TRUMP’S ACE

Everything in America is pretty much hunky dory, President Barack Hussein Obama said in his speech at the Democrat National Convention, during which he mentioned the candidate he was endorsing 43 times, himself 119 times.

Most Americans don’t agree.

The people running the country don’t really care what happens to them, say 82 percent of respondents in a Harris poll. Most people in power are trying to take advantage of people like them, say 70 percent.

An alliance of politicians, media pundits, lobbyists and interest groups runs the country for their own gain, say 83 percent, according to pollster Pat Caddell.

“The old ways don’t work. It’s time for radical change,” agreed more than 70 percent in Quinnipiac swing state polls in July.

Donald Trump, who isn’t one, got the Republican nomination by promising to blow up the system Hillary Clinton epitomizes.

It’s odd Trumpkins selected The Donald as their champion, because he and Hillary are so much alike. Both have oversized egos unjustified by meager accomplishments. Both lie constantly, abuse subordinates, think rules are for the little people. Filling their pockets has been for both their top priority.

Their political views are similar. The Donald is making his pitch to disgruntled Sandersistas and the white working class Democrats abandoned, hoping hatred of Hillary will hold a betrayed Republican base.

“Every election, especially a presidential election, is a referendum on one simple question:

Do you want the status quo or do you want change?” says Trumpkin John Nolte. “Once that question is answered, an almost equally important question is asked: If you want change, is the alternative acceptable?”

If 2016 is a referendum on our selfish, arrogant, clueless, corrupt and incompetent ruling class, Trump will win.

Fortunately for Hillary, Trump wants the election to be about Trump. Every day or so he’ll say something outrageous, as when he picked a fight with the parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004.

A decent human being with a modicum of political sense would commend Capt. Khan for his service, commiserate with his parents on their loss, perhaps suggest that if Hillary hadn’t supported the Iraq war, Capt. Khan might be alive today.

Not the Donald. “I’ve made sacrifices too,” he said, as if sleeping around while dodging the draft was comparable to the death of a son in combat.

The Khan controversy also permitted the “mainstream” media to downplay mounting evidence of Hillary’s criminality, and her escalating lies about it.

“What is amazing is how Trump and his surrogates can take any bad situation and find an innovative, groundbreaking way to make it worse,” said Jim Geraghty of National Review.

The upside for The Donald is during his feud with the Khans, two more instances of his unfitness for office were mostly overlooked. He confused Hillary’s running mate, VA Sen. Tim Kaine, with former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean. He declared Russia would not invade Crimea, which it did in 2014.

Her selection of Kaine indicates Hillary plans to “pivot” to the center, reminds us she’s as awful a politician as she is a person.

Sandersistas don’t like Kaine because he’s what passes for a “moderate” Democrat. But to be Hillary’s Veep, Kaine backtracked on abortion and gun control, the issues that made him seem moderate. The only speech at the Democrat convention worse than his was hers.

Hillary is stuck advocating a third term for Barack Obama’s policies, which is a bad place for her to be. But if she accepts that Americans really, really dislike her – and stops trying to persuade them they shouldn’t — she should win.

Hillary should have chosen Admiral James Stavridis as her running mate. If she gets another 3:00 a.m. call, as in Benghazi, she could say she’d hand the phone to Jim. Stavridis has the cred to pound Trump on foreign policy, which Hillary and Kaine don’t.

Her panicky reaction to the Wikileaks email dump indicates Hillary may blow what might have been her best issue. All Americans should worry about Trump’s man crush on Vladimir Putin.

But after Trump said, in his usual loutish way, that the Russians should make public the emails Hillary didn’t turn over, her campaign manager went on the cable news shows to say this was tantamount to treason.

If the deleted emails were as innocuous as Hillary says – about yoga lessons and recipes and such – it doesn’t matter a damn if the Russians have them. If they contained important national secrets, then Hillary has done a bad bad thing, and is lying about it.

What really worries Hillary is the Russians may have emails which implicate her in soliciting bribes. If our government knows this, and has concealed it, that’s a bigger deal than if the Russians – via Wikileaks – reveal it.

This election will be won by who most Americans dislike least. Trump’s runaway mouth will give us more reasons to dislike him. Hillary’s prospects will improve if she stops reminding us why we dislike her.

And that means getting out of our sight. She should lock herself in a closet in Chappaqua, conduct her campaign through surrogates who have the credibility to attack Donald Trump.  But her ego won’t permit her to do that.

So she’ll be in America’s face worse than Trump, with that blackboard-screech of a voice earning her nickname of Her Shrillness.  Can’t beat it for irony that she is Trump’s ace in the presidential hole.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  He is the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.