Free Press Editorial Board

The Nov. 8 showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump long ago transcended the candidates themselves, or their respective parties.

The vote will mark the convergence of two historic opportunities for Michigan voters, and America.

The first is the chance to shatter a bigoted gender barrier that dates to the nation’s founding by electing a woman — a woman who happens to be one of the best-prepared candidates to seek the presidency in the last century.

The second is the necessity to repudiate, once and for all, the unflattering caricature of America conjured by Clinton’s demagogic Republican rival, Trump.

The contrast between the candidates’ visions of the country each aspires to lead could not be more stark.

Clinton’s America is a mature, self-confident nation that leads by example in a world bound ever more tightly by its inhabitants’ common economic and environmental interests.

Trump’s America is a paranoid bully, animated by vengeance and convinced that its survival hinges on its ability to bludgeon enemies and allies alike into compliance.

Clinton’s America draws strength and stability from its diversity; Trump’s stews in racial, ethnic and religious resentments, romanticizing a vanished America in which white men reigned supreme and everyone else — women, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims — competed for their favor.

Trump’s cynical campaign to fan Americans’ darkest suspicions about one another poses a threat more dangerous than his chronic dishonesty, demeaning rhetoric and backward thinking about issues as diverse as abortion, nuclear combat and climate change.

At stake Nov. 8 is the idea of America, and what it means to be an American.

That is among the strongest reasons this newspaper chooses to endorse HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON — former secretary of state, former U.S. senator from New York, former first lady of the United States — for president.

More Free Press Endorsements:

► Michigan Supreme Court

► U.S. House and State House seats

► State Board of Education

► University boards, elected through statewide vote

► Regional Transit Authority Millage

► Circuit and probate court judges in metro Detroit

► Macomb County Public Works Commissioner

► Oakland County Executive

► Other Oakland County races

► Wayne County schools millage

► District court judges in metro Detroit

► Detroit community benefits proposals, Detroit city council

► Detroit Public Schools Community District Board

Clinton is a confounding figure in many ways.

She’s a lifelong crusader for women’s and children’s rights, a progressive who believes in the government’s power to create greater opportunity for its citizens. She’s also haunted by a history of reluctant transparency in the face of criticism and controversy.

Just in this campaign, she has magnified concerns about her candor by slow-walking the full truth about her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state, and the intersection of her work as the nation’s top diplomat and her interest in the success of the Clinton Foundation.

That’s to say nothing of her longer history, alongside her husband, President Bill Clinton, of darting and dodging in situations that demanded forthright accountability.

At the same time, it’s difficult to recall any presidential candidate who has punched more tickets on the way to the White House than Hillary Clinton.

After eight years as a first lady with unprecedented policy-making influence, she waged an innovative and successful campaign to become New York’s junior U.S. senator. Within her first two years, she was one of Washington’s foremost advocates for first responders and victims of the 9/11 terrorist bombings, as well as a key figure in legislative battles over health care, education and national security.

Long before this current presidential contest began, she had cemented her reputation as a Democrat who could draw Republican colleagues into narrow spaces of common interest.

Exploiting those collaborative skills will be crucial to the success of a Clinton presidency.

Clinton further distinguished herself, and burnished her qualifications to oversee foreign policy, as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state.

She took over from a Bush administration whose doctrine of pre-emptive war for ambiguous ends had left American influence weakened, particularly in the Middle East.

The barbs of her critics notwithstanding, nations around the globe once again look to America as a leader, not merely an enforcer.

Early on, Clinton was the architect of the sanctions against Iran that brought that country to the bargaining table over its nuclear ambitions. And the subsequent long-term agreement with Iran — an agreement that, despite Trump’s bombastic criticism, backs that nation away from the nuclear brink and binds it more securely to the civilized world — may prove one of her most important legacies.

Clinton also played an important role in the successful hunt for Osama bin Laden, and watched with the rest of Obama’s national security team as the mission to kill the terrorist leader came to fruition.

In Russia, she maintained as respectable a relationship as possible with the erratic and possibly unstable Vladimir Putin, whose trash-talk about her during this election only confirms the extent to which she confounded him.

In Syria, she has supported measured action — a firm hand but not a wanton one — to manage a complicated swirl of Russian, Iranian and ISIS ambitions.

These skills — mastering partisan politics in the Senate and managing complex diplomatic relationships — are core to the presidency, and will be critical to Clinton’s success in the White House. If anything, she will have a leg up on her predecessor, who came to office with little experience in either realm.

America has rarely seen a candidate more unqualified, more boorish, or more comprehensively unschooled in the demands of the office he seeks than Donald Trump.

The most glaring evidence of this fundamental deficit is Trump’s proclivity for simple, push-button solutions to complex issues.

Undocumented immigrants? Build a wall.

Terrorism? Impose a religious test to screen out Muslims.

