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I am an American – a proud American. Which explains why as I’ve experienced it, the 2016 presidential campaign has turned from comedy to tragedy. What once, I admit, I found somewhat funny, I now find somewhat sad, dispiriting, even frightening.

We know full well that in recent decades Americans’ faith in leaders of all stripes has been in sharp decline. We similarly know that Americans’ faith in their elected officials has led this list. Our political leaders are even less trusted than, for example, our business leaders. Moreover, the span is not narrow but wide. In mid- October only 24 % of Americans had “a fair amount of” of confidence in their political leaders, while fully 46% had a similar level of faith in their military leaders.*

These poll numbers are just two weeks old. Still, it’s safe to assume that now, one week before Election Day, they would be even lower. The last two weeks of the presidential campaign have been that bad – both major party candidates far, far less inspiring and trustworthy than any pair previous.

The tragedy to which I refer is not the campaign per se, but rather the years that will immediately succeed it. Given the muck and mire in which we’ve been stuck in the recent past,  governance will be dauntingly difficult. I shudder to think of President Hillary Clinton trying to get legislation through Congress, trying to broker a deal with Republicans. I shudder even more to think of President Donald Trump trying to govern the country, trying to govern the beloved country sanely, securely, and sensibly.

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*Pew Research Center, October 18, 2016.

In 2009 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Barack Obama. It was questioned at the time, for Obama had been in office only briefly, and had done nothing obvious to garner such an honor. Nevertheless, the Norwegian Nobel Committee stood by its selection – though since then Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Committee at the time, did admit that “the Committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

Mild understatement. It is the tragic irony of Obama’s presidency that he has failed miserably to merit the award he was given pathetically prematurely. Instead of leading for peace, Obama has followed for war. To be sure, blame, in particular for the calamity in Syria, extends well beyond the White House. Still, in the unipolar world that Obama was the last to inherit, the US was the obvious candidate, the only candidate, to preclude or at least mitigate the slaughter in Syria.

From a recent editorial in the Financial Times: “At this rate, Russia’s bombardment of Aleppo alongside the Syrian air force will enter the annals of infamy …. Aleppo is the…scene of a war crime matched in scale by few others in recent decades ….”

Of course in the old days, before television cameras and web cams, leaders (and others) could claim that they did not know. That they did not know the horrors of wars unfolding far from home but on their watch. Now effectively no one can make such a claim. Now leaders (and others) know everything or, at least, we know enough. Ergo, the decision to stand by and do nothing while Rome burns is a conscious one, a deliberate one.

In my book, Followership, I wrote that Bystanders observe but they do not participate. They decide consciously, deliberately, to disengage, which makes them, in effect, accomplices. Being a Bystander is, in other words, “a declaration of neutrality, which amounts to tacit support for whoever and whatever constitutes the status quo.”

So far as Syria is concerned, then, Barack Obama, the US, has been the follower and Vladimir Putin, Russia, the leader. Nobel Peace Prize anyone?

Years ago, during the scandal globally known by the name of one of its protagonists, Monica Lewinsky, I labeled Hillary Clinton an enabler. Whatever the precise nature of Bill Clinton’s long history of sexual entanglements outside marriage, it was clear his wife had long put up with his escapades, obviously deciding to remain married to this man, notwithstanding his bad behavior and her resultant, public, sequential humiliations.

Yes, Hillary was, and turns out still is, Bill’s enabler.

Seems little he won’t do to increase the chances that he will in some way profit while she will in some way suffer.  Whatever WikiLeaks has yet to reveal, it’s clear even now that he, as head of the Clinton Foundation, was guilty of being greedy in the extreme, while she was serving as secretary of state and preparing to run for the nation’s highest office. She, meanwhile, was a Bystander, aware of what he did and how and why, but leaving it to others to try to tamp down her venal husband.

So far as we know, there was no point at which Hillary Clinton put her foot down. So far as we know, there was no point at which Hillary Clinton demanded of Bill Clinton that he stop his egregious quest for personal enrichment. And, so far as we know, there was no point at which Hillary Clinton asserted her independence from Bill Clinton to her own personal, not to speak of political advantage. It was left curiously, typically, to daughter Chelsea to try to bridge the gap between her parents, to intercede episodically and fruitlessly on her mother’s behalf, to try to restrain and contain her father.

Who am I to judge another couple – another marriage? This though is not about live and let live. The fact is from the Clintons’ private behaviors emerge public consequences. Which makes their psychodrama my problem – not only theirs.

Not for nothing is George Washington known as “the father of his country.” The honorific is for his leadership roles during the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, and his two terms in the White House. But mostly he is thought of as the nation’s “father” because he did what effective leaders do – they parent their followers. Effective leaders provide their followers with a sense of comfort and control, even if sometimes this sense is misplaced.

