By Erica Jong Updated 2313 GMT (0713 HKT) May 26, 2016
Photos: 1 of 38 Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Hillary Clinton, a former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, is looking to become the country's first female President.
Story highlights
Erica Jong: Two older white men running for president over-promise, can't get over the crowds they're drawing
But it's the woman, Hillary Clinton, she'd trust to keep her promises--for women, children, people of color, she says
Jong: America, it's time to vote for the woman, who has proven herself over and over again in public service
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Editor's note: "Erica Jong is a poet, novelist and nonfiction writer with more than 24 books published. Her novel "Fear of Flying" celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2013, and has sold over 27 million copies in 42 languages. Her latest novel is "Fear of Dying." The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author."
(CNN) -- There are two men running for president and one lone woman.
Both men have been carried away by the madness of crowds. The truth is we don't know what either of them can or will do. One of the men is a carny barker who is busy proving H.L. Mencken's dictum: "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." The other is an avowed socialist who wants "a revolution" but who has only been tried in a white, low population state.
Erica Jong
Then there is the woman. All her life she has fought for civil rights, children's rights and women's rights. We know what she stands for because she has been standing for those things forever: as first lady, senator and secretary of state. And she is standing for them now.
True, she has been around too long to be a "new face." But the men are not new either. One is a real estate guy who boasts that he pays no taxes and the other is a senator whose favorite word is "revolution." Both are old faces, but male. And both have gotten the biggest crowds of their lives and they can't get over it.
So who do you think is more likely to keep promises? The woman warrior or the two guys? For me it's utterly obvious: The woman is more likely to keep her promises to support children, women and people of color.
VIDEO: Clinton: Contest between fundamentally different views 00:56
Why then are people so confused? Well, we don't how a female president should sound. We've never had one before. We had Eleanor Roosevelt, but she wasn't president and she sounded funny despite her brilliance.
And men's voices are so much more familiar. One of our two male candidates blathers on about how great he is, the other promises the blue moon. We are all familiar with that. But a woman who has been consistent in her beliefs? That's new, and to me very reassuring.
When people complain that Hillary Clinton is "shrill" I think they're worried about their mothers. I'm not. When they call her a hawk, I'm also not worried. Grandmothers don't go to war unnecessarily. That's why Native Americans often used a council of grandmothers to decide on war and peace.
I'm totally comfortable with Hillary Rodham Clinton. She understands the nuclear threat. She fought against proliferation when she was secretary of state. She understands the Supreme Court and why we need more Ruth Bader Ginsburgs sitting on it.
She understands why education is important both in early childhood and adolescence. She understands why Black Lives Matter. She understands why black and white women's lives matter. She understands why men's lives matter. She understands climate change and why solutions are urgent and this is not only because she is a grandmother.
VIDEO: Hillary Clinton full CNN interview (part 1) 13:09
When people worry that she got paid a lot for her speeches, I shout hurrah. Good for her. In a world where women are paid less, she understands her value.
When people blame her for the deaths of ambassadors, I point out all the GOP budget cuts .. http://blogs.reuters.com/david-rohde/2012/11/16/a-hidden-cause-of-benghazi-tragedy/ .. that exposed our diplomats to danger all over the world. When people blame her for her husband's adulteries, I think "duh, are you kidding?" She wasn't the one with the out-of-control testosterone. We might after all praise her for holding her marriage together. What about that? What about loyalty?
I do think there are many people in our great country who agree with me, who see attacks on Hillary Clinton for what they are: discomfort with powerful, smart women who are born to lead. I do think that after 25 years in the public eye, few women would be left standing.
VIDEO: Hillary Clinton reacts to email report 02:05
Today, we women are subject to many double standards — as experienced women and male feminists know. We are the gender that grows more radical with age — as Gloria Steinem pointed out. And the men who love us often grow more radical, too. The late Marty Ginsburg grew more and more proud .. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128249680 .. of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
So let's gather round and get used to the voice of a woman leader. Many countries have flourished under female presidents and prime ministers. Our time is now. The USA will be left behind until we have a woman leader.
VIDEO: Trump slams women of both parties 02:07
Our P.T. Barnum candidate is not the future. And Bernie Sanders is a thing of the Brooklyn socialists past. Only the very young would believe that his utopian vision could come true anytime soon. It's time for a woman leader with a consistent vision. What's wrong with having a diamond sharp vision of the future and the strength to carry it out? What's wrong with experience? What's wrong with forceful beliefs that don't change with the wind? Whom do you trust if you don't trust your grandmother?
I trust Hillary Rodham Clinton's long-held beliefs and the prodigious work she has put behind them. Bernie is a beautiful dreamer. Trump is a fake and a fraud. Of the three candidates I know whom to trust.
Donald Trump's lying far more sinister than distortion of facts
November 6 2016 - 5:02PM
Paul McGeough
Washington: Donald Trump's lies are so overwhelming that reporters stir them as a child does peas on a plate – marvelling at the shape and colour, but for much of the time oblivious to a greater question of "why?"
