One reason I grow weary of the focus people place on the personalities and even (to a degree) the character of our presidential nominees is that winning control of the executive branch is always about a lot more than that. Either you’re on the left or you’re not. And if you want to understand what was lost in this election, just look at the rules that will go away. For example, let’s just look at energy-related issues.
Immediately after the election, EPA took preliminary steps toward regulating methane releases from oil and natural gas production — even though Trump’s win means that the overall effort to rein in the potent greenhouse gas is most likely doomed. In addition, the Fish and Wildlife Service released the final version of updated rules governing almost 1,700 oil and gas wells inside national wildlife refuges, and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management released a major rule on leases for wind and solar projects on federal land.
Interior also released a final rule to limit fracking-related methane pollution on public lands a week after the election, prompting oil industry groups to file a lawsuit within minutes. And by Dec. 1, EPA faces a court-ordered deadline to propose a rule requiring companies that mine for minerals like gold and silver to demonstrate they can afford to clean up any pollution they cause. EPA is also awaiting White House approval for a rule governing emergency preparedness at chemical plants, in response to incidents such as a deadly 2013 fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.
It’s not just that Trump and the Republican Congress will gut all these rules in favor of polluters and climate warmers, the judges they appoint and confirm will move in the same direction.
But Hillary gave a speech to Goldman Sachs and isn’t likable enough, so fuck everything!
It doesn’t work like that.
I probably weigh character higher than policy, assuming there’s a serious character defect. Character is extraordinarily important in a president. But the defect has to be highly significant to overcome the massive difference between what a Republican in the White House gives us compared to a Democrat. Clinton never met that standard, or even came close to meeting it.
Obviously, Trump’s defects were so great and so glaringly obvious that he lost the support of everyone from right-wing newspaper editorial boards to the foreign policy establishment to Glenn Beck.
In his case, it was justifiable to conclude that policy be damned, this man should not be president. In Clinton’s case, anyone who came to that conclusion was simply wrong, and we will all pay the consequences.
