Czernobog
Gold Member
I have been asked several times, why I am voting for Hillary. I have been hearing a lot of noise - from both sides of the ideological divide - about a "choice of lesser evils". Now, to some extend I get this, particularly among millenials. I mean, they're coming from college campuses where the debate centred around a $15 minimum wage, reparations for slavery, abolition of the prison system, whether cis actors can realistically portray trans characters, how soon is too soon to start pushing for universal basic income. It’s simply demoralising to trek all the way back to the American centre, where the topic up for discussion is whether Muslims and Mexicans are too scary to let into the country.
But I do not see Clinton as the "lesser of two evils", but as the best conceivable candidate versus the worst conceivable candidate. Now, a couple of disclaimers here. The question of "Why are you voting for Clinton" is not one that can be easily distilled into a couple of nice taglines that can be fit on a bumper sticker. Hence, this is going to be a "wall of words" - translation: it is going to be a thoughtful post that requires effort, and consideration to appreciate. If you are looking for a short, pithy one-liner to easily dismiss, or thank, then stop reading, now. This thread will not be for you. The second point I will make is that I am not writing this to convince Republican, or Trump supporters that they should "change camps". Hillary Clinton is not an ideological candidate that Republicans can support, and Trump supporters decided long ago that Trump is their guy, regardless of who was on the other side of the debate. I am penning this for Progressives, and Millennials who feel that they are having to begrudgingly vote for a candidate that they don't really like.
Hillary is a woman who thinks in single-spaced policy briefs, whose speeches are alternately criticised as being either confusingly wonkish or condescendingly meat-and-potatoes. Where past presidents and nominees have leaned on charisma to balance out their intellect (or disguise their lack thereof), Clinton has instead doubled down on being what she is: a nerd.
Did you guys know that her dissertation, printed in the Harvard Educational Review in 1974, is one of the most widely cited works on children's rights? But based just on her legal writing and tenure at the Children’s Defense Fund, historian Garry Wills called her in 1992 “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.”
Even the New York Times, in a feature titled “How Hillary Clinton Became A Hawk” summarised her disagreements with Obama with one quote from a staffer: she has “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” How dismissive! Does anyone really believe this? That this lifelong student of world politics, with decades of foreign travel and diplomacy under her belt, whose teams of advisors would make any military strategist’s mouth water — you think she wants to put lives on the line because rah rah go team?
You may believe Clinton does not share your values, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But let’s dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton doesn’t know what she’s doing.
There’s enough effective activism in here — civil rights litigation, legal aid for the indigent, advocacy for working women — for a lifetime. But I want to focus on the 1990s.
The impression is that older Democrats are voting for Hillary as an extension of her husband, and fond memories of him. Most of us defend her because of her independence from her husband! Anyone who sees her as just "the wife of Bill Clinton" never saw that amazing 60 Minutes interview:
We are defensive of her because we remember the multi-decade smear campaign that ensued. Because we see echoes of it in her public perception today. Hillary was the first First Lady who wasn't a "Happy Little Homemaker", and she deeply disturbed the conservatives at the time, who saw working mothers as a direct threat to "family values".
As such her existence in the spotlight made her "Public Enemy #1" of the anti-feminist movement. They called her a "congenital liar" (fun fact: Politifact has rated her as the second most honest candidate on record). They forced her to bake cookies. Republicans even turned her husband’s infidelity into a political flashpoint, highlighting the instability of their nontraditional marriage.
And yet, she refused to just sit down, shut up, and be a White House fixture. She gave her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, despite pressure from her husband’s administration to soften her rhetoric. She spearheaded a health care plan that, had it passed, would have been the largest poverty-reduction measure since Medicaid. She coauthored It Takes A Village, which presented the unprecedented argument that we have a collective responsibility to make sure every child has the basic necessities and opportunities for a happy life. And she did all of this before even running for public office!
Her Senate voting record makes her more liberal than Obama — and only slightly less liberal than Sanders, a self-described socialist. And, in case we’ve forgotten, she’s currently running on the most progressive major-party platform in American history.
