Five months from tonight, the United States will have a new president.
American voters have two choices - Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Trump sewed up the nomination for the Republican Party when he outlasted all of the other candidates while Clinton was declared the winner for the Democratic Party nomination by the Associated Press on Monday, having amassed enough delegates over Bernie Sanders to make Tuesday's decision in California irrelevant.
With just those two to choose from, there are likely many Americans, not to mention citizens from around the world, who would like Barack Obama to run for a third term as president.
By law, however, he cannot, thanks to the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids anyone to be elected more than twice as president.
So Trump and Clinton it is.
The night of a presidential election is always historic, but this Nov. 8 will shine brighter than any previous result. Voters will either choose a woman to rise to the highest political office in the U.S. for the first time in history or they will pick a polarizing candidate unprecedented in American presidential politics, a brash businessman and TV star willing to defy his own party and its platform to seize the nomination.
The most frequent complaint from voters during presidential elections is that the candidates are too much alike, that they are simply different sides of the same coins.
They may have differences of style and perspective, but they have much more in common with one another. Middle-aged or older. Well-educated at elite schools. Rich or at least significantly above average, in both annual earnings and net worth. Confident. Articulate. Heterosexual. Married. White. Christian.
To become U.S. president, those attributes are almost essential. Obama broke two of them - his race and his age (he was just 47 in 2008) - but an emphatic check mark could be placed next to everything else.
On the surface, Trump and Clinton couldn't seem more opposite. She's a highly experienced political operative (first lady, senator, secretary of state), a detail-obsessed policy wonk who believes in the law and the political process. He's never held office, cares more about winning than being right and openly despises judges and government leaders who disagree with him. Clinton is one of the best and brightest. Trump is one of the most loathsome and loud. Naturally, they disagree on most important issues, everything from the economy to individual rights.
Beneath that thin veneer, however, and they could be brother and sister. They are only one year apart in age - Trump is 69, Clinton 68. They both have written books that made them well-known and further contributed to their already substantial wealth.
They both live in New York state. They both attended top schools - Clinton has a Yale law degree, Trump graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Trump's high-flying business career is notorious, Clinton's time as a member of the board of directors of Wal-Mart is not so well-known.
They see eye-to-eye on several key points, starting with their outsized ambition for power and prestige.
They both say they are fine mixing church and state, a stance that makes some Democrats uncomfortable. On the other side of the ledger, Trump appears to agree with Clinton on slamming the brakes on free trade, hiking taxes on the rich and making it easier for people to vote, none of which pleases traditional Republicans. Meanwhile, as one CNN analyst argued, both Trump and Clinton would likely stay the current course on America's dealings with Iran, Russia, Israel and the Islamic State.
Finally, over the next five months, both Trump and Clinton will spend hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money in a cut-throat campaign for the presidency. Clinton will pretend to be civil, even as her campaign office resorts to the usual dirty tricks, while Trump will make no such effort to be nice but will gain more attention whenever he happens to demonstrate kindness and understanding.
As usual, both the Republican and the Democratic candidate will make their pitch to voters by stressing how different they are from the other. And, as usual, what the candidates say on the campaign trail is not what Americans will get once the new president is sworn in next January.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
