With just over six weeks to go before Election Day, the New York Times editorial board has issued a powerful endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, and there’s nothing half-hearted or subtle about it:
In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues. But this is not a normal election year. A comparison like that would be an empty exercise in a race where one candidate — our choice, Hillary Clinton — has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway.
But, says the Times, their endorsement carries a deeper purpose:
But this endorsement would also be an empty exercise if it merely affirmed the choice of Clinton supporters. We’re aiming instead to persuade those of you who are hesitating to vote for Mrs. Clinton — because you are reluctant to vote for a Democrat, or for another Clinton, or for a candidate who might appear, on the surface, not to offer change from an establishment that seems indifferent and a political system that seems broken.
Running down the other guy won’t suffice to make that argument. The best case for Hillary Clinton cannot be, and is not, that she isn’t Donald Trump.
The best case is, instead, about the challenges this country faces, and Mrs. Clinton’s capacity to rise to them.
And indeed, the paper makes a ringing, affirmative case for why Clinton would be an excellent president, tracing her long public career from her earliest days as an advocate for children who had no voice through her time as secretary of state, when she pushed for sanctions against Iran that ultimately led to last year’s historic nuclear accord. The Times doesn’t shy away from noting Clinton’s mistakes, such as her vote in favor of the Iraq war, but it also offers a stinging rebuke to the overheated coverage of her emails, saying that in light of “the real challenges that will occupy the next president,” Clinton’s email server “looks like a matter for the help desk.”
Please read the entire editorial. And if you know friends who are wavering in their decision this fall, please share it with them, too. It might just convince a few fence-sitters.