Washington: Here's the digital dirt - the emails show Clinton as a politician; the video reveals Trump as a sexual predator. America, take your pick - one of these two is your next president.
In a campaign that is as ugly as it is volatile, as vile as it is tempestuous, the candidates don't always get the break they want.
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Sexism claims tarnish Donald Trump
The release of video and audio files that portray Donald Trump as both sexist and misogynist has many US voters questioning his suitability for the Oval Office.
The "grab them by the pussy" video was such a bad-news bombshell for Trump that few noticed what might have been a bad-news bombshell for Clinton in the same news cycle - WikiLeaks began serial downloads of excerpts from her controversial Wall Street speeches and bundles of emails hacked from her campaign's computers.
Trump came off worse. Never really in love with him, many in his party revolted - because they were revolted by his celebration of his own celebrity, as justification for his admitted, odious treatment of women. It was there for all to hear - so crudely expressed and in the unmistakable, very identifiable voice of Donald Trump, New York realtor and reality TV star, and Republican candidate for the presidency of the US.
But if the Trump video and a follow-up audio file, of the worst of his sexism and misogyny from his ramblings with radio shock-jock Howard Stern, were overwhelming, the Clinton speeches and emails, to date, are proving to be underwhelming.
The editorial page of The Washington Post is no great fan of the Clintons. But here's what it had to say of the speeches for which Clinton was paid millions, but stubbornly refuses to release: "the Hillary Clinton that emerges is a knowledgeable, balanced political veteran with sound policy instincts and a mature sense of how to sustain a decent, stable democracy ... The fact that Ms Clinton's eminently reasonable and open-minded words … are being treated as scandalous is the real scandal."
The speeches, like the emails, did reveal Clinton as, well, as a politician - with all the traits of the profession but which, in Clinton, are despised more than in others.
Clinton and her advisers come over as unerringly cautious, as pragmatically flexible and as fretfully suspicious of all who might trip them up on the way to the White House - in particular, Jo Biden, Elizabeth Warren and, most of all, Bernie Sanders.
![Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump kisses a 'Women for Trump' sign at a campaign rally in Florida.](/web/20161017000849im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/1/4/r/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs19bx.png/1476441451428.jpg)
They plot and scheme cynically, as political cells do - sometimes overrating a problem, sometimes underestimating. Obsessive about Clinton's media image, they use her connections and the power of who she is to bend institutional power to their agenda - from the White House to the Democratic National Committee.
In The Atlantic, Russell Berman writes: "The most common thread … is they show a political candidate being political. Not much more, and not much less. Clinton is a mainstream Democrat who admires "moderates" and pragmatism. And yes, she did move to the left to defeat an insurgent liberal opponent."
![WikiLeaks has embarrassed Hillary Clinton.](/web/20161017000849im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/0/l/v/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs19bx.png/1476441451428.jpg)
Like everything else in this campaign, the Trump video and audio files and the Clinton speeches and emails are cast as killer narratives that make the "enemy" - that's how Trump refers to Clinton on the stump - as unfit to be president. And despite Trump's rants to the contrary, the mainstream media are covering the Clinton leaks.
But as a news story, they'll never be, excuse me, as sexy as the Trump stuff. And the drip-feed follow-up accounts by other women who say they were molested by Trump keep the story alive and pertinent.
![Donald Trump posing with women from several of the pageants he owned in 2006.](/web/20161017000849im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/1/1/w/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs19bx.png/1476441451428.jpg)
These two narratives are the mainstays in a campaign that is fast narrowing to a decision about women - about how they are treated by men and about whether one of them is suitable to be president and commander in chief.
Trump's advisers push the Clinton email story relentlessly in media briefings and on TV talk shows, putting their diabolical spin on the contents of the speeches and emails in an effort to suck media oxygen away from attention to Trump's treatment of women.
![A man watches the debate at Seoul railway station in South Korea.](/web/20161017000849im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/z/0/m/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs19bx.png/1476441451428.jpg)
Camp Clinton retaliates on two fronts - playing up Trump's treatment of women and playing up the means by which the speeches and emails were obtained - a Russian sponsored or executed hack, according to US national security agencies - as proof that Trump is a Moscow pawn.
Trump doesn't seem to get, or is in denial over, the visceral response to the video and audio, of likely women voters - who are angered, but not surprised, by what Trump dismisses as harmless "locker room banter".
Within hours of The Washington Post's break on the video on Friday, Canadian author and super-blogger Kelly Oxford tweeted a 14-word account of the first assault she had experienced. She invited other women to do the same - by Monday afternoon, close to 27 million people had responded or visited her Twitter page.
Then on Tuesday, a heart-stopping piece in The New York Times, in which rape victim Michelle Bowdler told a story that, for 30 years, had been a secret shared only with her spouse and her therapist. It's a harrowing account of a break-in at her apartment unrelated to Trump, but for a single word that leaps from the text like kryptonite: pussy..
Hearing the word used by her attacker used so carelessly by Trump in the video troubled her deeply.
She writes: "It is dangerous for us to minimise what it means when someone uses a term that so quickly reduces a human being to an object - it's not just a word."
Trump has difficulty accepting that he is fast losing the support of women since the video became public. Here he is on Fox News on Tuesday - interviewed by Bill O'Reilly:
O'Reilly: "You're behind [in the polls] with women."
