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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with a new round of endorsements.
Cleveland Plain Dealer endorses:
Hillary Clinton is the most capable, experienced and knowledgeable Democratic candidate for president.
The former First Lady, secretary of state and New York senator has been in the political trenches virtually her whole life. She knows the issues. She understands the art of the deal. She's credible and she's impressive.
She not only can win the White House, but she also will be ready once she gets there, a description that does not apply to her worthy but ideologically narrow primary opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Clinton knows Washington, knows how to get things done, and will get things done.
Yes, she carries significant negatives, partly because her partisan opponents have spent decades trying to tarnish her reputation. Even so, she stands in full command of the knotty issues, both domestic and foreign, that confront America today.
For all those reasons and more, Ohio Democrats should vote for Hillary Clinton next Tuesday.
Beyond the server issue, it's impossible to recall another American political couple investigated more often or more deeply than Clinton and her husband, dating back to Bill Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas (1979-80 and 1983-92). Whatever Hillary Clinton's flaws, her Republican foes, fearful of Clinton's political prospects, have waged what amounts to 30-plus years of relentless war against her.
And yet still she stands – likely poised for her party's presidential nomination. With early voting already underway in Ohio's March 15 primary, Democrats' choice is clear: Hillary Clinton for president.
Cincinnati Enquirer endorses:
Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, U.S. senator and first lady, is the epitome of a pragmatic, mainstream Democrat.
Clinton wants to tweak the Affordable Care Act; Sanders wants to replace it with a single-payer system. She wants to make college loans more affordable; he wants to make college free. She wants to increase the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour; he wants it to be $15.
It’s pretty obvious whose approach has a better chance of making headway in a divided Congress.
Clinton knows better than almost any presidential candidate how government works and what levers to pull to achieve progress. She has more nuanced proposals than her primary opponent for moving the United States forward in various areas:
•Transportation infrastructure: Would increase spending to address crumbling highways, bridges and pipes and at the same time create more jobs.
•Foreign policy: Would use diplomacy and coalition-building first when dealing with foreign threats such as Iran and ISIS.
•Health care: Would expand the Affordable Care Act rather than creating a whole new system of “free” care for everyone.
•College costs: Would provide more assistance so students who work can graduate from public colleges debt-free.
Tens of thousands of voters so far this primary season have cast ballots for the candidate who is promising easy fixes in an uncertain time. Socialize health care. Build a wall.
America needs leaders with expertise in the art of the possible rather than the gift of glib, empty promises.
South Florida Gay News endorses:
So we choose first to stand by the friend who has stood by us.
Our world is uneasy with terror and crisis in the Mideast and elsewhere. It has been so for decades and the instability and chaos there has never been directly attributable to either Republicans or Democrats.
Madmen exist in our world, from North Korea to the last prime minister of Iran.
In America, this year we are offering our own lunacy in the Republican primary, led by Donald Trump, who is neither conservative or liberal, just nastily narcissistic, fostering a nationalism based on hate and hostility, segregation and separation. His bipolar campaign and persona borders on Neo-Fascism, and our equations to the early days of Adolf Hitler have a ring of truth to them, like it or not.
We also believe that Clinton is the best candidate positioned to take on the Republican nominee in the general election. She is only one that has faced the full assault of the Republican attack machine again and again over the past 30 years. She’s been knocked down, but never knocked out. She proved to this country her resiliency when she testified for 11 hours in front of the Benghazi committee. She walked away unfazed and unbroken.
We support Hillary Clinton because she has spent a lifetime supporting human rights issues, from children’s rights as a legal advocate, to women’s rights as First Lady, and LGBT rights as a secretary of state.
We stand by the promise of an enlightened future rather than a return to a regressive past. We stand by a candidate appealing to the best in all of us, rather than the klandidate hiding behind false veils.
We stand by Hillary Clinton. We are with her.
The final delegate counts from Tuesday’s primary are in, and the final results have expanded Clinton's pledged delegate lead from 197 to 221:
Clinton appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show yesterday, where she commented about the violence surrounding Trump's campaign. She also commented on immigration and trade.
MSNBC reports:
After a day dominated by stories about violence perpetrated by Trump supporters – and even allegedly his campaign manager – Clinton said she was “truly distraught and even appalled by a lot of what I see going on” at his events.
“Mr. Trump should not be urging people on. This is deeply distressing, and I think as the campaign goes further, more and more Americans are going to be, you know, really disturbed by the kind of campaign he’s running,” she said. “You know, you can’t just be flailing around inside the White House saying whatever comes out of your mouth. Markets rise and fall. Conflicts can begin or get worse.”
With an eye on Tuesday’s primary contests in states hit hard by manufacturing job losses blamed on free trade agreements, Clinton said the president whom she usually sticks close to needs to do more.
“I wish the Obama administration right now would crack down on China’s dumping of steel into our market. You know, that should not be permitted. We have some tools that are available to this administration. I’d like to see them use it, and I’d like to send a very clear message to China: You may have your own economic problems, but don’t try to undermine and take away jobs in our steel industry any more than you already have,” Clinton said.
“I think in some of these areas, like opposing [Obama] on TPP, I did hope that we would get an agreement I could support. It turned out I couldn’t,” Clinton said. “I am speaking out and I am urging the administration not to go forward with market economy [status for China] and to crack down on dumping of steel.”
“I don’t like the raids, I don’t like the roundups, I don’t like the level of deportation that we’ve been seeing in this administration,” she said.
But she said she would not move to Canada if Trump were to win the presidency. “I would never leave our country, but I would certainly be spending a lot of time yelling at the TV set,” Clinton said.
Melissa McEwan has written an amazing piece for Shakesville that contrasts the empathetic humanity that Clinton's supporters see in her with the rank dehumanization that she is subjected to by the media and opponents:
Earlier today, I noted that, immediately following last night's Democratic debate, CNN's Anderson Cooper referenced the moment Clinton described herself as "not a natural polician," and said it will have "humanized" her to her supporters.
At that very moment, Clinton was in the audience, speaking with Guatemalan immigrant Lucia Quiej, who had asked the candidates during the debate what they would do, if elected, to help reunite her family, and families like hers.
It was not Clinton having a personal moment with a woman seeking her help that was offered as evidence of Clinton's humanity, but her (seemingly) self-deprecating comment about not being a natural politician.
Here she stands before us, the first female contender with a real shot at the US presidency, and she has gotten to this place not because of innate talent as a politician, but because she has worked her ass off.
Because she has practiced becoming a speaker, when she was not by nature someone who could command a room. Because she has studied until she has an unfathomable breadth of policy knowledge, when she cannot charm her way through not knowing something. Because she has mustered the courage to overcome her discomfort with campaigning, when campaigning is a part of the job.
I'm not a natural politician...and here the fuck I am anyway.
She's a politician powered by empathy rather than charisma, who makes people feel like they're standing in the sun rather than staring at it.
Maybe that just makes her a natural politician of a different sort. Of the sort who can challenge our expectations of what natural politicians look like altogether.
Hillary Clinton isn't a natural politician, but she just might be a revolutionary one.
Yes, even despite her policy errors, and her rhetorical mistakes, and her various missteps of myriad stripes. Even despite the fact that, as she campaigns on protecting and expanding significant pieces of President Obama's agenda, she is largely promising to maintain the status quo.
She can simultaneously be a person who has gotten things wrong, a person who has gotten things right, a person who is not politically radical in some ways, and a person who is politically radical in others. Her candidacy is complex. She is complex.
She is, after all, human.
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.