Hillary Clinton will never -ever- be President of the United States.
A major reason for this is that no one, including her, can articulate a reason why she should be president. "Well, she's experienced," is a common refrain, usually followed by the fact that she's been First Lady, a Senator, and Secretary of State. Notably, however, the gushing over her CV usually ends there which is weird, right? Don't you think if Clinton and her supporters were touting her time occupying positions of power as one of her central qualifications that they'd spend just as much time pointing to things accomplished using that power? Maybe they don't want to talk about how she was an ardent supporter of both the crime and welfare "reform" bills her husband signed way back when, bills that fed more non-violent offenders into the prison system and gutted the welfare benefits most poor Americans depended on. Considering that Clinton will need the votes of poor people of color, especially African-Americans, you can see why this would be a sensitive legacy to bring up.
Oh, right, how could we forget how, as a Senator, Clinton also voted down a bill that would reform how student loans functioned, such as their recipients being allowed to declare bankruptcy, after receiving a massive influx of cash from the financial institutions administrating those loans. For Clinton to win, she needs the millennial block (which are people aged 20-35, remember) to stay with her and not splinter off to 3rd-parties or not show up like they did the last time. Considering that my generation is the first to have a shorter life expectancy than the one before it because we're literally drinking ourselves to death, ODing on heroin, or using more traditional means of suicide in the face of massive economic pressures due to low wages and inescapable student loan debt, it goes without saying that any pitch Clinton makes about how she pinkie swears to solve a problem she had a direct role in creating will be something of a hard sell.
Finally, let's note that Clinton's crowning achievement as Secretary of State was convincing Obama to pursue regime change in Libya, disposing Muammar Gaddafi. How'd that turn out? Sure, we instituted the regime change easily enough, but now Libya has two militia-controlled governments with one of the most bustling slave trades in the entire world. So... not great, it seems. Suddenly being saddled with the Benghazi bullshit doesn't seem like a bad thing for Clinton's image.
All in all, the focus on Clinton's legacy is one of the most incompetent "don't look at the man behind the curtain" games in all of politics. You're supposed to be awed by the majesty of her accumulated titles, but any investigation into her actual policies, who they benefited, and who ended paying the most for her ambitions gets you labelled a misogynist or a Russian agent. A winning strategy this is, obviously, not.
That being said, presidential elections are based more on popularity and public engagement than any real experience so, how is she on that front? The last Gallup poll that asked about her was in September 2018 and two years after losing her approval rating is sitting at the rather abysmal 36%. For comparison, Trump's approval rating during the same polling period (September 4-12) ranged between 41-38%. Let's just pause to reflect on the fact that Trump, the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling by a mile, is still more popular Hillary Clinton two years into his presidency.
This is usually the time that someone pops up with the refrain of "Popular vote! Three million votes!!!!" Which, okay, sure, she won the most irrelevant vote in politics, but how significant is that vote margin? When you convert those numbers to percentages, the final vote tally comes out to Hillary getting 48% of the vote to Trump's 46%. You can see why people insist on screaming out the three million number because it makes it seem like she achieved something significant instead of barely winning a popularity contest against a proto-fascist pig by the skin of her teeth. This isn't even touching on the fact that she couldn't even muster 50% of the fucking vote. The idea that there's some overwhelming popular support just waiting in the wings that will rally Hillary to victory is a fantasy on par with Trump's supporter's insistence that he's an honest man.
So, why the disconnect? How can Clinton be in the hole to a man so utterly repugnant as Trump? The answer lies in the fact that the Republican base is solidly behind Trump, while the Democratic base is more ambivalent about Clinton. In that Gallup poll I mentioned earlier, the party breakdowns for Clinton's approval went this way: Democrats had a 77% approval rating, independents had a 30%, and Republicans had 4 %. In comparison, Trump's approval rating among Republicans and Independents over that same period were 85 and 36%, respectively. I guess there's an argument to be made that she could close that gap to something more competitive in a campaign, but I will point out that she's failed to do that twice already; there's no reason to believe that she'll be able to do so on the third go round, either.
Take, for example, one of her features in The Guardian, where she says that Europe must focus on curbing migration to cut off the far right's exploitation of the issue to rally people behind nationalist causes. On the surface, seems like something of a decent idea, right? If you "solve" the problem your enemies are using as a rallying cry, then you've cut them off at the knees, right? Except, that's not how politics work. Consider, if Republicans passed a comprehensive Medicare-for-All bill that instituted a national, single-payer system in the U.S., do you think people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would stop with the rest of their agenda? No, of course not. All they'd do is say, "Look, we created enough political pressure to get the opposition to accomplish one of our goals for us, let's cross it off the list and keep pushing for the rest." The far-right parties of Europe, and here, would behave no differently.
