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Reality, the election & Hillary Clinton
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This is not a show. We don’t get to change the station if we don’t like it. We don’t get a new choice for next year, or a whole new set of candidates. This is everything, and it’s for four years. 

This is for all the people who don’t like Hillary Clinton, wouldn’t want to have a beer with her, just can’t get their heads around the idea of voting for her.

I’m sorry. If I didn’t actually know her, I might feel the same way. The Hillary Clinton you see on television can be terribly frustrating: distant and scolding one minute; arrogant and presumptuous the next; clearly the smart girl who always raised her hand. (I was the smart girl who sat in the last row playing tic-tac-toe.) 

But the next president is unlikely to be coming to any of our homes for a beer. It doesn’t matter if we’d like to have dinner with her. It doesn’t matter if she sometimes grates.

She knows what she is doing. She has decades of actual experiences. She understands what a complicated, scary and difficult world this is. She is under no illusions. She won praise from the military as secretary of state. She is a professional.

Running against a rank amateur who, unlike a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton, doesn’t listen. President Reagan surrounded himself with first-rate talent, and he listened to them. President Clinton listened to everyone. His mind is like a sponge.

Donald Trump is scary not because he is ignorant but because he thinks he knows more than anyone else when in fact he knows less. 

We are the most stable democracy in the world. That is not an accident. It is because we have a procedure, spelled out in more detail than almost anything in the Constitution, governing the election of the president. On the first Tuesday after the first Monday, we vote; the electors from the states convene to cast their ballots; the president is inaugurated on a certain date in January. Richard Nixon had good reason to think that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley stole the election for Jack Kennedy in the wee hours of the night in Cook County, but he rightly conceded because in a stable democracy. Once the results are certified they must be respected. How can we elect a man who literally considers that a laugh line?

We cannot. You cannot.

Are you really willing to hand your children’s future to a man who has no discipline, no self-control and the power to destroy the world as we know it in four minutes?

Trump thinks he “doesn’t need to prepare.” Consider how frightening that is. This is a job that has aged every man who has held it. The world has never been a more terrifying place. Some nights, I watch the nightly news and wonder how it is that this can be the world we are leaving to our children. How could we do this to them?

But this we cannot do. 

So, Republicans: On the day after the election, go organize your Republican county committee. Take control of your party and nominate someone who could win. You could have done so this year. You didn’t. A costly mistake; I’m sure you feel that. But please, do not turn it into a catastrophic one.