The most recent narrative of Hillary's career - started, of course, by Trump - is that she undervalues minorities, and her brand of feminism is only for rich white women. The problem is that this, again, does not align with the facts of her career. The Children’s Health Insurance Program she salvaged from the failed health bill cut the uninsured rate for children in half, mostly by covering children of colour who were previously uninsured. The Clinton Foundation has low-cost HIV/AIDS medication to over 9 million people, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.
On a personal level, she joined the Children’s Defense Fund straight out of university, and due to her work with them, was able to provide legal assistance to Arkansas’s (largely black) poor.Her investigation into segregated schools brought about sweeping education reforms in Arkansas. This all points to a consistent pattern of providing effective help to those who need it most, regardless of race.
For your consideration:
If you believed something strongly and spent your life fighting for it, wouldn’t your natural reaction be to shout it from the mountaintops for all to hear?
If half the country spent decades attacking your personal character with unsubstantiated rumors, wouldn’t your natural reaction be to lose your cool and go off on an angry rant?
If a party convention hall chanted “lock her up” and “trump that bitch” for four days straight, if the national media decided that the wellbeing of millions of people depended on your ability to deliver a debate performance that’s knowledgeable but not wonky, composed but not robotic, exceptional but relatable, presidential but womanly — wouldn’t your natural reaction be to lose your shit?
Hillary, though, has an uncanny ability to comport herself in exactly the way she believes will best achieve her ends, to play her cards at exactly the right time, to recognize the second- and third-order consequences of her every move, to accrue and spend political capital with mechanical precision. This rather ties into my first point. She thinks, prepares, and then acts. She never simply reacts.
To her opponents, this is horrifying — and well it should be. Sean Hannity says she’ll be “President Obama on steroids.” Laura Ingraham says this election is the “last stand for America as we know it.” This is what’s holding the Republican Party together: the threat of what Clinton could accomplish.
But even to allies, this can be extremely unsettling. It can feel like she doesn’t care about you, and like she’ll say or do whatever she needs to in order to get your vote.
And thank god for that!
In the last year, a tide of white nationalism has rocked the entire Western world, with far-right anti-immigrant parties winning unprecedented electoral victories throughout Europe. Meanwhile, straddling grassroots insurgents on the left and right, personally disliked by 53% of Americans, and facing an extremely hostile media environment, Clinton has not once dipped below an electoral college majority.
In short, she is a political machine. And for this progressives should be grateful. Clinton gets blasted on the left for taking money from interest groups and giving speeches at banks. But if you think you can get elected in 2016 without a $500 million war chest, if you think you can be a New York senator without shaking hands on Wall Street, you’re just not being honest about the realities of electoral politics. Yeah, Clinton has gotten her hands dirty - and that's okay. That is, in fact, is the very model of how change happens within massive, complex institutions.It’s an inconvenient reality that for every MLK you also need an LBJ - someone who knows the gears and levers of Washington inside and out, who collects notes from hundreds of meetings with activists and academics and turns them into policy, who builds coalitions and woos opponents, who sits at the damn desk and signs the damn bill.
One of my favourite, although less known, quotes from Hillary Clinton is:
I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws. You change allocation of resources. You change the way systems operate.
You're not going to change every heart. You're not.
It may not me a pretty way to do things. We may wish we lived in an ideal worlds where the system can be changed from without. But, the reality is that this is how change happens - it's dirty, it's ugly, and it can only be done by recognising that the system is the system. It is the way to move forward.
For those who bothered to stick around, thank you. I realise it was long, but, as I said at the beginning, my reason for choosing to support Clinton can't exactly be distilled down to a bumper sticker.
But I do not see Clinton as the "lesser of two evils", but as the best conceivable candidate versus the worst conceivable candidate. Now, a couple of disclaimers here. The question of "Why are you voting for Clinton" is not one that can be easily distilled into a couple of nice taglines that can be fit on a bumper sticker. Hence, this is going to be a "wall of words" - translation: it is going to be a thoughtful post that requires effort, and consideration to appreciate. If you are looking for a short, pithy one-liner to easily dismiss, or thank, then stop reading, now. This thread will not be for you. The second point I will make is that I am not writing this to convince Republican, or Trump supporters that they should "change camps". Hillary Clinton is not an ideological candidate that Republicans can support, and Trump supporters decided long ago that Trump is their guy, regardless of who was on the other side of the debate. I am penning this for Progressives, and Millennials who feel that they are having to begrudgingly vote for a candidate that they don't really like.
