Now that the general election pairing is set--Bill Clinton's cheated-on and long-suffering spouse versus cheating braggart Donald Trump--the American political dialogue has risen quickly to matters of what the movie character Borat called "sexy time."
Democrats are trying to make the case that all Republicans are now saddled with the woman-degrading behavior of the man their primary voters have chosen to select for a presidential nominee.
Trump is a return-fire kind of guy. And he is saying that, if Democrats want to go there, then he'll talk about Bill Clinton's serial abuse of women and that wife Hillary, his Democratic opponent, not only put up with it all those years for purposes of political viability, her husband's and her own, but oversaw damage-control even in an enabling way for her tomcat husband, by pressuring women to keep quiet.
This is what we get--what we deserve--if Republicans can't do any better than the human outrage of Trump and Democrats can't do any better than recycle the '90s.
Allow me to synopsize the two competing partisan sexual narratives:
• Democrats such as long-shot U.S. Senate candidate Conner Eldridge in Arkansas are honing videos that collect some of Trump's junior-high-caliber degradation of women over the years, such as calling one woman a pig and saying another's breasts were headlights and saying he would be unable to rise to the occasion of another he found unappealing and, on shock jock Howard Stern's radio show, joining the shock jock in objectifying one of the blondes to whom Trump has been married.
Then, as in Eldridge's case, the video ties the local Republican candidate--in this context the haplessly mild U.S. Sen. John Boozman--to that behavior. In the Eldridge video, actual audio is used of Boozman saying something he probably never thought he'd say, which is that he'd support Trump if his party nominated Trump.
• So Trump, beholding that kind of thing, is saying, all right, then, what about Bill Clinton and all that, and that we have evidence--which is not really evidence, but right-wing rhetoric--that Hillary was the one leaning on these poor women victims to keep quiet about their close encounters with her husband's personal parts?
I believe this to be Trump's point: He is an outsider, sick of the politics of which all of you are sick, and, in that vein, he's not denying anything about his sexual conquests. Heck, he's proud of them. Read his book. He's had starlets. He's had wives. But these Clintons are the consummate modern political animals of which all of you are sick, and what we have in their case is a classic example of a career politician, and a career politician of a spouse, behaving as badly or worse, but playing all of you for saps with their career politicians' feigned innocence, their bogusness and their fraud.
Hillary probably will narrowly win this early sexual round because Trump's position can be easily ridiculed as hypocrisy and as blaming the victim for the bad behavior of her no-account husband. And the allegation Trump is advancing--that Hillary enabled and cynically covered it all up--is unprovable, indeed unknowable.
Take the case of Juanita Broaddrick, for example. What really happened in that hotel room nigh unto 40 years ago? We can't know. And when Broaddrick says Hillary came up to her at a subsequent function and implicitly warned her to keep quiet, do we accept Broaddrick's version of an implied message or do we wonder what Broaddrick was doing at an event with a man who had recently done to her what she alleged?
And does any of that from the 1970s and '80s in sexed-up Arkansas--good only for water-skiing and copulation, a Texan once told me--have anything to do with defeating ISIS or managing the domestic economy or putting forth the better nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court?
Let me answer that: No.
If the issue is character, then we're going to need a third party.
If you don't like the kind of dialogue you're enduring, then blame yourself. You could have nominated John Kasich and Bernie Sanders. They could be arguing about pro-business economic policies and budget management versus the raging new American socialism that disdains Wall Street's corruption and advocates government health care and free college.
But, no, you rejected those two for these two, now didn't you?
Maybe the good news is that we're getting the sexy-time talk out of the way early.
Maybe the bad news is that the level of dialogue is not certain to rise significantly.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/12/2016