Election 2016 questions that keep me up at night

Now the only wall standing between us and a Donald Trump presidency is Hillary Clinton.

Ooh, do we worry!

The purveyors of presidential wisdom keep showing us the red-and-blue map of the 2012 presidential election results, insisting the electoral math does not add up to a Trump victory. But fight the urge to take comfort in optimism about a Trump defeat.

Keep these factors in mind:

The Trump blindness. Pundits and politicians admit they were consistently wrong about the GOP primaries. So, don’t buy into their predictions for the general election.

The electorate. So many times, in reaction to a hateful statement from Trump, a politician or pundit felt compelled to say: “That’s not who we are.” Sadly, it often is who we are. History shows that too many of us are capable of the traits we profess to loathe in Trump — like nativism and sexism.

The paid-by-Mexico wall. It’s a truly bad idea, but it’s rooted in our shameful history of nativism: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; barriers against immigration from Eastern Europe during World War II, which kept out many Jews desperate to escape the Nazi killing machine; and the teens who attacked and killed Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue simply because his immigrant origins made him vulnerable.

The sexism. If you think Trump is alone in his willingness to say contemptible things about women, just read the death threats in online comments directed at women who make a living reporting on male-dominated sports.

So, if we rely on the innate goodness of the American people to ward off a Trump presidency, we probably hope for too much.

Still, it’s long past time for the president of the United States to be a woman. Despite Trump’s “woman card” comment, Clinton is extra smart and deeply experienced. Except for the tragic vote that helped enable the invasion of Iraq, she was a good senator for New York. In debate, she can be formidable.

But she also has shown a troubling managerial weakness. Before she became secretary of state, her only two efforts to run something big ended badly: her attempt to craft health care reform in the 1990s and her chaotic 2008 presidential campaign, torn apart by leaks and infighting. It remains to be seen whether she’ll do better running a campaign to keep Trump a private citizen.

Clinton also has shown an ability to make unforced errors on the campaign trail, like commenting on Nancy Reagan’s death by praising the Reagans for starting a national conversation on AIDS — a bit of historical revisionism that angered those touched by that disease.

She also faces the task of defeating an opponent who seems ready to run against her from both the right and the left on defense. In contrast to Clinton’s advocacy for interventionism in places like Libya and Syria, Trump has signaled that he understands voters’ war weariness. But he has also taunted her for not being “strong with the military.” That could set off a round of can-you-top-this pledges to increase our already profligate levels of military spending.

Unfortunately, Clinton is strong with the military, in the sense that she defers too readily to generals. If she wins, we’ll need to worry that her deference and her faith in military solutions will lead us into wars that we’ll regret, as we regret the invasion of Iraq. The nation’s founders feared a standing army. So they built civilian control of the military into the Constitution. They were so right, as President John F. Kennedy proved during the Cuban missile crisis by rejecting the apocalyptic advice the military offered.

But the alternative to Clinton is Trump and his key military adviser, Donald Trump. She might lead us deliberately into protracted ground war. He might stumble mistakenly into a planet-ending nuclear exchange.

Ooh, do we worry.

Bob Keeler is a former member of Newsday’s editorial board.