I Don't WANT to vote for Hillary Clinton

I never thought I would be saying this - certainly not in the days early in the Bill Clinton presidency when I would chastise my male student research assistants for making disparaging remarks about Hillary Clinton's "aggressiveness", etc.  I said then, look, this woman is essentially me - a professional, ambitious, bright woman who is determined to have an impact on policy.  Why, then, am I saying now I don't want to vote for her, although if compelled to by the Democratic nomination process I will?  Follow me below the fold for a spurt of consciousness rumination.

I find myself this morning, even before reading the New York Times magazine piece on Clinton's war vote maneuverings, thinking, "I simply do not want to vote for this person."  And if I'm not alone (and I seldom am - as a baby boomer, I rarely have an original or isolated impulse), Clinton may be in trouble, and the Democrats with her if they nominate her.  But why don't I want to?  Several reasons:

-- I'm tired of Bushes and Clintons - I want someone new;

-- I'm tired of Clinton's endless calculating approach to her job and to politics. She's far from alone in doing this - but she doesn't seem to be able to disguise it.  It's like seeing the open works of a clock while it's ticking away - you can see the gears meshing and the hands moving.

-- Most of all, I guess, and this is probably one reason for my perception of her as calculating, Hillary Clinton is neither magnetic nor inspiring.  I know, that's not a good reason for either voting or not voting for someone - but the lack of magnetism can be an essential factor for a losing politician.  Look at John Kerry.  Look at Al Gore in 2000 - although I believe he now has it, he didn't then.

This last point is critical, to me.  I think Kerry kept winning primaries in 2004 because loyal Dems thought he was the inevitable winner, that he could win - even though I think many of them, as I did then, preferred John Edwards.  I think now Edwards might well have been able to win, but we were convinced by the pros back then that Kerry was the better candidate - in effect, primary voters went with their heads and not their hearts and political instincts.

I think that's what's happening now - Clinton has achieved the air of inevitablity, at least at this early stage, and people don't like to get in the way of a freight train.   But I fear for 2008 if  primary Democratic voters don't think for themselves, don't listen to their own political instincts which are every bit as good as the pros, in most cases.  

Clinton invokes not just a yawn in Democrats like me now - I actively don't want her as the nominee, because of her war vote, because of her constant triangulating, because I don't trust her to press what I consider the most important issue, the climate crisis, and because I don't think she can win.  There, I said it.  I hope I'm wrong, if she's the nominee, but if there are many other women like me - and I'll bet there are a lot - Hillary Clinton will be in trouble.  I'm her demographic - and if I don't want to vote for her, how is she going to pull women less committed to a Democratic victory than I am to the polls to vote for her?

I've done no research for this diary - it's largely my gut feeling, written, as the Car Guys would say, without benefit of the thought process.  But I'm very worried about next year if Clinton steamrolls her way to the nomination.  She's not inspiring, she's not even particularly likeable in her public persona - this has echoes of John Kerry to me, who I think is a fine man and would have been a good president.  But people didn't particularly want to vote for him.  2008 by all rights should be a landslide year for the Democrats - let's not turn it into a bump in the road for this country's continued downward slide toward oligarchy and permanent war.