On the morning after three massive wins for the Bernie Sanders campaign in Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington state, I am here to discuss why I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Florida primary and why I am a massive supporter of her and all female leaders.
Before I go on, however, let me get one thing straight. I dearly love Bernie Sanders. I feel no despair or even disappointment to know Clinton lost three states last night. Whether Sanders or Clinton win the Democratic nomination they both would be excellent presidents. If Sanders gets the Democratic nomination, I will not only vote for him, I will volunteer my guts out for his victory. I would be proud to have Sanders represent my party and my country.
That being said, I support Hillary. After supporting Bernie for a long time, I switched to Hillary. Sure, I hated the Iraq war vote. Sure the George W. Bush administration changed my young mind from third-party candidates (I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Never again!) to straight Democrats. The carnage that the GOP wreaked on America turned me away from Republican candidates and let’s-bleed-votes-from-the-Democrats candidates (fuck you Nader and Jill Stein) and directly towards voters who could stop the destruction on our country that the GOP was instigating.
When the hideous candidacy of Donald Trump unveiled itself as an unstoppable force in the GOP, it became more imperative than ever that the election go to the Democrats. At the end of 2015, Clinton was busy frustrating all her allies by constantly falling on her face. Instead of taking advantage of GOP turmoil to easily glide to victory, Clinton was busy unwisely shutting out the media and just generally screwing up.
The only good guy running a halfway-decent campaign was Bernie Sanders. He was drawing a lot of massive crowds and drumming up passion in a way that Hillary Clinton could only dream of. Also, in head-to-head polls, Sanders was beating Trump by wider margins than Clinton. Plus, as a paramedic for a private ambulance company Florida, I was starting to have surprising conversations from young white working-class males. There was the usual pro-Trump garbage, and then there was this:
Young white male EMT: “So, it’s like, I’m tired of, like, all the government bullshit, y’know? People never saying what they mean and, like, the bullshit! Nobody fixing anything!”
Me: (internal eye roll), “Yeah.”
Young white male EMT: ”It’s like, whatever happened to freedom?? Whatever happened to all that stuff? It’s like, geez, just leave us alone and stop doing government shit and stuff that doesn’t work and just, y’know, change the system! Just blow it up! It doesn’t work! Obama doesn’t work! Nothing works!”
Me: (Hoo boy, here it comes. The usual “Trump is so great” speech… and I’m gonna have to agree because I’m going to be stuck in the ambulance with the guy for the next ten hours), “Yeah.”
Young white male EMT: ”Anyway, that’s why I like Bernie Sanders, y’know?”
Me: (internal eye roll- wait, what?) “You like Bernie?”
Young white male EMT: ”Yeah man, he’s awesome.”
Holy crap, if Bernie Sanders was attracting working class white voters, a severely necessary voter group for the Democrats, then maybe the Democratic Party really SHOULD nominate this guy! I mean, Hillary Clinton may be more knowledgeable about the issues, but Sanders had good experience, had good viewpoints, was adorable and charismatic and knew how to combine old-school Grandpa charm with cutting-edge social media activism to build up an enthusiastic base of support. Hell, why not? I agree with 99% of what he said anyway.
So I went with Bernie. I volunteered for Bernie. I phone-banked. I wrote letters to the editor. Like Bernie I didn't really want to trash Hillary (unwise, considering she had a very good chance of still ending up the Democratic party's nominee despite the Bernie phenomenon), but I still supported Bernie.
There were still a few things that stuck in my craw with Bernie though. I wasn’t entirely happy. For one thing, Bernie was so old. Can he really last eight hard years in the Oval Office? Second, Bernie just wasn’t appealing to the core of the Democratic party: minorities. He tried, bless his heart, but Bernie was no longer in Vermont. Bernie was dining with Al Sharpton (whom most African American voters regard as a bit of a huckster and opportunist rather than an actual voice for black Americans. Sharpton made no friends when he said in 2008 that he would not give "Obama the keys to the black electorate." Failed miserably there, Mr. Sharpton.) while Hillary Clinton visited Flint, Michigan. The crisis in Flint has a much greater emotional resonance for black voters than whatever Sharpton is saying between sips of champagne… and that’s something Clinton understands better than Sanders.
