I live in Texas and so I had to cast my only real vote for president in March. I cast it for Hillary Clinton.
Why?
It was tough. I love Bernie Sanders and I basically agree with many of his views. Yet having lived through the 1972 McGovern disaster as a young man, I knew and know that being right about an issue(s) is just not enough reason to be elected President nor proof that one will be a good at it. McGovern had been a backbench Senator like Sanders. And like Sanders, McGovern was a burr under the saddle of power.
I will always revere George McGovern for courageously speaking truth to power and taking hard lumps meted out by LBJ and others for so doing. But George McGovern was a one issue candidate. He did not have breadth nor depth outside the subject of Vietnam. He was beaten in an historical landslide by Richard Nixon in no small part due to his lack of wide-ranging experience and gravitas. That Nixon later took himself out with Watergate is no consolation; a Democrat should have been sitting in the Oval instead of Nixon to begin with.
Now Bernie Sanders is not George McGovern but living through McGovern’s loss made me wary. The changes that Bernie Sanders wants to make to this country start with changing the laws of this country not with electing a president. Bernie, a veteran legislator, knows this but running for president has obviously not dwelled on that fact. While the Senate may go back to Democratic control, the House probably will not. And even with a Democratic Senate majority, Bernie Sander’s initiatives still face an uphill battle and then would be dead on arrival in the House.
I’ve spent a lot of time on twitter in recent years and so have been a witness to the return of words such as socialist and communist. They pretty much disappeared from the vocabularies of most Americans after the fall of the Soviet Union. Then came roaring back after the election of Barrack Obama. During the Cold War socialist and communist were used to smear the names and destroy the careers of thousands of innocent Americans. It is true that socialist and communist don’t carry the same punch they once did. But with great frequency of repetition on talk radio and certain cable networks, they can and would be used effectively against Senator Sanders.
Over the last four years President Obama’s hair has gone from black to gray due to the stress of the world’s toughest job. Now consider Mr Obama is a fairly young man and Senator Sanders is not. One wag on twitter took to calling him “Old Man Sanders.” This forced me to face the fact and admit upon reflection that Bernie Sanders is too old to be president.
OK. So why Hillary then?
I believe Hillary Clinton will be a good to great President. While no previous governmental experience serves to qualify a candidate for the presidency, her’s, of all the candidates, comes the closest. She saw the presidency up close and personally as First Lady and that experience undoubtedly convinced her she needed more seasoning before going after the oval. She knows the Senate and hence has lived the workaday life of a legislator. Like LBJ she is going to know how representatives and senators see the world. She has been in the middle of legislative sausage making. She has taken tough votes and paid the price. She will be able to relate to the senator or congressman who wants to do the right thing but fears the fall out.
As Secretary of State she headed that Cabinet department from which Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan came.
The question is often asked what was Hillary’s big accomplishment as Secretary of State? Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was able to make alliances crippled by the crazy cowboy diplomacy of the George W Bush administration functional again. Her willingness to go everywhere and meet with the officials of governments large and small, essential and peripheral played no small part in winning trust and cooperation back for the United States. It may be hard or surrealistic to recall, as we bring eight years of the Obama administration to a close, but during the years of the George W Bush administration the nations of the world openly feared the United States. It was quite simply President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s leadership that turned that situation around.
Hillary Clinton is not, as commonly asserted, a hawk but she is a woman who would be president. As such she realized early on that it would be said and believed of her that as a woman she would not properly exercise the president’s command authority. Her service in the Senate and as Secretary of State has clearly shown that she can and will advocate for use of American military might when and where she sees it as appropriate.
Hillary Clinton did not vote for the Iraq war. She voted to give the President of the United States the war fighting authority he requested to pursue, fight and eliminate an enemy who had brought us 9/11. She trusted that the President was sober, serious and much better informed than her on the threats to be addressed by military action. George W Bush was a political adversary who’s view of the world, politics and policy was not hers. Yet she trusted, as she should have, that as President he would not lie to her and the nation about so serious a matter. The fault lies not with Senator Hillary Clinton of New York where as she cast her vote the hole that replaced the twin towers still smoldered.
It is said that Hillary Clinton is corrupt. In fact one fella on twitter so believes in Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” that when she appeared certain to become the Democratic nominee he had no other choice than to switch his support for Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. He may be off to Trump University next...so it goes. He is not alone. Twitter right-wingers compete to put up ridiculous photoshops of Hillary in behind bars in prisoner orange. They don’t even get that a high energy side-band of such tweets is their own expressed fear of Hillary as a potent political force. It is a crazy time is it not?
I don’t believe Hillary Clinton lusts after luxury, riches and ease. She could have retired into the enjoyment of those things long ago. Nor do I believe she sold her services as Senator or Secretary of State for contributions to the Clinton Foundation. I do believe Hillary Clinton has not been a perfect human being in the 43 years she has been in public life but I do not believe she has committed a single crime. Did she make some bad judgements surrounding the email server? Sure. Did she commit treason or espionage? The answer is not just NO but HELL NO! I see the “Hillary Clinton is corrupt” meme as a diversion from what actually seems to trouble white males, like myself, about Hillary mightily. Hillary does not ask and wait for permission as we expect women to do; she speaks boldly and she acts without permission as a man might.
Finally I would say that those who have followed Senator Sanders should vote for Hillary Clinton to save the nation from Donald Trump. I have watched silently and with a heavy heart as diarists of the progressive Daily Kos community have gone after each other over Bernie and Hillary when it is Charles and David Koch, libertarians and conservatives who push politics and policies that not only threaten democracy in America but the continued existence of human beings on this planet.
