Everybody loves refrigerator lists, right?
Magnets that list Five Reasons I Love Lists, and Bush-isms To Live By...we love ‘em. Magnetic notepads to make our own To-Do and Grocery lists...we can’t function without ‘em.
Even the books we buy, such as Ten-Thousand Places You’ll Never See Before You Die, and One Hundred Things I Learned In Kindergarten And Forgot By First Grade Let Alone Adulthood, we’d post on the side of the refrigerator if we could find magnets big enough.
In the interest of making this election a little easier for the average obsessive political junkie, especially when raiding the kitchen before the next JeffLieber diary, I’ve assembled the following refrigerator list of reasons why Senator Hillary Clinton should not be our nominee for president.
All jokes aside, what follows is intended as a serious, considered, respectful assemblage of reasons why I believe that Senator Clinton is undeserving of votes in the remaining Democratic contests in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, South Dakota, Guam, and Puerto Rico.
I’ve even put them in a convenient, easy-to-print-and-clip-out format.
For your refrigerator, of course. And for the refrigerators of anyone you know still undecided
Scissors ready?:
Reasons Hillary Rodham Clinton Should Not Be The Democratic Nominee For President
- Her 2002 AUMF vote. Authorizing a rogue president to launch an unnecessary war ought to have been a career-ending lapse of judgment.
- Her inability to have read – before her AUMF vote – the National Intelligence Estimate hastily assembled in the fall of 2002 which warned of the dire consequences of an attack on Iraq. Is this the kind of experience we want in the White House?
- Her yea vote on Kyl-Lieberman in September 2007, which ratcheted up tensions with Iran by calling for the designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. One cannot run as an anti-war candidate having both voted for war, and for laying the foundation for future wars.
- Her increasingly nasty kitchen-sink campaign, and her repeated use of smear tactics and smear merchants to kneecap Senator Obama in the now aptly-renamed Tonya Harding Strategy. That she is willing to employ scorched-earth tactics at the risk of significant harming to the party's chances in the fall election, all in desperate attempts to win the nomination, confirms once again that though the Clintons have built their careers on the notion that their commitment to public service is all about you, really it's all about them.
- Her willingness to leave open the door for xenophobic and anti-Muslim sentiment to spread unchecked in the minds of voters by stating that Obama was not a Muslim, "so far as I know".
- Her Michigan and Florida shenanigans. She pledged to honor the DNC’s decision, and now wants to change the rules. Imagine her and her husband’s outcry were the situation reversed.
- Her campaign's attempts to suppress the vote in the Nevada caucuses, and to threaten legal action against the Texas caucuses. She repeatedly displays a willingness to avoid playing by the rules, or to try and change the rules altogether.
- Her unwillingness to release her tax returns. What is she trying to hide? She’d rather have us suggest the worst than see the facts?
- Bill 2.0. Do we really want Bill back in the White House? Do we really want him injecting himself back into the American body politic? Who will hold him accountable? How will the White House function with an ex-president and a vice-president vying for influence?
- Her campaign's heavy-handed attempts to play the race card and pigeonhole Obama as a niche (i.e. black) candidate. Such heavy-handedness and willingness to divide when the going gets rough makes one wonder what will happen when things get rough in the White House?
- Her clearly erroneous decision earlier in the primary season to send her husband back into the political trenches to fight her dirty battles. By involving Bill, Hillary has assumed the enormous risk of being seen as something other than her own candidate. If she is a bona fide candidate, in her own right, she shouldn't need him. That she does means she will continue to need him. Why should we expect that to ever change?
- Senator Clinton's decisions as president would constantly and inevitably (and, unfairly) be picked apart and second-guessed by the media, by her political opponents, and even by her supporters as being influenced or even introduced by her husband. Imagine four years of this.
- The Clinton Legacy. While some aspects of Bill Clinton's presidency are to be admired, his missteps, with the full assistance of Hillary (remember their boast that we got "two for one"?), propelled Republicans into power in Congress for 12 years, and propelled George W. Bush into power in an election Al Gore should have won easily. Let's remember that when the Clintons left office, there were fewer Democratic senators, representatives, governors, and state legislators than when they entered it.
- The Clinton's shared career has been an endless strong of scandals. They have a bad reputation for truthfulness. Why should we suppose that would change? While there may be some Democrats who wish to return to those days, clearly most Democrats are ready to move on.
- Mark Penn, Terry McAuliffe, and James Carville. They, along with the Clintons, are masters of the politics of personal diminishment. They represent the style of politics Americans are tired of and want to see changed in Washington. Most Americans have had enough of spin and divisive tactics over the past eight years and do not want anymore.
- Senator Clinton is a living symbol of the culture wars of the past. Her presidency would mean a continuation of the same tired old partisan, ideological battles we've been fighting for the past sixteen years. It's time America moves beyond the Vietnam War, the 1960s, and the 1990s all at once.
- It is difficult to imagine Senator Clinton carrying the banner of change while at the same time carrying such a heavy burden of the past, of the status quo. Clinton has more baggage than Samsonite; her nomination will take this country on a trip down memory lane, and we'd do best to ask now whether those memories will be good ones.
- To hear Clinton speak of it, she's winning 100 percent of the votes that matter, and the overwhelming support of Very Smart People Who Know What's Best For The Country. Her campaign's repeated comments disregarding as basically unimportant the voters in the 29 "small" and "insignificant" states Obama has won smacks of the elitism we're tired of in Washington.
- Her nomination would be the surest way to unify a fractured Republican Party. She will rally the Republican base to McCain's side, a man they don't particularly like, like nothing else, just to keep "Billary" from ever stepping foot near the Lincoln Bedroom again. While Clinton complains bitterly, and to some degree rightly so, about the "vast right-wing conspiracy, she all the while recruits it, feeds it, and sends it to war.
- Her over fifty percent unfavorable ratings. Only two percent of voters claim no opinion of her, a very small number of voters to convince to swing to her side. She is a known commodity, and half of America does not want to own it.
- Her claims of being "experience candidate". Even before she began repeatedly "misspeaking" about Bosnia and Northern Ireland, she never missed a chance to mention her "35 years of experience". She is sixty. She left Yale Law School at age 25. Evidently she considers everything she has done since school, from her years at the Rose Law Firm to her time on the board of Wal-Mart to her experience as First Lady of Arkansas and in Washington as relevant to the presidency. But the fact is that as a lawyer, First Lady, and senator, Clinton has had little actual experience running anything.
- It is disingenous to count her years and largely cermonial role as First Lady as "foreign policy experience", and to add the policy successes (though not the failures) of the 1990s to her resume. By doing so, she implies that she was part of a co-presidency, in which case it is only fair and necessary that Americans ask whether she intends to be part of another.
- Her unsupported claims, confirmed not least by the long-resisted and heavily-redacted release of her public schedule for her eight years as first lady, that she helped negotiate the Irish peace accords, helped facilitate the flow of refugees in the Balkans, helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act (signed by her husband just ten days after his first inaugural) and SCHIP, and privately opposed the passage of NAFTA. As we watch her imaginary worlds collapse, we must ask ourselves what other imaginary worlds has she created and will she create again?
- She is the status quo candidate in a change election. Given the type of "kitchen-sink", Tonya Harding campaign she has run, how many millions of energized, change-driven primary voters will choose - hopes deflated - to sit out the general election when given the status quo choices of Clinton and McCain?
And, in answer to the inevitable comment wondering why I couldn't have instead posted Obama's refrigerator list, I did.
Happy cutting!