Letter: Washington needs outsider

Our two presidential candidates share one serious character flaw: lying frequently.

Donald Trump’s lies exaggerate past accomplishments and future promises of corrections he would make immediately upon election.

Hillary Clinton lies about how productive she has been, as well as her serious failures in government positions. Her perpetually secretive nature must be to hide wrongdoing; what else might explain it?

Interesting is how the two party’s campaigns react to their candidates’ multiple shortcomings. Republicans are widely disgusted by Trump’s unending disrespectful pronouncements on persons and groups. Recent disclosure of his 11-year-old oral blunder on “groping” caused numerous Republican big-wigs to retract support, throwing their campaign into chaos.

Compare this with Democrats’ enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton as the “most qualified person ever nominated for office of president.” Doesn’t the contrast tell us something critically important about the parties’ concept of qualification? On this logic, Bernie Sanders, who ran a close race against Clinton, is the second-best qualified candidate, with a paper-thin resume at his age.

Seventy-plus percent of Americans rightly believe our nation is on a wrong course — national debt, economic growth, and moral decay. Clinton promises to build on this wet-sand base of Obama’s. It will take a Washington outsider as president if we are to upset the long-ruling, self-serving, clique now in power.

This story was originally published October 27, 2016 at 9:37 PM with the headline "Letter: Washington needs outsider."