‘There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot’
via Flickr user (cc) TED Conference
A poll released yesterday by The Washington Post /Survey Monkey revealed some shocking news, Hillary Clinton was leading Donald Trump in Texas by one percent. For comparison, in 2012, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 16 points in the state. Although most polls still show Trump with a lead in the Lone Star State, Texas is looking bluer this year than it has in years. In fact, today the Dallas Morning News—a conservative-leaning paper with over 400,000 daily subscribers—endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. This makes her the first Democratic presidential candidate the paper has endorsed in 75 years.
“There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November,” the Dallas Morning News Editorial staff writes. “We recommend Hillary Clinton.” The paper drew a stark contrast between Clinton’s experience versus her opponent. “Unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has experience in actual governance, a record of service and a willingness to delve into real policy. Resume vs. resume, judgment vs. judgment, this election is no contest.” The paper also believes that many of the criticisms leveled at Clinton are unfounded attacks by partisan hacks. “Her being cleared of crimes by investigation after investigation has no effect on these political hyenas; they refuse to see anything but conspiracies and cover-ups. We reject the politics of personal destruction. Clinton has made mistakes and displayed bad judgment, but her errors are plainly in a different universe than her opponent’s.”
The paper recently issued a harsh takedown of Trump’s candidacy entitled “Donald Trump is no Republican,” and didn’t hold back in their endorsement of Clinton. “Trump’s values are hostile to conservatism. He plays on fear—exploiting base instincts of xenophobia, racism and misogyny—to bring out the worst in all of us, rather than the best. His serial shifts on fundamental issues reveal an astounding absence of preparedness. And his improvisational insults and midnight tweets exhibit a dangerous lack of judgment and impulse control.”
In their endorsement, the Dallas Morning News drew a strict apples-to-apples comparison of the candidates in an election cycle where false equivalencies run rampant. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman made a clear example of this media bias earlier this week. “If [Trump] manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream.” While Krugman sees most of the criticisms of Clinton to be based in innuendo. “Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.”
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