The leader’s parenting role came to mind yesterday, while reading an article about how many Americans have been made anxious by the 2016 presidential campaign. The American Psychological Association reports that 52 % of adults are coping with high levels of stress brought on by the political season. According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, “therapists around the country have said in interviews that patients are coming to appointments citing their fears, anger and anxiety about the election.”*

While the article claimed that the reason for our stress is related to the issues –  issues such as terrorism, gun rights, and sexual assault play into our fears and anxieties – the leadership literature suggests that the problem goes deeper. It suggests that what we really seek is a recreation of, a reiteration of, a reincarnation of Mommy and Daddy.

We long for reassuring authority figures to play parental roles: to satisfy our need for personal safety; to satisfy our need for domestic security; to satisfy our need for protection against interloper outsiders; to satisfy our need to be well taken care of; to satisfy our need to be included in a group; and to satisfy our need to feel special. Leaders who appear able to satisfy these needs meet with our approval. Leaders who do not face our disapproval.

So the reasons for our collective stress have less to do with specific policy issues than with how we feel about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Instead of calming us down, enclosing us in a protective embrace, they do the opposite. They trigger in us feelings of fear, anger, distrust and frustration.**

But, as the campaign winds down, it’s increasingly seeming we prefer having Hillary as Mommy than Donald as Daddy.  Her whopping 20 something point lead on the matter of temperament is why her as parent is preferred over her volatile Republican counterpart.

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*http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/well/mind/talking-to-your-therapist-about-election-anxiety.html

**http://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/6-how-do-the-political-parties-make-you-feel/

What happened to the Tea Party? Where did it go? Why did it all but vanish? How did it come to pass that the party, the movement, that until five minutes ago was central to the conversation about politics in America has been wiped from the nation’s consciousness?

During President Obama’s first term and into his second, the Tea Party was the proverbial bull in the china shop: a highly energetic, highly disruptive, and highly potent political force that no one was able to tame. Consisting generally of right wing Republicans, the Tea Party was the first twenty-first century faction that was genuinely divisive. Tea Partiers caused an early and significant fissure in one of America’s two major political parties, proving impossible for mainstream Republicans effectively to control.

John Boehner, who became Speaker of the House in 2011, had the miserable experience of discovering that Tea Partiers, ostensibly his fellow Republicans, were impossible to lead. Instead, to his astonishment, he found himself dealing with a band of grassroots, anti-authority populists who shared nothing so much as a deep distrust of the American establishment.

Sound familiar? Turns out the Tea Party had a baby. The baby’s name is Donald. In other words, the Tea Party has by no means vanished. Rather it has a new face – the face of Donald Trump. Trump’s most fervent followers share many of the same characteristics and demographics that six or eight years ago typified Tea Partiers.

Tea Partiers were, famously, leaderless. Now they are not.

Robert Mugabe has insisted on staying president of Zimbabwe for almost 30 years. Bashir al-Assad is dead set on holding on to power in Syria, despite having wreaked death and destruction on his country and its people. Vladimir Putin has been either president or prime minister of Russia since 2000, and shows no signs of going anywhere far into the future. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already been either president or prime minister of Turkey since 2003, but gives every intention of plowing on with his plan to consolidate and strengthen his powers still further. And while China’s president Xi Jinping has been in office only since 2012, by every measure he has strengthened his hand since then, eliminating or muting much of his opposition, and suggesting he wants more of what he has for more, many more, years to come.

Seems power is intoxicating. Addictive. Habit forming. Hungry making.

Churchill, predictably, put it perfectly. Speaking about Hitler before the House of Commons in 1938, he remarked, “The might behind the German Dictator increases daily. His appetite may grow with eating.”

Trump has been attacked for his attacks on whoever is the other. For criminalizing the Clintons, for demeaning and debasing women, for slandering Mexicans, for excluding Muslims, for mocking Americans including war heroes and the disabled… I could go on. No need to though, for the full freight of his fury is easy to see, for example in the raging speech he delivered yesterday, in Florida.

But the frightening thing about Trump’s rhetoric is less what it reveals about what he thinks of others, than what it reveals about what he thinks of himself. He is a full-fledged, all-out, no-holds-barred messianic megalomaniac.

Yesterday’s speech smacked of nothing so much as Trump as savior – Trump promising members of his “movement” to deliver them from danger. “I take all these slings and arrows for you,” he shouted.  “I take them for our movement so we can have our country back.” Only he can do this he insisted, play the part of martyr, to redeem us, to save us from ourselves and from the evils in the ether.

At one point he went so far as to invoke heaven and hell. “Many of my friends and many political experts warned me,” he intoned, “that this campaign would be a journey to hell. But they’re wrong. It will be a journey to heaven, because we will help so many people that are so desperately in need of help.”