There's also this lovely quote, where Hillary describes the motivations of Trump's supporters:
"The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality."Remember when Hillary dropped the deplorable line and it turned into a rallying cry for Trump supporters and galvanized their opposition to her? Imagine what's going to happen if she's the nominee and every single campaign ad from the Trump camp includes this quote where she's dismissing all of them has freedom-hating bigoted automatons. When the only people you can effectively mobilize are members of your opposition, you probably shouldn't be running for higher office.
More importantly though, Clinton is just not up to the task. Right now, we face two existential threats- climate change and the rise of fascism, both of which will require radical reforms implemented by bold, fearless leaders who understand that the goal is to defeat the opposition, not try to co-opt it. Hillary's insistence that the center-left parties of Europe implement a right-wing agenda for their own survival shows that her political instincts are misguided at best and deliberately obtuse at worst. If your main advice to a party losing power in the face of waning support from your political base and an emboldened opposition is to implement the policies of your opposition which further emboldens the opposition and alienating your base, you probably shouldn't be listened to by anyone wanting to win their next election.
This also touches another important point to make about Clinton, namely, that she isn't really an opposition figure to Trump. What I mean by that is that Clinton's political philosophy means that, when she's faced with political opposition, she will try to find a "balance" between the two sides. In practical terms, this means she'd recall the troops stationed at the border, rescind the executive order that basically cancels our amnesty policy, but those kids in the tents? They'll stay right where they are. Because in the end, Clinton is a difference of degree from Trump, not kind. Trump is the ass end of American attitudes- he's aggressively stupid, knows absolutely nothing about the world or how it works, and is a petulant bully who incessantly whines about not getting his way. Clinton, on the other hand, is more the dignified face that we want our leaders to put on our activities. Hers is the face that stand behind sanctions on Iraq that kill 500,000 children, or invade Afghanistan and Iraq which kills hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians, who can stand idly by as we kidnap and torture people all over the world, who again, can leave a nation in chaos and thousands in slavery, who can help the Saudi's institute a famine for years on end in Yemen, without any guilt or even the slightest acknowledgment of our actions.
Hillary has made her entire career making decisions that will doom millions of people at home and abroad to starvation, death, imprisonment and misery and she's done it without flinching or even pausing to reflect on all the wreckage her goals have left behind. And we let that happen, we want it to happen, because we think as long as our leaders can commit atrocities with a facade of dignity and composure, then the actions can't really be all that bad no matter the consequences.
To get back to the issue at hand, though, we can't trust Hillary to solve the problems of fascism or climate change. On the fascism note, you have to do more than just beat Trump in an election. The Republican base has obviously shown it has no issues with the practice, so when the next Trump comes along, they'll flock to him as well. Fascism breeds in times of economic depression, which, if you haven't noticed, is what we're still experiencing ten years after the crash. To do away with this, there has to be a massive government spending program that puts people directly to work along with a new progressive tax regime that taxes the richest elements of society both so they don't have as much wealth to use to buy off politicians and so that money can actually be put to good use instead of just hoarded in off-shore bank accounts or mutual funds. You have to put through a single payer health system that eliminates the biggest source of bankruptcy in the country. You also need to do a debt jubilee covering medical debt and student loans so people whose income is being hoovered up to stave off the worst effects of those debts so they can use that money for more efficient economic activity.
In addition to all that, you need renewable energy resource and power production like solar and wind set up and incorporated across the country to reduce the reliance on the fossil fuel industry which is literally killing off the ecosystem we need to survive. I'm sure everybody saw that UN report that said we've only got twelve years as a species to fix this issue or we'll be facing catastrophic consequences we have an uncomfortable chance of not surviving. We won't even have the potential to implement these changes in the U.S. for another two years, so, we literally don't have the time for a measured, balanced approach to policies that may or may not come to full realization in a few decades if ever. We need leaders who understand the urgency of the moment and act like our lives depend on it.
There's a term I've seen thrown around, unicorns, which refers to a type of candidate that leftists prefer who only want the perfect candidate that will give them all their policy dreams and actively sabotage real, capable candidates like, well, Hillary Clinton. And while there is a certain truth to this (see, all the people who voted for Jill Stein or wrote-in Bernie Sanders) I also believe that the term applies just as well to people who want someone like Clinton to be president.
Because if the idea that a woman with no real popular support or platform, who's already lost the chance to be president twice, and has a history of caution, compromise, and appeasement is the person to not only win but boldly lead us to safety in a world on fire isn't magical thinking then, well, nothing is.
No comments:
Post a Comment