Clinton’s two problems: trust and vision…
Mrs. Clinton has been around too long. Her past drags her down, especially those events reflecting on her trustworthiness. Her lack of vision diminishes her future electability. And she learned to waffle from her hubby. In the last days before the Iowa caucuses, she said she was the better candidate because she is more moderate. Now, in New Hampshire, she’s saying she’s the progressive. I put her more toward center than the Bern, but her ties to big money, special interests, and lobbying groups all mean that whatever she’s saying at the moment just represents empty rhetoric on her part.
Trust? It’s hard to imagine any politician being trustworthy. “Trustworthy politician” is an oxymoron. The longer s/he’s around, the more opportunities there are for a politician to lose our trust. Part of young people’s distrust in Clinton and trust in the Bern can be attributed to two facts, of course: Mrs. Clinton has been around so long that people know she’s untrustworthy; the Bern has been around a long time too, but people don’t know him that well. When that happens, any sane person focuses on policies (there are a lot of insane ones among voters, of course). The Bern talks about policies—maybe not enough, but at least he does; Clinton talks in fifteen-second sound bites with zero policy content, keying her remarks to impatient media and TV viewers instead of intelligent people who look beyond all that to policy details.
Clinton’s references to her past service record remind me of job applicants who tout their wonderful past accomplishments (it’s bad when you see they weren’t so great, as in the case of Clinton). First, they don’t tell me much about what the applicant will do in the future. When Clinton says, “Look at what I’ve done and what I’ve put up with, so it’s my turn,” it just doesn’t cut it with me. She isn’t promising a chicken in every pot, of course, so she tries to reduce our expectations. In fact, she is promising more of the same. She’s the establishment candidate with the constant litany that she’ll continue Obama’s programs. That’s living in the past, not the future. We need more than Obama’s programs!
Saying she wants to continue with what Obama started might eventually win that well-intentioned but ineffective man’s endorsement (he seems hooked on this legacy thing—not bad, but he could have done so much more), but the next Democrat in the White House should be trying to fix the things wrong with what he started, the first priority being to break all ties with one-percenters who are destroying this country (they might be only one percent of our population, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to them as well). That’s a huge gap in any vision Clinton pretends to have—channeling Obama will not get the country’s problems solved and will piss off a lot of people who know he caved to special interests in too many circumstances.
And Clinton’s trust is eroded further when she becomes frustrated, strident, and lashes out. Sanders avoids personal attacks; she’ll resort to them when cornered. At last Thursday’s debate in New Hampshire, she accused Sanders of artfully smearing her—maybe she meant the artful part as a compliment to balance the smearing insult? The audience would have none of that; their boos were energetic, frustrating her even more, quite amusing when you realize that she was so addled she didn’t remember the audience was overwhelmingly for the Bern. She should have kept her cool.
Sanders is an atypical politician because he’s too nice; Clinton is a streetfighter as a politician and the opposite of nice. Backtracking on the moderate comment she made as proof she’s more electable, Sanders refrained from mentioning that she worked for Barry Goldwater’s campaign, so I will. That’s a bit right of moderate, I’d say. Sure, that happened long ago, but it shows she hasn’t always been a progressive. Her waffling history is longer than her husband’s while Sanders has been a lot more consistent. She says it’s her time; I say it’s Bernie’s.
Her vision does include the recognition that the next Dem president will have to continue Obama’s bitter battles with Congress if the makeup of Congress and the Supreme Court doesn’t change. It’s sad and amusing that she criticizes Sanders for not recognizing this, but she’d have the same problem—maybe worse, because Sanders is an unknown while all those Republicans hate the Clintons and always have. Winning the White House will not be a progressive victory (Clinton is a wee bit progressive, I’ll admit, but much less deserving of the label than Sanders) until there is a majority of progressives in Congress and in the courts, not the retrograde conservatives who control the dialectic now in Washington. It’s true that Sanders might polarize the country even more, but that’s OK if he’s honest about it. I’d rather see someone who stood up for their principles than a waffling Obama-clone in the White House. And, as time goes on, people will see that Sanders is a much better candidate than Clinton to confront the insanity of the GOP.