“A journey to heaven.” When was the last time a prominent American politician told you that he and he alone could take you on a stairway to heaven?

Be forewarned. History tells us that were this man ever to reach the levers of power he would be nothing other than a delusional dictator.

I have seen the future for women leaders in the United States of America – and it’s not Hillary Clinton. Clinton might well become the next American president, the first female American president, but she will do so under a cloud. Notwithstanding the unmitigated ardor of her most fervent supporters, the totally of Clinton’s record is too tarnished for any electoral victory to be entirely celebratory.

Michelle Obama is different altogether. She is unfettered by her political past, which is precisely why she represents the political future.

She is known to have disdained politics before, during, and after her husband entered the political fray. Moreover after she became First Lady, her previous professional accomplishments notwithstanding, Obama spent most of her time behind the White House curtain. Most of her time in the White House she emerged from behind that curtain only to look great and engage in a few activities, every one of which might have been undertaken by First Ladies of a generation or two, or even three or four, ago. Michelle Obama even rejected the part that Jacqueline Kennedy and other predecessors played – that of supremely skilled White House hostess, using the perks of the presidential perch to grease the wheels of politics in Washington.

But during the last half year of her husband’s presidency, Michelle Obama has, for whatever reasons, metamorphosed. As the direct result of two sensational speeches – the first delivered this summer at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the second delivered yesterday, on the stump in Manchester, New Hampshire – she has willfully and deliberately catapulted herself onto the national stage. Moreover, she has done so in her own right, on her own manifest strengths and merits.

It is impossible for me to believe that when her husband’s time in office is over, she will revert to where she was until recently. Michelle Obama has tasted the fruit of political influence, which usually is irresistible.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos. There was just one small problem. The peace deal hammered out under his leadership to end the world’s longest running war – between the Colombian military and Marxist guerrillas – had just gone up in smoke.

How had it happened? Santos had turned greedy. Basking in global approval, including by such luminaries as Pope Francis and President Obama, and reveling in what appeared considerable Colombian support, Santos called for a plebiscite. Despite a long history of national strife on precisely this issue, and despite no need for voter approval to make the peace deal official, Santos was certain he could win and then revel in electoral approbation.

Santos was wrong. He lost. Colombians who voted rejected the peace deal, 50.2 to 49.8 percent. Like Britain’s David Cameron, who was similarly spectacularly unsuccessful in trying to score public approval for a policy he particularly favored (remaining in the European Union), Santos was sure he could win public favor, only to be proven delusional.

On paper, direct democracy seems immensely appealing. It gives voters, ordinary people, the opportunity to say yay or nay on particular policy issues. What could be better? What could be more democratic than having the likes of you and me participate in collective decision making?

Turns out national plebiscites (sometimes called referendums) frequently come out badly. For reasons ranging from who turns out to vote, to how much information voters can secure, to reducing complex choices to simple yes and no answers, they can be risky and even dangerous, ironically undermining the democracies they are intended to secure.

Leaders who use plebiscites for whatever ostensible reason should be viewed with suspicion. For followers who vote in plebiscites cannot reasonably be trusted to do so wisely and well.

So, here’s the question. Why is this monstrous Trump embarrassment different from other monstrous Trump embarrassments?

Why has this monstrous Trump embarrassment prompted the Republican establishment to cluck-cluck about his gross, offensive behavior when other examples of his gross, offensive behavior produced only stony silence? Why has this monstrous Trump embarrassment incited the likes of Utah’s Representative Jason Chaffetz to declare, “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president,” when other examples of Trump’s gross, offensive behavior did not? Why has this monstrous Trump embarrassment forced him finally to apologize for behavior that was gross and offensive when other similar such behaviors resulted in no mea culpa whatsoever?

So, here’s the answer. This monstrous Trump embarrassment was about sex. Get it? It was about sex.

The humiliation of women?! Give me a break! Trump has humiliated women on countless previous occasions. Just as he has humiliated or tried to other groups who failed to live up to his imagined white, Christian, slim, masculine/feminine ideal – Muslims and Mexicans to take just two screamingly obvious examples.

Aggression against others?! Give me a break! Trump has incited aggression on countless previous occasions, at his rallies, on the stump, references to guns and shootings and violence par for his course.

Using foul language?! Give me a break! Should we be surprised – shocked, shocked, shocked? – that this course, vulgar individual has used course, vulgar language in what he thought the privacy of a personal conversation?

No, what’s different here are Trump’s overt, blatant, utterly direct references to sex. To women’s sexual parts, to his own sexual preferences and proclivities, to his previous sexual encounters and experiences, to his explicit pleasure in what to him is sensually and sexually stimulating.

Notwithstanding all that’s come before, it’s sex that’s finally threatening to break this camel’s back. Which goes to show Americans remain Puritans.