Racial tensions flaring? More stop-and-frisk.

Trade deficits? Embrace protectionism.

Russian aggression in the Middle East? Bomb ‘em.

Trump’s simplistic tropes have found a ready audience in a nation where deep understanding of multilayered, multidimensional problems is not only rare, but too often lampooned as wonkish or nerdy. His empty sloganeering stands in sharp contrast to his opponent’s hard-won expertise.

Trump’s casual dishonesty is another powerful argument against his candidacy. The totality of Clinton’s evasions and occasional fibs pales before Trump’s lifetime habit of compulsive deception.

Factcheck.org, the gold-standard of nonpartisan fact-checking, decreed earlier this year that no candidate in the past four presidential election cycles could challenge Trump’s record for bald-faced deceit.

When confronted with irrefutable evidence that one of his talking points has no basis in fact, his instinct has been to deny and deflect rather than to acknowledge the truth.

His disingenuous retreat from the assertion that America’s first black president was not a citizen was only the most glaring example of this ugly reflex in action.

All too often, Trump has marshaled lies to scapegoat ethnic or religious minorities (as when he asserted, with absolutely no supporting evidence, the discredited allegation that Muslims citizens had conspired to conceal the burgeoning terrorist plot in San Bernardino). Demagoguery like this is rarely just about the demagogue. There are real fears and insecurities driving Trump’s popularity, and dangerous bigotry lurking just beneath the anxiety he so carelessly provokes.

Clinton will be hard-pressed to heal the fissures Trump’s campaign has exposed and exploited; Trump has neither the will nor the wherewithal to try.

Clinton will need to hold fast to her convictions about the value of diversity even as she addresses the legitimate frustrations of Trump’s supporters.

Expanded economic opportunity for everyone will go a long way toward easing that tension. But Clinton, who came under fire for branding some of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” must not be shy about confronting the ugliness that Trump has whipped up. A forthright rejection of bigotry is part of the leadership the nation needs from its next president.

Urban policy has scarcely been an afterthought in Trump’s idea-light campaign. But it’s of crucial importance in cities like Detroit, whose residents are becoming poorer, more isolated, and confront diminishing access to the tools that have lifted their neighbors to better lives.

Clinton offers largely an extension of the Obama agenda, with a renewed emphasis on fairer taxation. That speaks powerfully to the problems Detroit and other cities face. Jobs matter, and setting the table for more aggressive creation of good-paying jobs will make a huge difference for the nation’s urban centers.

The Obama administration has also spent billions to stem foreclosures and remove blight in cities like Detroit; both initiatives would likely continue under a Clinton presidency.

On the flip side, Trump has trashed urban areas and the majority-black populations that inhabit them, offering worn-out trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations as a solution while asking African Americans, cynically: “What do you have to lose?”

Clinton is far from perfect herself on the issue of race and equality in America.

But she has risen, adequately, if slowly, to the historic challenge of the Black Lives Matter movement and the unfinished business of the civil rights movement.

Back in the 1990s, when her husband was pushing a crime bill that would eventually imprison millions of African-American men, Clinton exploited white fears of black “super-predators.”

In her 2008 presidential primary contest with Obama, she pandered to the anti-immigration crowd by saying she’d deny drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants.

She has reversed herself on both issues. We’d like to believe that represents an evolution in her thinking, as well as demographic changes in the electorate.

Whatever its origins, Clinton has shown a superior capacity to address racial inequality with knowledge and empathy. She has also called her opponent out for his transparently racist campaign to sew doubts about Obama’s citizenship, a comeuppance as healthy as it was overdue.

Her insistence that the humanity of undocumented immigrants be a guiding concern in immigration reform demonstrates both the pragmatic and compassionate dimensions missing from Trump’s immigration policy.

With Clinton poised to make history, it’s worth remembering that women have been able to vote in American elections for less than a century, have acquired a modicum of control over their own reproductive lives just 43 years ago, and have scarcely begun to claim an equal role in the nation’s state legislatures and corporate boardrooms.

Gender has played a disappointingly bitter role in this campaign, largely because of Clinton’s opponent. Trump has never been very effective in concealing his disregard for women, but his contempt became manifest with the emergence of videotapes in which he boasted of foisting himself on non-consenting bystanders.

Clinton’s historic achievement is a resounding reproof to Trump’s misogyny. That a former presidential spouse became the first woman to capture a major party presidential nomination was a remarkable twist of history. That she is likely to become the first female president is mind-blowing, a testament to both her own determination and the changing nature of American ideas of equality and fairness.

The bitterness of this campaign has sometimes made it difficult to remember the substantive differences between the candidates, or to believe their acrimonious contest will even end.

But end it will, and a vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton will move the nation at least incrementally down the path of reconciliation, equitable economic growth and international stability.

There simply is no better choice to make on Nov. 8.