Gender war trumps policy agenda

WASHINGTON: US presidential candidates aspiring to occupy the White House Oval Office usually campaign on the basis of issues. In 2016, gender is trumping agenda, with personalities looming larger than policies. Donald Trump’s trash-talk about women, plentifully chronicled in his past, and Hillary Clinton’s tough temperament in enduring her husband’s alleged peccadilloes, are now meat-and-drink for a slavering media in an election campaign where nothing and no one appears sacrosanct. Not even dead people.

Over the weekend, Trump walked backed on talk that he lusted after princess Diana and could have “nailed” her, as he sought to sanitise his rampantly misogynistic trash-talk from yesteryears. Rumours of him wanting Diana to be his “ultimate trophy wife” were false, Trump said, clarifying to Piers Morgan that he had “no interest from that standpoint,” and that he met her only once and thought she was “lovely.”

Trump also lashed out at the NYT for exaggerating or falsifying the testimony of women it spoke to in its portrait of his past sexist outlook, even as one of the interviewees herself challenged the paper’s interpretation of her remarks.

All this came even as the Clinton campaign advanced its ad campaign against Trump with two commercials ad-libbing his most misogynistic remarks, including “she had blood coming out of her… wherever” comment about Fox anchor Megyn Kelly.

Despite the past antagonism, Trump and Kelly got together again for an interview that will air on Fox News. In excerpts released so far, Trump suggests that Kelly, and anyone else affected by his bullying, should get over it and fight back. In her previews, Kelly says Republican women have warmed a little to Trump, but his unfavourables even with women are still high and he needs to do better than Mitt Romney who lost to President Obama by 11 points with women. In an effort to mitigate this, Trump is said to be considering former Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Clinton, meanwhile, is not resting on the female vote; she has been mocking Trump’s lack of policy chops.

“Let’s just imagine I am on a debate stage with Donald Trump,” Clinton chortled in a recent public meeting. “Here is the question, ‘so what is your plan to create jobs?’ His answer is, ‘I am going to create them, they are going to be great, I am going to do it. But I am not telling you what it is that I am going to do,’” she said, imitating the frequently thin answers Trump offers to serious policy questions.

She on the other hand would offer specifics. “I am going to say, ‘Here is what we are going to do, here is how we are going to change the tax code, here is how we are going to incentivize people to do it....’” But that, some analysts suggest, is precisely the problem. Clinton gets lost in wonkish policy details; Trump wins people with generalities like “we will bring back jobs and make America great again.” Clinton maintains that such answers will not sustain for long.

Perhaps realizing that he is on thin ground on policy issues, Trump had lately reached out to Henry Kissinger for tutoring. The foreign policy mahaguru, who is 92, may have his work cut out for him. On Tuesday, Trump contested a bleeped out line in the Clinton campaign’s ad that showed him saying, “You can tell them to go fuck themselves.” “The pathetic new hit ad against me misrepresents the final line. ‘You can tell them to go BLANK themselves’ — was about China, NOT WOMEN!” Trump clarified in a tweet.