A Stress-Test Election

All happy elections are alike, as Melania Trump might say, and each unhappy election is unhappy in its own way. But no American Presidential election, at least not one that anyone alive has experienced, has been as unhappy as this one. However ugly they got, the nation’s most miserable postwar contests, among them Lyndon B. Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater, in 1964, and Richard Nixon vs. Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, at least met a standard of coherence and rationality that now seems elusive. The Republican candidate, the television performer and businessman Donald J. Trump, is not only the strangest duck to have won a major-party nomination but is so uniquely unfit to hold office that the strongest unwritten plank in the platform of his Democratic opponent, the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that she offers a sane alternative. She may be unloved in many quarters, but she is no Donald Trump.