The ugly spectacle of the U.S. election is spilling over into the transition with new conspiracy theories about Russia and Donald Trump, as the world looks on in shock and dismay, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.
By Graham E. Fuller
It had been an exhausting, interminable 18-20 months of presidential campaigning during which much of the business of thoughtful American governance had to yield space to the riveting follies of politics. Yet most other countries in the world, not locked into dictators or kings for life, conduct their elections far more briskly and get on with business.
Canada with its parliamentary system extended its last federal election campaign to 11 weeks; many were angered that the campaign had been extended even that far beyond the more traditional seven or eight weeks it takes to hold a federal election.
Republican presidential nominee (now President-elect) Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. (Photos by Gage Skidmore and derivative by Krassotkin, Wikipedia)
One might have hoped too, that whatever the electoral cost and fatigue had been in the U.S., the process would at least eventually distill it all down to the finest of candidates, tempered and honed in the exhausting demands of the campaign, to now represent America’s best. Instead we got what was demonstrably far from America’s finest — two candidates competing for the honor of who was hated the least. Election night left almost no one truly inspired, enriched or empowered by the outcome.
One might also have expected that by now, hallelujah, it would at least be all over, leaving nothing but a few sober post-mortem analyses of events. But even here the agony is exquisitely drawn out in a two-month interregnum, closer to purgatory, between the election and the inauguration.
The campaign indeed now seems far from over as we enter a new, extended, and possibly uglier period of speculation and spectacle in the parade of contestants now modeling for high office. Here again this interregnum seems unduly prolonged and messy compared to a parliamentary system where a back-bench opposition steps in ready to take over within days after election results…