CLEVELAND — This is the stage of the presidential campaign at which newspapers and their hired opinion-mongers issue their candidate endorsements, advising their readers on how they should vote. Accordingly, today’s Forum cover announced this news organization’s official endorsement for president, as determined by our editorial board.
I’ll note that I have long thought that newspaper endorsements for president are a mistake, for two reasons:
One, because it moves us from reporting on the news to being part of the news and decreases readers’ faith in what we report and how. An endorsement from a major newspaper always becomes a news story, as this one will – part of the national campaign coverage. And even though we go to great lengths to separate our news coverage from our opinion pages, it is difficult to convince readers that the candidate we endorse does not get preferential treatment in our news coverage.
And two, because I have yet to meet the reader who breathlessly awaits our endorsement so that they will know how to vote.
Sure, if you ask readers whether they want us to publish presidential endorsements, the majority will say yes. But that’s not because they are having trouble deciding what to do on Election Day. No … what they want us to do is endorse their candidate, because they believe our endorsement will help him or her win. Which, of course, takes us back to Reason One.
Regular readers of these pages will not be stunned by the identity of our endorsed candidate. They might be a little surprised at where my vote landed though – which was nowhere.
When the time came to vote after our endorsement discussion, I abstained. But not because I do not intend to vote in November, or because I’m advising that you not vote, or that you cast your ballot for a write-in with no chance of winning.
Quite the contrary.
I did consider the possibility of not voting, I’ll admit. But either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be president of the United States come Jan. 20, and whether we like it or not, we all need to participate in the process, to stand up and be counted.
Here’s my problem with that: I believe both these candidates to be so deeply flawed that I cannot support a full-throated endorsement for either one, and I would be embarrassed to offer one. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Donald Trump in 2020, and remain embarrassed by each decision. I fully expect to be similarly chagrined this time around, but I won’t know for sure where my vote will land until I walk into the booth on Nov. 5. Neither will you, because I’m keeping it to myself.
I do have some thoughts that might help me, though, and perhaps help you – particularly if you are thinking of sitting this one out.
First of all: Don’t.
Second: Take the long view.
A story in last Sunday’s Plain Dealer by Jeremy Pelzer quoted a University of Akron political science professor who said that increasingly, voters are making their decisions based on whom they dislike, rather than whom they support.
“They hate the other side more than they like their own,” said, J. Cherie Strachan.
A letter writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal put it more pungently: “There is 100 percent agreement in America that half the voters are wrong.”
Both are probably correct, and both reveal the folly in trying to find things they like most – or hate least – in the two candidates.
So my advice is, don’t do either.
Much of the coverage in this campaign has devolved into celebrations and concerns about the personalities of the two candidates. That is not inconsequential, but instead I’m looking four years down the road. Trump, if he wins, will be gone, leaving only his legacy. Harris, if she wins, will have a record she’ll be forced to defend.
Personalities aside, what will that legacy, or that record, look like in four years? There are profound differences in the parties and philosophies each represents. That’s where our focus should be, not on which one we like the best, or the least. Will the country be economically stronger or weaker, more fair or less fair, better positioned internationally or worse, more energy-independent or less, more divided or less?
One thing we know for sure: Broad smiles and intemperate tweets matter less than those issues.
This is not to say that the candidates don’t matter. They do. And each comes with a boatload of shortcomings, expertly (and frighteningly) outlined by Bret Stephens in a recent New York Times column:
“If Trump wins the election, I’ll feel sick. If Harris wins, I’ll feel scared. A Trump victory is going to complete the G.O.P.’s transition to a full-blown MAGA party that trades conservative convictions for illiberal ones. A Harris victory puts an untested leader in the White House at a moment of real menace from ambitious autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran. A Trump victory means the country is again going to go crazy with all the cultural furies he unleashes, both for and against him. A Harris victory means four more years of misbegotten economic policies, like the threat to put controls on prices some federal bureaucrat deems to be too high. A Trump victory is dreadful for Ukraine. A Harris victory could be terrible for Israel. A Trump victory empowers people who don’t accept the results of an election. A Harris victory empowers a candidate who has never won a presidential primary and whose supporters want to jail their political opponent.”
That’s Stephens’ take, as he writes that he cannot vote for either one.
It doesn’t help the rest of us, who must decide.
Over and over, during the past four years, I have delineated the many things I loathe about Trump. I’m still trying to figure out who Harris is.
But all any of us can do is look four years down the road, decide where we think we’ll be after four years of Trump and the Republicans or four years of Harris and the Democrats, make our choice, and live with it.
God help us all.
Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
To reach Ted Diadiun: [email protected]
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