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"Never appeal to a man's 'better nature.' He may not have one."

— Robert Heinlein, "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"

Perhaps the worst of the many maddening things about the current election campaign, and the way it is covered by journalists and understood by voters, is the trap of what is called "false equivalence."

That's the idea that if one party or candidate has done, said or proposed something bad, then the immediate responsibility of all observers, professional and amateur, is to find and draw out something bad that the other party or candidate has done, said or proposed and call it even. As if politics is a mathematical equation that, by its nature, must and will be balanced.

It is a trap that reporters fall into whether they are covering the election of a new president or the city council in Chanute, Kansas. Someone says something that is obviously true, but the desire of a news organization to "be balanced" often moves us to find someone to state the opposing view, even if we sometimes have to find a willfully ignorant yahoo to give us a quote.

If it were useful to compare such human activity to the laws of nature, then false equivalence would be better understood as the meeting of matter and anti-matter. Equal amounts of each create a reaction in which both are utterly annihilated, leaving nothing useful behind. (Unless you've figured out a way to contain the reaction, in which case you can power your starship with it.)

The idea that Hillary Clinton's wrongdoings, serious though they may be, annihilate Donald Trump's utter unfitness for office is the bad rationale used by such party-before-nation Republicans as Utah's Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Sen. Orrin Hatch, who claim little affection for the reality TV star turned politician but pledge to vote for him anyway.

But it might be safe to assume that, in at least one important respect, Clinton and her campaign are just as nefarious as Trump and his operation. Grant, with some reason, that both are more interested in gaining power and feathering their own nests than they are in actually making the world a better place for everyone else.

Proceed from the assumption that both Clinton and Trump — or, at least, their campaign pros — base all their decisions, policy papers, speeches and highly rehearsed talking points on the view that the American people are not only easily bamboozled but long to be hornswaggled because it is easier than thinking for ourselves. That they approach us not as intellectual equals to be reasoned with but as so many desirous ids in the same search for self-validation that drives our decisions on which beer, smartphones and cars to buy.

How does Trump think that is best done? What opinion does he have of the American people that cause him to take the positions and make the remarks that he has?

And what does Clinton think of us? What public persona does she think will serve her purpose in the long run?

There, the difference is stark. There is no equivalence.

Trump thinks the American electorate is bigoted, inarticulate, misogynistic and xenophobic. That we will eagerly sit up and beg at the sound of the appropriate dog-whistle remarks, the divide-and-conquer approach that banks on winning by making angry white males long for a day in which their supremacy was unquestioned and everyone else — women, blacks, immigrants, gay folks — knew their place.

Does he really believe any of that? Only he knows. Maybe.

Clinton thinks that what we want to hear is "Stronger Together." It's all over all her campaign materials, played even more prominently than her name. She wants us to think that she is the champion, not of people who blame different ethnic groups for their own woes, but of people who are ready, willing and able to take the bit in their teeth and pull themselves and their nation forward with equality and with access to education and health care, a cleaner environment and a tax code that makes the rich pay their share.

Is that really the path that, deep down, she thinks the nation should be on? After living in the crucible of public life for a generation, maybe even she isn't altogether clear on all that.

In a way it doesn't matter what either candidate really wants to use the power of the presidency for, because we cannot truly know what that is. We can know — we cannot help but see — the kind of country they think we want.

That's the choice. And it should be obvious.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, thinks balance means a fresh donut with every cup of coffee. gpyle@sltrib.com