Steven Biel: You’ve been trashing Donald Trump for months. Now it’s time for choosing. For all intents and purposes, the primary season is over. Clinton or Trump. Those are your choices. So what’ll it be, Lance?
Lance Dutson: Why is it that the year the GOP nominates this bag-over-your-head embarrassment, it happens to be the same year the Democrats nominate their worst candidate in decades?
This is such a horrible state of affairs. It would be easier to jump across the aisle if you all had a different candidate on the ticket, but Hillary is just so hard to imagine supporting.
Steven: You have a two-term U.S. senator, former secretary of state and first lady, someone who has been tested in the glare of public scrutiny and in the heat of the situation room for years.
On the other hand, you have a reality TV show star, who reads the National Enquirer for news. Can you think of another world leader this patently unprepared? Kim Jong-un? One of the alcoholic, inbred child kings of medieval Europe? How is this a hard decision for any minimally educated person?
Lance: It’s an easy call unless you look at the Clinton record. Bill’s administration gave nuclear technology to the North Koreans. The Clinton law-enforcement approach to terrorism led to 9/11. Hillary’s foreign policy “resets” were dangerous failures that destabilized multiple regions of the world. And she simply doesn’t tell the truth.
This is a choice between the known evil and the assumed evil. With Hillary, we know her policy choices are going to be wrong. With Trump, we assume (with good reason) that they’ll be wrong.
Steven: Come on. There’s a minimal threshold required to function in the job without creating truly catastrophic problems for national security and the economy. Trump fails that test.
We’re talking about the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world! Nuclear codes. Management of the global economy. This is not a joke.
Lance: It’s funny to hear this argument right now, after two terms of Barack Obama as commander in chief. People are more interested in someone they can trust, not their experience.
Steven: You can’t seriously be comparing Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Obama was a U.S. senator, a state legislator, president of the Harvard Law Review. Your guy is a professional wrestling promoter and beauty pageant host!
Lance: Hillary’s got an opening to pick up GOP votes if she can convince us that she’ll be less liberal than Obama. But Sanders prevents her from moving to the center. She’s probably closer ideologically to George W. Bush than Trump is, but she’s got to start making that case, instead of running from it.
Steven: I’m honestly shocked at this false equivalence you’re drawing between Clinton and Trump. I have my own list of gripes with Clinton’s policy record, but to lump Clinton and Trump together as two similarly unacceptable nominees is intellectually dishonest and dangerous. You’re making the case for Republicans to go ahead and make this two-bit carnival act the most powerful person in the world.
Lance: The GOP should have shown Trump the door a long, long time ago. But his path to the White House only exists because Democrats nominated the worst possible candidate for this cycle.
Voters are revolting against establishment politics, and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate insider, with a deep resume of skeletons in the closet and hypocrisies.
What if the shoe were on the other foot? What if you had to choose between Trump and George W. Bush, for instance?
Steven: The worst possible option for Democrats would be Howard Stern, Larry Flynt, or Snooki from the “Jersey Shore.” That’s how far your party has lowered the bar.
Hillary Clinton is a flawed candidate, but no one can doubt that she’s a qualified and credible nominee. Trump shows all the clinical signs of narcissistic personality disorder and might be diagnosable as a sociopath because of the pleasure he takes in hurting others and his inability to feel shame.
Lance: You didn’t answer my question. You’re telling me it would be an easy call to pull the lever for W. if Trump was the only alternative?
Steven: Sigh. You’re really going to make me answer that question in public?
Lance: Welcome to life as a Republican in 2016.
Steven Biel is former campaign director for MoveOn.org and president of the Portland-based political consulting firm Steven Biel Strategies. Lance Dutson, a principal of Red Hill Strategies, is a Republican communications consultant. He has served on the campaign teams of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Kelly Ayotte, as well as the Maine Republican Party.