Best of the American columnists

 If Hillary is so likeable, why isn’t she liked? 

If only Americans could get to know “the real Hillary Clinton”. This has been the constant refrain of Clinton’s handlers over the years, says Rich Lowry. At the party’s convention in Philadelphia last week, they sought, yet again, to unveil “the Hillary we supposedly don’t know”. How many relaunches can one politician have? The commentator Jonathan Rauch has a theory that no one is ever elected president more than 14 years after winning election as a governor or senator. Given that Clinton was elected to the Senate from New York in 2000, she’s “technically only a couple of years past this benchmark for staleness”, but she has been a constant face in US politics since Bill ran for president 25 years ago. Her handlers “are like leftists insisting that socialism has never failed; it’s just never been tried”. It may well be that, if they met her, people would like Hillary, but an ability to project appealing qualities in public – as opposed to coming across as gratingly insincere – is part of being a good politician. “No one ever had to say about FDR, ‘You wouldn’t believe how buoyant he is – behind closed doors’, or about Ronald Reagan, ‘He’s very funny – when the cameras are off’.” 

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 America’s most important daughter 

 Whatever happens in November’s election, says Joshua Kendall, America is set to gain something it hasn’t had in a long time: a truly influential first daughter. Both Chelsea Clinton and her friend Ivanka Trump have been major players in the 2016 campaign. Chelsea is one of her mother’s closest advisers and serves as vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation. Ivanka, who serves as executive vice-president of The Trump Organisation, is often referred to as “Trump’s better half”, and was the star of the recent Republican convention. To find another first daughter who played as important a role as either Chelsea or Ivanka are likely to in the next administration, you have to go all the way back to Anna Roosevelt. In 1944, the 37-year-old eldest child of Franklin Roosevelt moved into the White House to serve as her father’s special assistant. She became known as his “expediter”, the aide who both got people in to see him and got him to do things. It was Anna whom FDR asked to accompany him to the Yalta Conference, rather than his wife. “Daddy’s girl is running Daddy,” commented Life magazine in early 1945. Perhaps the same will one day be said of America’s next first daughter. 

FDR with Anna, his “expediter”

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The GOP is not committing suicide

 “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.” So George W. Bush reportedly told a recent gathering of former aides. Like many conservatives, he fears that Trump’s divisive candidacy may spell the end of the GOP as a viable party. “The pessimists could be right,” says Jeff Jacoby. Political parties can die. In general, though, they almost always adapt, retaining their name “while revising – or even overturning” – their supposedly immutable beliefs. In the end, they’re about winning elections. The character of the Republican and Democratic parties has changed a lot over the years. After the Civil War, it was the GOP that championed black civil rights, while white supremacists dominated the Democratic Party. Later, the GOP embraced high tariffs, while the Democrats championed free trade. Democrats today wouldn’t dream of nominating a leader like JFK, who backed across-the-board tax cuts, limited government and increased military spending. Likewise, today’s Republicans would shun the “muscular internationalism” and “free-market optimism” of Reagan. “In elevating Trump, the GOP is rejecting ideological standards it long advocated… But is it committing suicide? Probably not. The parties’ brands endure, even if their principles don’t.” 

                Is Trump in cahoots with the Kremlin? 

 The fear that a US presidential candidate could be a secret agent of some enemy power “is an old theme in American pop culture”, said Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. The 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate famously imagined a Chinese plot to engineer a coup d’état. But in 2016, the truth may be even “stranger than fiction”. Republican nominee Donald Trump has never made any secret of his admiration for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He has called him a “strong leader” and has openly promoted his agenda, by, among other things, casting doubt on the future of Nato. Putin, in turn, has used his propaganda network, RT, to cheer on Trump’s candidacy. When Democratic Party emails reportedly stolen by Russian hackers were released last month with the express purpose of dividing the Democrats, Trump welcomed the move and invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s personal emails. The ties between Trump and the Kremlin go deep, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, worked for many years in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president ousted in 2014. Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy adviser, has close ties to Gazprom, the Russian energy giant. And Trump has many financial links to Russia, too. Although he’s still refusing to release his tax returns, we know he has “substantial if murky involvement with wealthy Russians and Russian businesses”. Just imagine what Trump, who has “never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like”, would be saying if this involved somebody else, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. He’d have a field day. There’s no evidence to suggest that Trump is actually in league with the Kremlin, said Julia Ioffe in Foreign Policy. If he were, there would surely be at least one Trump Tower in Moscow by now. As it is, Trump has been trying – and failing – to open a hotel in Russia for 30 years, even as chains such as Ritz Carlton and Hilton have succeeded. Has Trump done business with “shady people from the former Soviet Union”? Yes, but that’s hardly surprising in his trade – a lot of dubious money has been invested in the London and New York real estate markets over recent years. The very fact we’re even discussing the possibility of Trump being a Kremlin plant will delight Putin, though, as it means we’re “imbuing him with the very power and importance he craves. All he wants is for America to see him as a worthy adversary. We’re giving that to him, and then some.” 

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