Since you are speaking to me, my feeling is that "It could always be worse" is no way to approach the election when the country has been on a downward course for the past seven or so years. Trump will try to reverse things. She won't even try. She's campaigning on the myopic platform called "Why change? Everything is great right now!"
I disagree with the premise that the country has been on a downward spiral for the last 7-8 years.
I think what happened is that almost 30 years of Republican and pseudo-Republican economic policy caught up to us, and almost caused the second Republican Great Depression (Hebert Hoover, another Republican's, lack of regulation of the economy and advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism is part of what caused the first one in the 1930s.). Deregulation, a lack of government oversight and enforcement of anti-trust laws, and so on and so forth almost unquestionably are what caused the big banking problems that led to the Great Recession. Bush's tax cuts for the rich didn't help either- exploding deficits without stimulating the economy.
President Obama got in there and started cleaning things up. He avoided the economic depression that economists thought was unavoidable. He held it to just a severe recession and then started making things better. We've been out of a recession for a while now. The stock market came back up, unemployment came down, and things are rolling again to some extent. Are they as good as in the 20th century? Probably not. There are still problems. But when you consider what he inherited and the total lack of cooperation from the Republican Congress, I think he did a pretty good job. Plus, one has to consider that there were pre-existing trends towards certain things that already had people predicting that America was going to slide from being an economic super-power to simply one of five or six strong regional economic centers in the world- that's just the arc of history, and a single President could not have done anything to totally avoid that.
We needed tougher regulations on Wall-Street, and the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. We did, when the Democrats had Congress, get the Dodd-Frank bill through, which was a nice start, although it didn't go far enough and the Republicans have subsequentially dismantled parts of it. Similarly, we tried to put in a strong Consumer Protection Agency, but the Republicans neutered it, so we got a weak one, but at least we have one now. And when they blocked Elizabeth Warren as the head of the CPA, she ran for Senate and now is doing a great job on key Senate committees. Did you see her grilling the CEO of Wells Fargo the other day? Warren is a great woman. Frankly, I wish we could make her President, but since we can't right now, I'd settle for taking back the Senate and making her part of the majority on committees rather than a minority voice.
In the 00s, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, which basically meant eliminating it, for most intents and purposes. Democrats blocked that and have thwarted continued efforts. In fact, we now are achieving a growing consensus in the Democratic Party that we should expand benefits, not cut them. People pay FICA tax their entire working lives, and they deserve to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits when they retire or become disabled- they paid to support the last generation, the next generation should pay it to support them and be supported by their children the same way. In the old days, you used to have a situation where people could rely on savings, pensions, and Social Security as sort of a three-legged stool of retirement, but most middle class jobs don't offer pensions, a lot of the middle class has sunk into a paycheck to paycheck situation because of Republican attacks on unions and deregulation of corporations (They are even against a living wage), so people live paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to save- which means that we need to preserve Social Security. And Democrats are holding the line and doing it.
And, while it'd be nice to have true universal health care like in the UK, it wasn't politically achievable here, so President Obama had to compromise with the Affordable Care Act. And while Republicans and Republican-leaning Democrats removed the public option, the Republican dominated Supreme Court removed the Medicaid expansion for states that didn't want it, and Republicans refused to even consider reasonably reforms based on how the thing was doing on the ground and spent their time voting and re-voting to repeal the ACA something like 70 times in the House as if they had nothing better to do- DESPITE all that, we have insured 13 million people who were not previously ensured. We're saving lives and improving the quality of people's lives.
On foreign policy, Bush ignored terrorism for his first 9 months and didn't meet with his terrorism czar once. When someone handed him a report about how an attack by Bin Laden on the US was imminent, he told that person that they had covered their asses and to leave him alone. This was despite the Bill Clinton people emphasizing and reemphasizing repeatedly during the transition to the Bush administration that terrorism was the number one threat to our nation.
Then, when the terrorists struck, Bush overreacted and decided to chuck the 4th amendment and the Geneva Convention out the window and embark on illegal dragnet surveillance of telephones and Internet access, and illegal detainment and torture of people. Obama didn't reverse enough of that, but he did at least ditch torture.
What is going on in Iraq is not and was never Obama's fault- Obama opposed that war. Bush destabilized the region and created ISIS. ISIS's symbol should be a Republican elephant, because that's who they have to thank for their existence.
The Obama administration has built bridges with Iran and got us unprecedented access to their nuclear program. People may not like that treaty, but it's creating a safer world. And if Iran goes back on the deal, we'll know about it and be no worse off than had we never signed it.
We are certainly not problem free, but most of our problems stem from Republican policies and Republicans blocking the fixes that we need. Democrats are doing the best we can.
And, you know, when we talk about immigration, you know why Trump gets to go on his rants against it and scapegoat anyone who isn't a white male? It's because people want to come to this country. You know why they want to come? It's because, despite all of our problems, we are still one of the nicer places one could live in the world. I mean, apart from maybe some of Western Europe or Canada, what other places can really compete with what America offers?
We don't need to make this country great again, this country already is great. Trump thinks we're a third world country. Trump is wrong. There are things that could be better, but there are also some things that are going well, and it would be a big mistake to let Trump just blow everything up and start over.
Hillary Clinton offers a measured approach that'll keep the good and incrementally improve the band and the things that are good but not as good as they could be. It may not be the massive change people are clamoring for, but they had their chance to elect Bernie Sanders (I vote for Bernie in the primary) and they didn't, so Hillary Clinton's incremental approach is what we have left if want to keep what's going well and improve the rest. Trump is wrong when he says we're a third world country, but if we elect him, he may make us one- look at all the bankruptcies he's gone through with his businesses.
Now, of course, Clinton can't do it on her own. Hopefully, we'll elect her and give her a Democratic Senate. I wish we could give her a Democratic House, but it's not realistic because state governments were strongly Republican after the 2010 census when they got to redraw the districts for 2012-2021, and the majority of the people in the country who voted for the House at least one (2012, I think), voted for Democratic House candidates and somehow got a Republican House majority. But if people elect Democrats to their state and local governments consistently, after the next census in 2020, we'll start working to improve the board and create fair maps that will allow us to retake the House in 2022.
Sometimes in politics, you have to play the long game. It's not fun, but it's often the only way things really get done.
Clinton is not the ideal candidate, but she is 10x better than Trump. And those are the two choices I had. If anyone doesn't like them, don't blame me, I voted for Bernie in my party's primary, and told anyone who'd listen not to vote for Trump in the other party's primary. Now we have the two choices we have, and Clinton is clearly the better of the two general election contenders in my book.