Third, I hated the trollism of Bernie Sanders’ online supporters. It was surprising to see how differently Sanders supporters handled criticism (screaming, trolling, borderline-racism, rampant abuse of the “up-rating” button for content-free Sanders fluff and “hide” button for even the most mild Sanders criticism or Hillary support) versus how graceful Sanders himself was in the face of divisiveness. To be fair though, many Sanders supporters themselves were disconcerted by this and tried to tone down the incidences of trolling.
Still, Bernie isn’t his supporters. Bernie is Bernie. So I soldiered on. But still, my doubts started to pile up… or rather, I started to get more enthusiastic about Hillary than Bernie. Weird, right? Well, Hillary started winning primaries, and when she started winning primaries she started hitting her stride. After the Paris attacks, Clinton and Sanders had a debate less than 24 hours later. Clinton shone, ready with her commander-in-chief persona and measures she would put in place for that 3am phone call. Sanders merely acted pissed off, irritated that 120 dead Parisians had interrupted his punish-Wall-Street-and-bring-back-the-middle-class speech. Good speech, but now was not the time. People were now thinking about national security and, unlike Clinton, Sanders was not ready. Whenever Hillary Clinton spoke, I would find myself getting proud. “She is my president,” I would think. I especially loved her performance in the last debate with Sanders. My sister described Clinton as “competent down to her shoes,” which is such a great way to put it.
Finally, what brought me back to Clinton wasn’t anything bad Bernie Sanders did or anything his supporters did. It was Clinton herself. Her calmness. Her competence. And most of all, her fighting instinct. I finally was brought back to Clinton when I last heard the Diane Rehm show. There Molly Ball of the Atlantic related a very interesting conversation she had with Jenn Palmieri, communications directer for Hillary Clinton.
“And I asked Jenn, well, you’ve got to feel pretty good about running against Donald Trump. And what she said was, no, because this is a very unpredictable scenario. It potentially put a lot of the Rust Best states in play, a lot of the states where Mitt Romney was not able to get close but where Republicans have been winning in midterm elections- states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. That’s where this base of sort of disaffected, white, working-class men is. And it’s a state that did not- that- where Obama underperformed his polling even as he barely won Ohio in 2012. So there are potentially new states on the map with a Trump candidacy, new coalitions. “
In other words, Hillary Clinton has her war paint on and she’s not taking a damn thing for granted when it comes to Donald Trump. And that’s what we need: a fighter. Someone who will CRUSH Trump. And that is exactly how a Democratic candidate needs to be when it comes to Donald Trump. Because Trump brings dirty fighting to a whole new level. He is an unashamed liar. He lies about the most obvious things. Trump lies to protect his campaign manager when his manager is caught beating women. And if Sanders is nominated, Trump is going to lie again. He will say Sanders is a child molestor. He will say Sanders is a terrorist. There will be all sorts of Zionist-conspiracy allegations. Sanders and his bank-controlling Jew friends were responsible for the 2008 recession! Is Sanders ready for this? He is used to honorable, well-behaved opponents like Vermont politicians and Hillary Clinton. Trump? Oh, hell no! Sanders isn’t ready.
Hillary is.
Oh, Mr. Trump has a BAD fight on his hands with Hillary. She has been fighting all her life, and she is ready to take on Trump. How ready? Let’s look at the poll numbers, shall we:
Latest averages: Clinton leads Trump by 10 points on average among registered voters, 18 points among likely voters
Of course raw votes don’t count as much as electoral college votes. Let’s see how Clinton is doing in swing states. Clinton leads Trump by 4 points in Ohio, and by 2 points (though latest poll shows a Clinton lead by 8 points) in Florida, and the same story is told all over the board. Even the Republican stronghold of Texas shows an only 2 point lead by Trump over Clinton. That’s an old poll too, according to Real Clear Politics. Now that Republican women have fallen away from Trump, we could see Texas turn blue in 2016! Hellooooo President Hillary Clinton!