As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump braced themselves for the third and final presidential debate in las Vegas on Wednesday night, President Barack Obama had a word of advice for the Republican nominee: Stop whining.
Obama’s reprimand of sorts came at a White House news conference when he was asked about Trump’s latest rhetoric that it’s going to be a “rigged election” with calls to his army of supporters to monitor places on Election Day.
“If you start whining before the game is even over, if whenever things are going badly for you and you lose you start blaming somebody else, then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job,” Obama said, adding caustically: “I’d invite Mr Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.”
At his recent rallies, Trump has been pounding the message that while the liberal mainstream media remains busy “colluding” with Clinton, there are very real fears of a large-scale “voter fraud” in the country. He brought up a 2012 Pew Center study that 24 million voter registrations are invalid or significantly inaccurate and that more than 1.8 million dead people were still listed as voters.
The debate, for which Clinton has been preparing intensively for the past three-four days while Trump himself has continued with his campaign rallies, will be their final face-off before the November 8 election.
Clinton, having established a comfortable lead in a slew of polls over the past couple of weeks, will seek to ensure that the maverick Republican does not upset her applecart. For Trump, the debate is reckoned by pundits to be a do-or-die encounter before a national audience if he is earnest about salvaging his prospects.
It won’t be easy for Trump, given the recent complications arising from accusations of sexual misconduct with as many as nine women claiming that he had either groped or kissed them against their will over the years.
For Clinton, the embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks of hacked emails from the account of her campaign chief John Podesta could prove to be a major distraction that Trump is sure to exploit.
In the run-up to the debate, Trump has been trying to strengthen his anti-establishment credentials by coming up with some radical proposals such as imposing term limits for members of US Congress, saying that if elected President, he would push for a Constitutional Amendment to bring this about.
“Decades of failure in Washington, and decades of special interest dealing, must come to an end. We have to break the cycle of corruption, and we have to give new voices a chance to go into government service. The time for Congressional term limits has arrived,” he said at a rally in Colorado.
Analysts, however, that any move on term limits for members of Congress will be a non-starter, given that it is next to impossible to get those very lawmakers pass a Constitutional Amendment to cut short their political career.
Signalling his hard push at the debate, Trump is bringing President Barack Obama’s Kenyan-born half-brother, Malik Obama, and fierce Clinton critic Patricia Smith, whose son was killed in the attack on the US mission in Benghazi when Clinton was Secretary of State.
Malik Obama, an American citizen, is a critic of President Obama’s policies who announced his support for Trump in July. “I look very much forward to meeting and being with Malik,” Trump said, adding: “He gets it far better than his brother.”