Of course, the Bern goes beyond vision. He knows the difference between right and wrong. Part of my distrust in Clinton is that she doesn’t seem to—there’s a lot of evidence pointing that way. Her choices are dictated by political expedience. Right for her is equivalent to what’s politically convenient, not what’s morally correct or necessarily better for the nation. Wrong is what the Clintons determine not to be politically expedient and/or approved by their supporting special interest groups. Hillary carries the banner of the Clinton dynasty into battle, and that banner is a bloody one.
The hubby never pursued the terrorists in the first WTC attack, for example, and we suffered through 9/11 as a consequence. Hillary touts her participation in the decision to get bin Laden; Bill never tried because he couldn’t be bothered. Hillary voted in 2002 to invade Iraq; Sanders didn’t. They both had the same information available, but no one can deny that the Iraq War ultimately led to the creation of ISIS. She claims to be the foreign policy expert, but what good is expertise when your decisions are mistakes? And does it strike anyone else that Bill is the epitome of a hypocrite in lashing out against the Sanders campaign for being sexist? (Hillary should have tossed him out on his ear years ago–so much for showing she’s a strong, smart woman!)
The Clintons let the GOP have their way in dismantling Wall Street controls in place since FDR (so much for being true Dems—FDR is Bernie’s favorite president, by the way), and we went through the 2008/2009 financial collapse as a consequence. Hillary, as SecState, was only indirectly responsible for Benghazi, but not being more forceful in beefing up security in embassies and consulates in dangerous areas was a major error of vision (and was she responsible for some of the decisions portrayed in the movie Thirteen Hours that left Americans stranded in Libya?—curious that the movie, like Concussion, has all but disappeared)—like Lady Macbeth, she has a lot of blood on her hands, and it isn’t imaginary.
And let’s not forget the email gaffe. Yes, everyone knows that the one sending classified information is responsible for labeling it correctly and sending it through appropriate channels (you didn’t?—you do now), and retroactively reclassifying shouldn’t change that, but that channel never should be outside a secure intranet with impenetrable firewalls, let alone on some arrogant politician’s private server. I don’t care if other SecStates did the same thing—if others are stupid, does Hillary have to follow suit? That reflects on both trust and vision—how can you trust anyone who should be in jail?—and a lack of vision of the consequences—oops! isn’t a legit excuse when you’re SecState. Sloppiness and arrogance disqualifies her from any sensitive position, not just the presidency. Those other SecStates aren’t running for president; she is.
And also let’s not forget that she’s Wall Street’s darling. To the extent that Wall Street supports any faux progressive, it always hedges its bets and backs those candidates on both sides who will let them continue their fraudulent ways designed to enrich themselves and destroy the middle class (the poor have already been screwed by Wall Street, so these one-percenters now can only steal money from the middle class). What Goldman Sachs stupidly paid Clinton for a speech has little relevance. What’s relevant is the Wall Street money swelling her campaign coffers. Clinton uses Citizens United to her advantage; Sanders wants to undo that SCOTUS decision (I know because he just asked me to sign a petition that calls for a constitutional amendment, and I did). Guess who has the right priorities?
I tend to write off politicians when I learn enough about them to distrust them and their policies. I wrote off the Clintons and Bushes long ago. I lived through the Clinton era and know them all too well (I could say many worse things about them here). So far, the Bern hasn’t reached that stage. Clinton has, many times over. Every GOP candidate has too. Even if the Bern loses the primaries, I’m hoping he will make Clinton a wee bit less dishonest and a buyer into his vision for saving this country. (Note that I said “hoping”—I don’t think it’s likely.)
Sanders is already making all the GOP candidates look like heartless hypocrites—sociopaths hovering between theocratic demagogues and power-hungry, fascist-leaning psychos. But I will never be able to call Hillary Clinton “Madam President”—she’ll only be a madam because she has helped turn Washington into a bordello that attends to special interests instead of the interests of the American people. I don’t have much hope for the Bern because the Clinton machine could easily gobble him up in its hungry maws, but he’s the only hope we have. As I said on Tuesday, I wonder if Germany wants any more migrants. I like sauerkraut and sausage, and I’m half-German. The other half’s Irish, so Jameson whiskey is an alternate solution…sigh….
And so it goes….
