Barry Soper: Clinton v Trump US presidency battle a race to bottom

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Photo / AP

There's nothing like the wacky hoopla of American politics, although no one's ever seen anything quite like the battle going on there at the moment.

It's a race to the bottom for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which will come to a climax on November the 8th when the least unpopular of the two will get the key to the White House door. It's not a contest of popularity because neither of them are.

Not matter how both the Republican and the Democrat conventions tried to soften their image, which turned into family outings, they didn't succeed.

On the Clinton side it was just plain weird. Daughter Chelsea, who once had a night out on the town in Christchurch with Jenny Shipley's son Ben, could end up with a mum and dad who've been President. You'd think her ambitious mum would have had her fill of being in the spotlight as First Lady and then as Secretary of State.

It makes her claim seem a bit shallow, as she became the first woman to be nominated as the future so-called leader of the free world, that she was a public servant with the service part being easier than the public part. And why anyone would want to return to the scene of Bill's cigar-smoking Oval Office is beyond me.

And it's baffling why Hillary Clinton believes she can make America safer and create more jobs when for four years she was a central figure in the Obama Administration that she's applauded for doing exactly that.

At least Donald Trump can't make that claim - but then that's the least of America's nightmare. It's unheard of that an aspirant for the presidency suggests that America's arch enemy Russia involve itself in espionage by hacking into his rival's email account, even if he did say a few days later he was just joking.

It's no joke that he now seems to have the backing of a man who'd rival him in the haircut stakes, North Korea's Kim Jong Un.

And it's hard to see the funny side of his description of women as pigs, his mocking and mimicry of the disabled and his doubts about John McCain as a war hero, saying he was that because he was captured and he likes people who weren't captured. Fact is he remained captured in Vietnam because he wouldn't leave his men.

And a man who advocates "a hell of a lot" worse torture than water boarding is surely beyond a joker. They're just a fraction of the boofhead's bungles.

Forty-five per cent of Americans didn't vote in the last presidential election, and with the choices before them this time, to match it would be something of an achievement.