Shudder

Last night Hillary Clinton made her nomination inevitable and Donald Trump made his all but certain, unless the Republican establishment wants a damaging fight at the convention. Most of Washington is staying home today because the region’s Metro trains are shut down for a safety inspection. We’ll have time to contemplate our presidential options and how wrong things have gone in a political system that has served so well for so long.

The Trump puzzle is easy to solve. Despite a sharp increase from the past, still few people are voting in these primaries: about 17% of eligible Republicans. Trump has mobilized uneducated, lower income whites who have not seen an increase in their incomes for decades. His voters are also predominantly male. Trump’s barely coded racism, blatant lies and loud bragging mark him as one of them. Identity politics don’t only happen in other countries.

Hillary Clinton is the more conventional candidate. She is a relatively moderate democrat who has aligned herself with her former rival and boss Barack Obama, who can’t run again. She would serve his third term and perhaps even his fourth.

With the “misery index” declining sharply since 2008 and minority voters rising, she would be a shoe-in were it not for the baggage she carries: a vote in favor of George Bush’s mistaken Iraq war, support for trade deals she now questions, the Benghazi non-scandal and the continuing investigation of allegedly classified information found on her private email server.

President Obama today nominated middle-of-the-road, white, male Federal court judge Merrick Garland to right-wing Republican Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. This surprised me: I expected nomination of a minority, but the scuttlebutt says the President didn’t want to “burn” a strong minority candidate in a process likely to fail. Confirmation would tilt the balance of the Court towards the Democrats. Senate Republicans have vowed not even to consider the nomination. This sets it up as a campaign issue, one likely to bring out a few more Democrats, even as more moderate Republicans either stay at home or reluctantly mark ballots for Clinton.

So this election is Clinton’s to lose, which she could still do. Trump is scrappy and energetic. He knows how to mobilize his constituency. He has gotten an enormous amount of free airtime on American media. Clinton is far less inspired in dealing with hers. She is not a natural campaigner, as she herself puts it. Overly wonkish, a bit strident and inclined to talk down to her supporters, she has so far failed to generate the youthful energy and enthusiasm that her rival Bernie Sanders has inspired. He will support her, I suppose, but by then the air will have gone out of his balloon.

The great virtue of American elections is that their outcome is truly unpredictable. We have no Council of Experts or Guardian Council to limit our choices. We unfortunately allow money and party organization do much of that. The uncertainty scares non-Americans. It makes our international behavior difficult to predict. But no one can complain this time around that the candidates and parties offer no real alternatives. They certainly do. One makes me wonder why she is the best on offer. The other makes me shudder.