What Hillary Clinton Could Learn From Boris Yeltsin

The failure of Hillary Clinton's campaign to disclose that she has come down with pneumonia amplifies the parallels between this U.S. presidential election campaign and the 1996 contest that opposed the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.

The two presidential races are similar in their negative framing. In Russia 20 years ago and in the U.S. this year, both candidates are unpopular, and many of those who intend to vote for them see them as the lesser evil. Yeltsin's backers feared a Communist victory, some of Clinton's are trying to keep out a man they see as a dangerous demagogue. Many of Zyuganov's supporters would have preferred a more hard-line candidate who appealed to their Soviet nostalgia and imperial yearnings, but mostly they didn't want another four years of Wild West capitalism and dalliances with the West under Yeltsin. Many of Donald Trump's backers don't see him as a true conservative, but they'd rather elect anyone than Clinton.