When Hillary Clinton is President

 It is now virtually certain that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. That prediction presumably comes true in four weeks. Just four weeks! Even though I read a fair bit about US politics, I’ve seen nothing, neither good advice or bad, about what is expected to happen next—after Clinton has received the majority of electoral votes and become president elect. Nor have I seen advice as to what she is to do during that period before being sworn in and during her first months in office.

   I attribute this dual lack to the great limit of my reading (subjective) but also to the fact that everyone is caught up in the Clinton-Trump pursuit of victory on November 8 (objective).

   But what about the day after and during the four years after that? Isn’t it time to comment about that future? There is a huge cluster of issues vastly more important than the who said what to whom chit chat that is now prologue to the election, with its outcome virtually foregone.

    My first comment about this narrow focus is the stuffy one that deplores the limited future of the views of the punditry. The reply will surely be that we are journalists, with the job of writing and commenting about what is going on now; we are neither historians, talking about how that came about, nor is it our job to predict the future—as distinguished from telling us what the polls and other current events portend about the future. Nor are we in the business of advising what various actors should be doing tomorrow and the day after.

   I certainly have a lot of opinions about what Hillary Clinton should do when she is president and I expect that I will make use of my blog to give expression to them. For now, however, I will wait with the rest of commentators for the confirmation that the United States will have, for the first time, a woman as the country’s president.