Clinton and Trump: America decides between 2 stark visions

A high turnout, fear and excitement marked a long and fateful US election day on Tuesday, as two contrasting visions of the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump collided at the ballot box.
Unlike previous elections, this one was more personal for many voters. Some Arab-Americans who could tip the outcome in few battleground states spoke to Arab News of the “need” to vote.
America’s long day witnessed long lines of voters in key states who gathered from early morning, with some waiting with their coffees, pets and work laptops to cast a vote.
But not everyone was equally excited about the vote, and some were more driven by the fear of the alternative in their support for one of the candidates.
David Shor, a conservative voter in New York, says: “I guess this election offers no real clear opportunities for positive change. We have one candidate who fundamentally disrespects the USA’s place in the global arena, and its values at home (Trump), the other at least respects and cherishes both (Clinton).”
He adds: “Even if we can’t count on an agenda that would depart from some of the failed Obama initiatives, we at least can have someone who won’t seek a departure of decades in bipartisan norms.”
For Arab Americans, this was personal and in States such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio, it surely mattered. Luma Al-Masarweh, an Arab-American voter in Ohio says: “I not only hope but need Hillary Clinton to win. This goes beyond my stance as a feminist or my belief that she is much more capable to lead this country than her opponents. I need Hillary to win because previously white-washed Arab-Americans are actually subjected to unfair government treatment, hard economic conditions, racial profiling and religious prosecution in the U.S, especially after 9/11.”
Luma sees in this vote “a reassurance as Arab- Americans that we still belong here, that we aren’t the new-‘underdogs’ and that history isn’t going to repeat itself.”
Another Arab-American voter, Dima El-Charif, stood in line in the early hours of the morning in Virginia, this is her first vote as a US citizen. “For me, there’s pride in having the chance to choose a president, despite my options... I’m definitely concerned over the outcome of this election” she says.
The image of how the US will be viewed by the world is at stake in this ballot, in El-Charif’s opinion. However, she says “the worst part is the doubt I have that Hillary Clinton, the woman I voted for, might be just a dogmatic hawk disguising herself as a bi-partisan grandma.”
Whether it’s Trump or Clinton, however, the legacy of US President Barack Obama in the Middle East will loom large for his successor.
Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, says Obama’s foreign policies in the Middle East “were not a central issue in this campaign”, as the President’s popularity rides much higher than both Trump’s and Clinton.
Ibish sees in Hillary Clinton’s critique of Obama’s Middle East approach a “more subtle, but also detectable” narrative than Trump’s.
“She has stressed that her foreign-policy would be more ‘muscular’ that in the last eight years” adds the expert. This “implies that there has been something too risk-averse, if not downright flabby, about the Obama administration’s willingness to project power and, implicitly, use force to assert American interests and imperatives.”
In a potential President Clinton, Ibish sees “enough of a post-Bush (and, hence, post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan) American politician to be very strong about resisting unnecessary deployments of American forces, particularly in the Middle East. But she is also enough of a Cold War era personality that she doesn’t share Obama’s complete rejection of the ‘bad actor’ theory of international relations.” This could manifest itself in countering Russia’s aggressive push in Syria and Iran’s destabilizing efforts, according to Ibish.
On the other hand if Trump should win, Ibish projects that “it’s very hard to speculate what his foreign policy would look like. He would have to begin by trying to figure out how he can be so pro-Moscow and anti-Tehran when Russia and Iran are fighting for the same things, especially in the Middle East.”

Source: Arab News