Mainstream media fact-checkers swoop, to hold the more egregious falsehoods up to the light – and to call out Trump; and their editors are increasingly comfortable with calling each lie a "lie," instead of resorting to the bendy language of the past that effectively let a liar off the hook.
VIDEO: Debate fact check: candidates go astray 01:46 .. and others .. A fact check finds that some statements made by Republican Presidential candidates do not square with realities around the world.
Washington-based Canadian correspondent Daniel Dale has made it his mission to count every Trump lie every day – by Day 33, in mid-October, he had reached incident 253 in what he describes as the GOP candidate's "avalanche of wrongness".
By Dale's reckoning, Trump's most truthful day included just four lies; at his worst there were 25 – and that doesn't include the first two candidate's debates, in which Trump uttered 34 and 33 falsehoods of varying degrees in just 90 minutes.
But the Trump falsehoods can't be looked at in isolation.
Another key element of the Trump political style is the rate at which he changes subjects when whipping up his supporters – in one classic speech, The Washington Post counted 25 subjects in the space of five minutes. So quite often, he'll glance on an issue, just to get the lie out there.
Trump creates a parallel universe. Key indicators show the US finally is getting back on its feet economically after the 2007-09 Great Recession – 15.2 million new jobs since 2010, average hourly wages up 2.8 per cent on last year – but for Trump, that's "disastrous".
It's the same with crime – violent crime in the US is close to historic lows, but he quoted alarming figures from an agency that seems to not exist to support his "inner cities are living hell" bullet point.
Donald Trump has a new reason for optimism. Photo: AP
It's the same with his constant denigration of the media. The moderator of the first candidates' debate, Lester Holt, is a registered Republican, but Trump didn't like the debate so he denounced Holt as a Democrat.
Yet Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley worries that the media are missing the point, that language like "lie" and "bald-faced lie," or even a term like "master of bullshit" misses a more disturbing aspect of Trump's political persona and in that, that we're not addressing a crisis in mass communication.
True believers: Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump cheer as he arrives to a campaign rally. Photo: Evan Vucci
Viewed through the prism of totalitarian propaganda, Stanley detects something more than conventional politicking in Trump's commentary.
"The goal…is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups.
The final stretch: Donald Trump on stage with six-month-old Catalina Larkin in Florida. Photo: AP
"It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader's power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness."
By this argument Trump is attempting to define a simple new reality that becomes an expression of his power, a reality that justifies his value system that seeks to change the value system of his audience.
Hence his continual riff on inner-city violence. Trump's objective is to convey a sense of wild disorder, which he'd have his followers believe is caused by African Americans and immigrants – "he's doing it as a display of strength, showing he's able to define reality and lead others to accept his authoritarian value system," Stanley, the author of How Propaganda Works, writes.
He says: "The chief authoritarian values are law and order. In Trump's value system, non-whites and non-Christians are the chief threats to law and order. Trump knows that reality does not call for a value system like his; violent crime is at almost historic lows in the US. Trump is thundering about a crime wave of historic proportions because he is an authoritarian using his speech to define a simple reality that legitimates his value system, leading voters to adopt it. Its strength is that it conveys how power can define reality. Its weakness is that it obviously contradicts."
Through the campaign, analysts have parsed Trump's feigned concern for inner-city blacks, expressed mostly to predominantly white audiences, as a bid to present himself as caring to educated white women.
But, by the Stanley reading, it's a more sinister conveying to whites of his "blacks are bad" scare tactics.
On the last two days of October, as Dale was collating 27 and 19 lies respectively, pollsters for The Washington Post-ABC News were polling Americans on questions of the candidates' honesty – and Trump now polls as more honest than Clinton, by eight points.
Seems that that new reality of Trump's is working very well. Again, in searching for meaning, analysts light on what one calls American sentimentalism – "what moves the electorate is not true facts but true feelings."
But it grasps only a part of what Stanley sees as Trump's big-picture objective.
Stanley demands that we all must lift our game: "Describing what Trump has done requires us to talk not just about the importance of honesty and accuracy, but also about power, value systems and in-groups versus out-groups. It also requires us to confront the failures of elite policy that have led to an erosion of democratic norms, primarily public trust, that makes anti-democratic alternatives suddenly acceptable."
Get Used to This Phrase During the Trump Years: American Authoritarianism
"Authoritarianism: The political science that explains Trump"
Dear leader tours the nation holding raucous rallies for the worshipping[sic] faithful.
Getty Ty Wright
By Charles P. Pierce Dec 2, 2016
A couple of events on Thursday gave us a peek into what the next four (or eight) years are going to be like. First, there was this panel discussion at Harvard among the various geniuses who helped run the presidential campaign just past. Apparently, this devolved into something between a middle-school food fight and a lacrosse match played with human heads. Bloomberg News .. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-02/trump-and-clinton-campaign-aides-clash-at-harvard-forum .. passes along the blow-by-blow.
-- "If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am glad to have lost," Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri responded. "I am more proud of Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech than any other moment on the campaign because she had the courage to stand up. I would rather lose than win the way you guys did."
"Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?" Conway fired back. "You going look me in the face and tell me that?" --
Well, yeah.
In fact, if you took part in any Republican presidential campaign since 1964, you helped run a campaign in which white supremacists had some kind of platform or another. There were some candidates—Gerald Ford, John McCain, and George W. Bush—who were less direct about it than were Richard Nixon with the Southern Strategy, Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair, or Poppa Bush with Lee Atwater, but it still percolated within the party apparatus beneath them. El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago just took away the party's Inside Voice on such matters.
(And, in the true bipartisan spirit, let me point out that Palmieri's bringing-a-nerfball-to-a-nuclear-exchange quote perfectly encapsulates 40 years of liberal political futility.)
-- "Guys, I can tell you're angry, but wow. Hashtag he's your president," Conway said. --
And then they all took selfies and flounced off angrily to gym class.
Triumphalism is the order of the day—triumphalism in the face of the fact that the president-elect's margin of defeat in the popular vote is up to 2.5 million at this point, and triumphalism in the face of the fact that the president-elect's approval rating is the worst ever recorded .. http://www.gallup.com/poll/197576/trump-favorability-trails-presidents-elect.aspx .. among presidents-elect. And there is no better example of it than the fact that the president-elect is now on a Wanks Over America Tour of self-congratulations. He is great, and you are great for voting for him, but not as great as he is just for being him.
Getty Ty Wright
Thursday's stop was in Cincinnati, as Cleveland.com .. http://www.cleveland.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/12/trumps_thank_you_tour_gets_off.html .. reports. It was genuinely unsettling, but, hell, it was better than sitting through all those boring intelligence briefings. Let Pence handle those. He's got time between KFC runs. Meanwhile, watch these people cheer what I'm saying. They love me, dammit, because I'm, well, me.
-- The raucous rallies during the Trump campaign road show often had the feel of a rock concert, and Thursday night in Cincinnati had all the hallmarks of a reunion tour: Trump took a veiled swipe at fellow Republicans. He remembered his general election foe by joking, "We had fun fighting Hillary, didn't we?" He boasted about size of his victory and repeatedly bashed the media. Protesters briefly interrupted the proceedings. And the crowd chanted "Build the Wall" and "Lock Her Up."… He boasted about his wins in Midwest states that normally vote Democratic, declaring he didn't just "break the blue wall, we shattered it." He veered off-script to make fun of a protester, saying she was being ejected from the arena so "she could go back to Mommy." He repeated his recent threat that, despite Constitutional protections, "if people burn the American flag, there should be consequences." And he repeated many of his signature campaign promises, including a pledge to "construct a great wall at the border." --
At this point, nobody would have been surprised if he'd shown up wearing a white military uniform and talking from a balcony. He took a shot at Ohio Governor John Kasich, who didn't show up to pay homage. He danced again on the media's head, despite this CNN .. http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/donald-trump-thank-you-tour/ .. dispatch that may set a record for suicide-by-euphemism.
-- The ostensible purpose of the event was to stress a message of national unity after a fractious campaign and to lay out a road map for Trump's presidency. But the President-elect showed that the heavy burdens of office that are about to settle on his shoulders and the behavioral constraints that normally apply to a head of state are not going to cramp his quintessential political style. In apparent diversions from his teleprompter, he lashed the "dishonest" media, jabbed Ohio Gov. John Kasich who refused to support him, crowed at his victory over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. He boasted about his election win, which defied the pundits who said he had no path to 270 electoral votes. He doubled down on controversial campaign vows to build a wall on the border with Mexico, to restrict Muslim immigration into the US and to repeal and replace Obamacare.
And in renewing his bonds with his loyal, vocal supporters, who chanted "Build the Wall" and "Lock her Up" in reference to Clinton, he sent a warning to opponents in Washington, even members of his own party, that he plans to marshal his unique political power base throughout his presidency. And perhaps more than anything else, Trump was having fun, reveling in being back as the rhetorical general of his grass roots army, riling his foes and commanding the spotlight surrounded by a worshipful crowd. --
If it wasn't clear already, it's clear by now that we all ought to be re-reading a lot of Hannah Arendt before Inauguration Day. In The Origins of Authoritarianism, she famously warned:
-- Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. --
The only true resistance to whatever comes next is sadly confined to a civic and political imagination that has grown stunted and crippled, and a commitment to truth and to political involvement that long ago surrendered to distraction, flash, and meaningless intellectual junk food. The democratic muscles needed for pushback have atrophied almost to the point of uselessness, and that's alright because the institutions through which those muscles could be used are shells of themselves. Get ready for four (or eight) years of empty spectacle in the service of destructive policies that the president-elect doesn't care enough to understand.
.. on Sydney tv just now .. re unemployment numbers USA .. an economist just said, "talking about making America great again, it's not doing so bad as it is" .. yes, mild sarcasm directed at drummer-boy Drumpf ..
See also: excerpt NYT .. Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality
Trump has taken an entirely distinct approach to the problem of mass communication.
Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
According to Arendt, the “chief disability” of authoritarian propaganda is that “it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”
The goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness.
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