Trump: "I'm not sure I believe that."
O'Reilly: "Whether you believe it or not, that's what the polling says."
Trump: "Yeah."
O'Reilly: "Do you have any plan to speak to women directly?"
In answering this question, Trump doesn't get it. In digressing to bread-and-butter policy, he feigns pretence that the video is even an issue - and, instead, he whacks Clinton. He claims that women want to feel safe, but he refuses to address the issue of their personal safety which, wittingly or not, he injected into the debate.
Meanwhile there's a damaging drip-feed of stories that compound Trump's problem.
On Wednesday, People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff wrote a first-person account of Trump going for a woman, as he likes to put it, "like a bitch".
It was about the time of the recording of the "grab them by the pussy" video in 2005, and Stoynoff was at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, to write a first-anniversary piece on Trump's marriage to his current wife Melania - who at the time was heavily pregnant.
Taking Stoynoff on a tour of the house while Melania left them "for a wardrobe change", Trump, she writes, said there was a particular room that she had to see.
"We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat … I was stunned. I was grateful when Trump's longtime butler burst into the room a minute later, as I tried to unpin myself."
The butler, she says, escorted them back to where they were to meet Melania, and Stoynoff writes of the minutes while they waited for her return.
"I fumbled with my tape recorder. Trump smiled and leaned forward. 'You know we're going to have an affair, don't you?' he declared, in the same confident tone he uses when he says he's going to make America great again. 'Have you ever been to Peter Luger's for steaks? I'll take you. We're going to have an affair, I'm telling you.' "
The New York Times has interviewed two women who say that Trump molested them - in incidents 30 years apart.
Infuriated by Trump's denial in Sunday's candidates' debate that he had ever touched another woman inappropriately, Jessica Leeds, now 74, said she had been upgraded to first class while on a commercial flight more than 30 years ago - to find she was seated next to Trump.
About 45 minutes into the flight, Trump had lifted the armrest and proceeded to grab her breasts and attempted to push his hand up her skirt, after inquiring about her marital status and making small talk, she said.
"He was like an octopus," she said. "His hands were everywhere."
Rachel Crooks, now 33, told The New York Times of a more recent encounter with Trump - in 2005 - when she worked as a secretary for a firm with offices in Trump Tower in Manhattan.
On riding in an elevator with Trump, the two introduced themselves. But she said that, on shaking hands, Trump had refused to let her hand go as he proceeded to kiss her on the face before he "kissed me directly on the mouth".
"It was so inappropriate," Crooks said. "I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that."
In Florida, 36-year-old Mindy McGillivray told The Palm Beach Post of having her rear groped by Trump one evening as she worked as a photographer's assistant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate 13 years ago.
And a disturbing, early 1990s video has surfaced of Trump making suggestive comments about a 10-year-old girl.
As reported by The Hill, Trump had encountered a group of young girls at Trump Tower, during which he made small talk with one of the girls before turning to the camera and saying, "I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?"
BuzzFeed reports: "Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Donald Trump walked into the dressing room while contestants - some as young as 15 - were changing.
"Trump, who owned the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants from 1996 until 2015, has publicly bragged about invading beauty queen dressing rooms, calling it one of his prerogatives of ownership."
CBS2 in Los Angeles reports that Trump just came "waltzing in" while Miss USA contestants were nude or half-nude as they changed into bikinis.
Trump's polling was already in the toilet. But the real damage from the reaction to the "grab them by the pussy" video, is just beginning to percolate, as revealed in a Marquette Poll in Wisconsin, for which likely women voters were contacted on two days either side of its release on Friday.
On the Thursday, Clinton was ahead: 45-36.
On Friday, Clinton took off: 60-33.
And through Saturday and Sunday, support for Clinton levelled off as Trump's went through the floor: 56-23.
This dramatic shift by women is reflected nationally in a PRRI poll for The Atlantic, which reveals the enormity of an unfolding gender split - Clinton trails Trump by 11 points among male voters, but she is a staggering 33 points ahead among women.
In an analysis headlined "Women are defeating Donald Trump", FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver cites 12 recent polls, in which Clinton leads among women by an average 15 per cent; and Trump is ahead among men by an average of just 5 per cent.
All of which means that Clinton is doing much better among women than Barack Obama did in 2012; and Trump is not doing as well among men as Mitt Romney did in 2012.
And on the attributes for the presidency, women see Clinton as the better candidate to handle a series of hot-button issues in a separate poll for CNN:
- Immigration, 55-39
- Terrorism, 49-44
- Islamic State, 53-39
- Criminal justice, 51-43
- Stronger, more decisive leader, 51-36
On Tuesday, one of the women crying "enough!" was Melissa Gesing, president of the Iowa Federation of Republican Women.
She quit, tweeting that she was taking this "incredibly painful" step because: "I cannot in good conscience lead this organisation or look at myself in the mirror each morning if I do not take a stand against the racism, sexism and hate that Donald J Trump continues to promote."
With all that in mind, Trump campaign manager Kelly Anne Conway might have chosen her words more carefully when she challenged Republican waverers and deserters such as Gesing, while being interviewed on ABC News on Wednesday morning: "Enough with the pussyfooting around ... do you support us or do you not support us?"
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