What will President Clinton do without Trump?

THE LATEST NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Hillary Clinton with a 9 percentage point lead over Donald Trump. Less publicized was the news that the same poll showed Clinton's favorability rating shooting up from 37 percent to...38 percent.

The presidential race looks like it's going to end in the only way a contest between the two most unpopular major party candidates in recent history could--by default. It's like a basketball game with two teams so horrible that you know whichever one has the ball last is the one that's going to lose...by dunking on their own basket.

After the party conventions in July, Clinton surged ahead by appearing in public as little as possible, while Trump kept burying himself deeper with his attacks on the family of a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq. Trump made a comeback later when his new campaign team muzzled him (a little) and let the media focus shift to Clinton's dishonest history with her e-mail server and her husband's Clinton Foundation.

But now, Trump is back in the spotlight--drowning in it, actually--with his unhinged debate performances and leaks to the media of, first, a small selection of his federal tax returns, and second and more devastatingly, a video of him boasting about being a sexual predator.

This is great news for Clinton, who in an election against a less ghoulish opponent would be feeling the heat over the revelations that WikiLeaks is providing about her and her inner circle--which confirmed, in the words of the New York Times, exactly what young skeptical voters already suspected:

The private discussions among her advisers about policy--on trade, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Wall Street regulation--often revolved around the political advantages and pitfalls of different positions, while there was little or no discussion about what Mrs. Clinton actually believed. Mrs. Clinton's team at times seemed consumed with positioning and optics.

Oh well--at least in a month, this will all be over, right?

Sorry, but I have some bad news for you.

IF CLINTON becomes president--as now seems certain barring something totally unexpected--she'll take office with some of the lowest initial approval ratings in history and no plan to address the growing economic and racial inequality that has driven voter discontent in this election.

On the other side will be a maniacal Republican Party, perhaps being driven to unprecedented heights of frenzy by a planned media company run by Trump and the Breitbart gang that will compete with Fox News from the right.

In these conditions, how long should we expect it to take after Clinton's inauguration for mainstream U.S. politics to be dominated by next version of the Tea Party, preparing for a sweep in the 2018 midterm elections? I'd put the over-under at three-and-a-half months.

Starting the countdown for the next election also suits Clinton, who'd much prefer to be seen as our protector from the bigoted barbarians at the White House gate than to have to deal with the actual grievances and aspirations of ordinary people.

That's why her campaign team rooted for Trump to win the Republican nomination, something that Wikileaks recently confirmed to the surprise of pretty much nobody. When Republicans incite hatred, Democratic voters shudder in fear while their leaders rub their hands with glee, knowing that they've just "won" further support without having to do anything to challenge their corporate backers.

We've seen this ironic disconnect play out already over the past few months. Clinton supporters in unions and liberal advocacy groups are sending out red alerts that we have to do everything in our power to prevent a President Trump from ushering in fascism--while Clinton herself is calculating how little she actually has to do or say in order to slip into the White House.

This dynamic won't change once she's in office--something that goes unacknowledged by the many leftists who are reluctantly supporting Clinton because they think her victory would "create better conditions" for social movements and the left.

None of us should be in the prognostication business given how unpredictable world events have been in recent years. The only factor the left can control is the left. Individual leftists and their organizations can build strong and independent movements that can break free from what Jane Hamsher, formerly of Firedoglake, famously called the "veal pen"--where nice, polite activists get their daily marching orders from Democratic Party leaders.

The task of building that left can't wait until after the election, because every day that activists support the Democrats makes our side less prepared to face a presidency under either Clinton or Trump.

FOR AN object example of the problem, let's look at Bernie Sanders.

The former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination should be all over the news now that Wikileaks has confirmed everything he was saying about the Clinton campaign during the primaries--that she says different things to voters than she does to donors; that she wants to be a centrist politician with no intention of changing the status quo, regardless of what she says in her speeches.

Sure, Sanders is backing Clinton now. But that doesn't physically prevent him from hitting the media to talk about how these leaks show the importance of building strong protest movements, regardless of who's in power--something that would lay the basis for a stronger left under a Democratic president, which Sanders says he agrees with.

But Sanders can't go in this direction--because his version of a political revolution involves keeping his connections to Democratic Party leaders who will freeze him out if he does anything but praise Clinton for the next month.

Then there's MoveOn.org and SEIU. Anyone remember the announcement back in March of the coalition they were starting, in order to challenge Trump in the streets?:

Today we are calling for a massive nonviolent mobilization of working people, students, immigrants, children of immigrants, great-great-grandchildren of immigrants, people of color and white people, the unemployed and under-employed, people of faith, retirees, veterans, women, and men--anyone who opposes bigotry and hate and loves freedom and justice--to stand up to Trump's bullying and bigotry.

The announcement came in the heady days after thousands of people mobilized to protest a Trump rally in Chicago, leading the big orange bully to slink away and cancel the event. But rather than build on this momentum, liberal groups didn't follow through on their promises of protests.

Perhaps that was the advice of the Clinton campaign, whose agenda is to keep expectations low and activism even lower.

Trump has continued to face protests organized from the grassroots--most recently, dozens of women shouting "Pussy grabs back!" outside Trump Tower in New York City--but not the kind of large demonstrations that not only might make some of his supporters think harder about what he stands for, but would also develop thousands of new activists heading into a Clinton or Trump presidency.

Instead of helping organize young people to directly confront Trump, Democratic-aligned organizations have chosen to lecture them for not feeling sufficiently inspired by the candidate who thinks America's doing just great.

This liberal condescension reached a low point a few weeks ago when New York Times columnist Charles Blow told young African Americans unhappy with Clinton's long dismal record supporting the racist criminal justice system to "grow up."

These conflicts might die down a bit now that Trump has fallen far behind in the polls. But expect them to flare up early and often in a Clinton presidency--when we're told first that we have to give her a chance, and then that we have to close ranks against the Republicans winning Congress, and on and on and on.

The task of building a left strong enough to resist this dead end starts now by breaking with the Democratic Party, voting for the Green Party's Jill Stein, and building grassroots protest movements and radical organizations.