serial date-rapist, Trump has a history of inappropriately touching fully conscious women. There are vast differences, overly simplified in some people's eyes, but both are appalling and reprehensible behaviors regardless.

Regardless of your opinion of Sec. Hillary Clinton --and yes, she has plenty of detractors-- we have to accept that she will be the next President of the United States. Her campaign has been at times uninspiring and perhaps even clumsy, but it never sank to the incompetence, bloviating, and pandering of the Trump campaign. (I will spare you the "Pretty Woman" reference.) It will not be a canonization or a coronation, but a reminder that most of the time, the bad guy loses.

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