Philadelphia: And so, into the night – after Cleveland, Donald Trump, like a lost character from The Simpsons, offers himself, alone, as an unreal fix to very real problems in today's America; after Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton offers variations on a questionable status quo, and hopes enough will rub off on her from Obama and Biden to win her the big house.
Oddly, for two candidates who have been part of the American consciousness for decades, there's a bit of a political orphan in each.
Trump, the angry one, has been abandoned by the Republican establishment – and is a danger to himself; Clinton, the insecure one, is being crowded by the Democratic establishment – lest she harm herself.
For the next three months, we'll be transfixed by a contest between these two, the most unpopular or unappealing candidates ever to seek the US presidency, in a struggle that's less about party affiliation than it is about a voter's sense of whether they are winners or losers in a new and rapidly-changing America.
Trump pitches a portrait of apocalyptic America to those who believe they made America great, whites who sense they are being cheated as immigrants snatch their jobs; factories go offshore; and every Muslim is a clear and present danger.
Clinton counters – diversity and inclusiveness makes America greater than ever.
Just look at the Democratic convention – the African-American Michelle Obama spoke of playing with her daughters on the lawns of the White House, a national monument built by slaves; and the first Jewish American to win a presidential primary contest was introduced by the first Muslim member of congress.
Trump will stop the drift – he's the "law and order" candidate who denounces the first black president as "the most ignorant" in the country's history and in a platform the likes of which has not been seen in US history, he has shredded the narrative that American exceptionalism comes from its embrace of immigrants.
By her very gender, Clinton's candidacy represents more change and her policies offer more still – fewer guns, more immigrants; and acknowledgements that black lives do matter.
The wagons are circled; this is war. Listen to Massachusetts Senator and Clinton surrogate, Elizabeth Warren: "Donald Trump's America is an America of fear and hate; an America where we all break apart – whites against blacks against Latinos; Christians against Muslims and Jews; straights against gays; everyone against immigrants. Race, religion, heritage, gender – the more factions the better."
Straddling the middle ground at the Democratic convention on Wednesday evening, Democrat turned Republican turned independent and billionaire former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, urged a vote for Clinton with a passionate plea – "we need a problem solver, not a bomb thrower".
Polls are published at a furious rate, but most are about how voters feel now – not in three months time. Also, the election is not a pure popular vote – a body known as the Electoral College appoints the president. The college has 538 electors apportioned among the states based on population and a candidate needs a majority of 270 to secure the presidency.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia does try to look over the horizon, and by his current reckoning, Clinton has it in the bag – with 347 college votes that are safe, likely or leaning to her; by contrast, Trump has only 191 votes that are safe, likely or leaning to him.
But Sabato hedges, kind-of: "If the election were held today, it would almost certainly be closer than that – and Trump could very well win. But the election is still about 100 days away [and] we still see Clinton with an edge."
Another analyst who models the data to predict a November outcome is the respected Nate Silver, of website Five Thirty Eight, who writes this week with an abundance of caution – "for now, we can say that Clinton isn't just going to glide to victory. Trump has a real chance at becoming president, and although Clinton is still favoured, she's already had a bumpy ride".
Trump picked up a post-convention bounce this week, by which he's nudging ahead of Clinton by about one point in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls – Clinton can expect a similar bounce in the coming days.
As interesting as the polls are the predictions of pundits, conservative and progressive, and their calculations on a dozen or so battleground states where the real war will be fought (in about 40 other states, US elections are mere window-dressing).
Michael Moore, the outspoken documentary maker, is adamant the next president will be Trump.
Muddling his metaphors, Moore predicts Trump will be carried by a Brexit-like vote in the Rustbelt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; and by the so-called "Jesse Ventura effect" – if Minnesota could elect a professional wrestler as governor in the 1990s, then all of America is capable of electing Trump, who Moore describes as "this wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath".
Moore bills Trump's imminent win as "The Last Stand of the Angry White Man".
On his blog, he writes: "There is a sense that power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the 'Feminazi', the thing that as Trump says, 'bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds', has conquered us – and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we're supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it'll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders!"
In The Washington Post, Chris Cillizza picks up on the Brexit analogy and invokes Lewis Carroll to take a stab at what's going on – "amid all of that empirical evidence, it's important to remember that we may be through the looking glass, politically speaking.
"Meaning that there are bits of evidence everywhere – from Trump's remarkable run to the Republican nomination to the Brexit vote – that suggest that not only the old way of doing things, but also the old way of measuring successes and failures is no longer operative."
Considered by some as a thinking conservative, commentator George Will was one of the few Republicans who stood on principle in the face of the Trump juggernaut – he resigned from the party.
Will now urges Clinton to mount an unorthodox version of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign – Reagan won by offering himself as a safe choice over the incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter. And, he writes, she can take advantage of an inbuilt flaw in the Trump persona – he radiates anger and the last angry man to be elected president was Andrew Jackson in the 1830s.
Will figures that Clinton could take Florida, a state that historically is more Republican than the rest of the country, but these days is rated as a swing state; and he quotes pre-convention polls in which she was leading by good margins in Virginia and Colorado. Mormons are disgusted by Trump, he writes, and they could deliver Arizona, a state in which they account for 11 per cent of voters but which has voted for a Democratic president only twice since World War II.
