Donald Trump, September 2016. Steve Helber/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.I was one of the original ‘boys on the bus’. In 1964, 1968 and 1972, I endured the appalling regime of 4am baggage calls to leave hotels in almost every state of the Union, oceans of indifferent coffee, fast food, and exhausted and exhausting candidates endlessly repeating ‘the speech’. My reward was an unparalleled Grand Tour of all the United States (except only North Dakota and Alaska) and face time with such legendary heroes of the American political pantheon as Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy.
For a veteran of those critical years, Monday’s first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not just anticlimax and disappointment: it is unimaginable. Not that the candidates I followed more than 50 years ago were either politically or personally impeccable. But they were serious people, serious politicians painting more or less solid pictures of how they wanted their country to be and to behave, accepting in greater or lesser measure a responsibility to all their fellow citizens.
Two very different politicians will meet on Monday. Hillary Clinton, to be sure, stands closer to the traditional candidates of a past that was certainly not golden. She has real personal credentials, achievements, policy positions, most of which she stands by, even if she is more than a little hubristic and embarrassingly impressed by money. Symbolically, as a woman candidate for the White House, she represents the righting of an historic wrong. There is still an uncomfortable sense that ultimately she is where she is, after all, because of whom she married, and because of the way she handled a domestic dispute many years ago. She is talented enough to have done it all on her own. But she didn’t.
