2016 August 22^nd

If these two presidential candidates are, either of them, as inept in office as they are in their campaigns, the government of this country will be in desperate trouble. Consider Hillary Clinton, our former Secretary of State. She pushes for transparency but is reluctant to hold a full-blown press conference. She keeps insisting that she answers questions from the press all the time, but these questions are asked on the fly and are hardly a substitute for the real thing.

Her emails and their disposition continue to bedevil her. She has recently suggested that no less a figure than General Colin Powell had a hand in her decision to use a private email server. He is not willing to agree that he did that at all, or at least not to the extent that Clinton has suggested he did. General Powell is a revered figure in this country and probably could have been elected President…and probably still could be, particularly if he were running today. If Clinton wanted to tell us that General Powell had made suggestions about how she handled her emails why didn’t she ask him beforehand if she could reference his opinion about how to deal with them. That would have eliminated another attack on her honesty. How much intelligence would that have taken?

(As an aside here it might be noted that over the four years of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State about 62,320 emails were sent or received by her office. That comes to over 40 emails a day seven days a week for four years. Does anyone believe that she, herself, composed the majority of those?)

Then we have the esteemed Kellyanne Conway who is supposed to be the new savior of the Trump campaign. No presidential campaign in the country’s history has been in more need of a savior. Conway’s efforts so far have not helped. She has had Trump delivering a message to African-Americans in the 95 percent white suburb of Dimondale Michigan instead of in the much more diverse, and disastrously served, city of Flint. He has talked to no black churches, talked to no black groups like the NAACP or the Urban League. You can’t get the votes of people you are not willing to talk to.

An important issue for Trump is the 11 million people illegally in this country, many with children who were born here and are thus citizens. Trump has claimed that he will round up these people and send them back where they came from. For many reasons this claim is absurd on its face.

Trump has recently held a “round table” of Hispanic citizens to listen to suggestions about how this problem might be handled. The implication seems to be that perhaps someone has explained to Trump that his original deportation plan is ridiculous. His new savior Kellyanne Conway was asked about what Trump was planning now. Her answer was that the immigrant issue was “to be decided.” Thursday was to have been the big immigration speech but just today we are told that the immigration speech has been cancelled.

However much Kellyanne is being paid it is nowhere near enough.