Based on an averaging of polls by Real Clear Politics and with the exception of Florida, which is a virtual tie, Clinton leads by margins of 0.8 per cent to 5.6 per cent in seven other swing states – Ohio, 0.8 per cent; Pennsylvania, 4.4 per cent; Michigan, 5.2 per cent; New Hampshire, 3.7 per cent; Virginia, 5.3 per cent; North Carolina, 2 per cent; and Wisconsin, 5.6 per cent.
The most recent New York Times/CBS poll has Trump ahead of Clinton, 53-38, among white voters who have not been to college. It's the other way around with whites with a degree – Clinton is in front, 47-37.
Democratic pollster Mark Mellman explains: "[Trump's] strength is concentrated almost exclusively with non-college-educated whites. And when you put together college-educated whites with minority communities and other groups that he had assaulted and insulted, it's a pretty big majority of the country [that's against him]."
And yet, we keep hearing that this is a close contest.
If the message from Cleveland was that strongman Trump would belt the US into shape; from Philadelphia, it was that change-maker Clinton would negotiate, cajole and shame Americans into finding the best in themselves.
The convention portrait of Clinton reveals a remarkable activist life – always finding something that needs to be fixed, at the grass roots for women and children, or in the geopolitical big-picture, in whatever war is in the news, global warming or whatever.
In video presentations and speeches by relatives of victims of war and gun violence, Trump seemed always to be talking about going to the coalface – Clinton was already at the coalface. Trump was getting off on grief while Clinton was in the room with the victims – trying to salve grief; trying to get something done.
When the flaws are airbrushed and the endearing tributes from the likes of Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived horrific injuries from an attempted assassination in 2011, and from the Mothers of the Movement, whose children died as a result of questionable police conduct, wash over, the response should be an immediate: "I'm with her." Yes?
Well, there's a problem. Selling Clinton is a bit like selling Obamacare to Americans. Display and discuss each aspect of the candidate or the healthcare system, and they like it – but bundle them all up as this person or that health scheme, and they baulk.
In an appearance that was more a love-letter than convention speech, former president Bill Clinton tried to shake off the perception of his wife as a status-quo candidate, describing her grit as a reformer and billing her as "the best darned change-maker I ever met in my entire life".
The former president who wants to be the country's "first gentleman", said of the would-be president who had been a first lady: "You could drop her in any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way, she will have made it better."
"Making it better" means that Clinton will have to convince a good number of traditional Democratic voters that she can do more for them than Trump might – their plight is unemployment, wage stagnation and social disenfranchisement; and Clinton's challenge is to convince them, not only that as a Washington insider she was not an architect of their crises, but that as president she can do something about it.
Either by winning or losing, Clinton and Trump will reveal the extent to which white people in particular have lost faith in the American dream – Republicans and Democrats alike. In that, the challenge for Trump is easier than for Clinton because she is the insider; he's not.
But in rejecting the Trump depiction of modern America, there's a risk that Clinton will be seen to be rejecting or dismissing a malaise that is as real as David Brooks describes in The New York Times: "Americans are no longer confident in their national project. They no longer trust their institutions or have faith in their common destiny. This is a crisis of national purpose. It's about personal identity and the basic health of communal life. Americans' anger and pessimism are more fundamental than anything that can be explained by GDP statistics."
That said, an error of the Democrat's convention planning might have been that, in their determination to defend the Obama record, the overall impact was more of the convention as cheerleader for the status quo than a heartfelt understanding of a need for change in the face of great frustration and division in the country. In this context, Clinton policy positions that might deliver substantive change, if executed, were forced on her by the success of the hard-fought primaries campaign by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
The insider-outsider element of this campaign can't be understated.
Prominent Republicans have run a mile from Trump, to the extent that he has virtually no boldface named surrogates. By contrast, Clinton has President and Michelle Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden, Sanders and Bloomberg and a promised, but yet to be unveiled, team of disaffected GOP big wigs who will campaign for her.
That could backfire – Trump's followers are so angered, that they are more inclined to believe what he says than to listen to others. At the same time, some will have chosen to believe Sander's depiction of Clinton as the ultimate insider in the course of the Democratic fight for the nomination – if only because Trump told them that Sanders was right.
By any conventional measure Trump should have been politically dead in the water long ago, with any of his nutty pronouncements serving as the bullet – from building a border wall to banning Muslims to inviting Moscow to spy on Hillary Clinton. His obsession with his own body parts, his coarse conduct and his treatment of women and various minorities ought to have ended his run, but Trump is still standing.
The insider argument means that Trump is where he is in the polls, simply because he is not Clinton. Her bad numbers accounted for a big pool of "undecided" voters whose numbers are shrinking now, as they move to Trump in a tightening race.
A recent poll found a remarkable 77 per cent of voters believed that Trump would change how Washington works – though only a third of them figured he would be for the better. Only 45 per cent saw Clinton as a change-maker – and only a bit more than half of them thought she would be for the good.
Coming out of the convention, Clinton's challenge is huge – she has to convince a significant number of Americans she is human and trustworthy, and that her husband was right – she is a darned good change-maker and a safe pair of hands.
In this she does have a strength that Americans have observed over the years without seeming to be impressed by it. Here's how Michelle Obama framed it as she reviewed the Clinton life story on Monday night: "There were plenty of moments when Hillary could have decided this work was too hard. She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life. When I think about the kind of president that I want for my girls, that's what I want. And that's why in this election, I'm with her!"
It's true – Clinton has never quit. Question now is, are the American people with her, or are they about to quit?
