US voters need to rise above personal attacks

The final few days of the most vicious presidential election campaign in the United States in decades continued with unabated personal attacks on both candidates, burying any hope of the campaigns ending with a better understanding of where either candidate wants to take America. The terrible legacy of this election will be a continuing breakdown of any bipartisan cooperation after the party-first rhetoric from the Republicans has been taken to new heights by personal bile about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, poured out by Republican candidate Donald Trump, which has replaced any political debate.

On Sunday, FBI director James Comey made the astonishing announcement that there was nothing criminal in the latest batch of emails linked to Clinton’s private email server, despite his dramatic announcement a week ago that he had reopened the FBI’s investigation. Comey repeated his previous finding that Clinton had been “extremely careless” but that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against them. Nonetheless, Comey’s role in re-igniting this controversy so close to the election, in a move that favoured Trump so dramatically, should come under close scrutiny after the election. The short-fused Trump reacted with anger at the news and reiterated his view that Clinton should go to jail and frustratedly raged at the FBI, saying that no-one can review 650,000 emails in eight days.

Meanwhile, Trump was under attack for an anti-Semitic ad released by his campaign, which hinted at his hatred of a Jewish conspiracy to control US financial industry, with lurid shots of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve interspersed with images of three prominent Jewish people: Janet Yellen, who chairs the Federal Reserve, the progressive financier George Soros and the Goldman Sachs chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein. Trump has been roundly criticised for allowing some senior advisers to retweet anti-Jewish rants, and he was far too slow to repudiate support from the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and now Louisiana Senate candidate David Duke.

Today, Americans voting will have to make their choice based on personalities. Trump has been far too light on policy all the way through and anyway has frequently changed his mind. Clinton has struggled to get her obvious mastery of the issues to dominate the debate and has got sucked into Trump’s whirlwind of personal attacks and innuendo. But the voters in the bizarre election have to remember that policies matter, as well as character.