- She is a deep thinker with a profound breadth of knowledge.
Hillary is a woman who thinks in single-spaced policy briefs, whose speeches are alternately criticised as being either confusingly wonkish or condescendingly meat-and-potatoes. Where past presidents and nominees have leaned on charisma to balance out their intellect (or disguise their lack thereof), Clinton has instead doubled down on being what she is: a nerd.
Did you guys know that her dissertation, printed in the Harvard Educational Review in 1974, is one of the most widely cited works on children's rights? But based just on her legal writing and tenure at the Children’s Defense Fund, historian Garry Wills called her in 1992 “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.”
Even the New York Times, in a feature titled “How Hillary Clinton Became A Hawk” summarised her disagreements with Obama with one quote from a staffer: she has “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” How dismissive! Does anyone really believe this? That this lifelong student of world politics, with decades of foreign travel and diplomacy under her belt, whose teams of advisors would make any military strategist’s mouth water — you think she wants to put lives on the line because rah rah go team?
You may believe Clinton does not share your values, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But let’s dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton doesn’t know what she’s doing.
- She has dedicated her life to advancing her values and ideals.
There’s enough effective activism in here — civil rights litigation, legal aid for the indigent, advocacy for working women — for a lifetime. But I want to focus on the 1990s.
The impression is that older Democrats are voting for Hillary as an extension of her husband, and fond memories of him. Most of us defend her because of her independence from her husband! Anyone who sees her as just "the wife of Bill Clinton" never saw that amazing 60 Minutes interview:
We are defensive of her because we remember the multi-decade smear campaign that ensued. Because we see echoes of it in her public perception today. Hillary was the first First Lady who wasn't a "Happy Little Homemaker", and she deeply disturbed the conservatives at the time, who saw working mothers as a direct threat to "family values".
As such her existence in the spotlight made her "Public Enemy #1" of the anti-feminist movement. They called her a "congenital liar" (fun fact: Politifact has rated her as the second most honest candidate on record). They forced her to bake cookies. Republicans even turned her husband’s infidelity into a political flashpoint, highlighting the instability of their nontraditional marriage.
And yet, she refused to just sit down, shut up, and be a White House fixture. She gave her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, despite pressure from her husband’s administration to soften her rhetoric. She spearheaded a health care plan that, had it passed, would have been the largest poverty-reduction measure since Medicaid. She coauthored It Takes A Village, which presented the unprecedented argument that we have a collective responsibility to make sure every child has the basic necessities and opportunities for a happy life. And she did all of this before even running for public office!
Her Senate voting record makes her more liberal than Obama — and only slightly less liberal than Sanders, a self-described socialist. And, in case we’ve forgotten, she’s currently running on the most progressive major-party platform in American history.
The most recent narrative of Hillary's career - started, of course, by Trump - is that she undervalues minorities, and her brand of feminism is only for rich white women. The problem is that this, again, does not align with the facts of her career. The Children’s Health Insurance Program she salvaged from the failed health bill cut the uninsured rate for children in half, mostly by covering children of colour who were previously uninsured. The Clinton Foundation has low-cost HIV/AIDS medication to over 9 million people, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.
On a personal level, she joined the Children’s Defense Fund straight out of university, and due to her work with them, was able to provide legal assistance to Arkansas’s (largely black) poor.Her investigation into segregated schools brought about sweeping education reforms in Arkansas. This all points to a consistent pattern of providing effective help to those who need it most, regardless of race.
- She is extraordinarily — inhumanly? — pragmatic.
For your consideration:
If you believed something strongly and spent your life fighting for it, wouldn’t your natural reaction be to shout it from the mountaintops for all to hear?
If half the country spent decades attacking your personal character with unsubstantiated rumors, wouldn’t your natural reaction be to lose your cool and go off on an angry rant?
If a party convention hall chanted “lock her up” and “trump that bitch” for four days straight, if the national media decided that the wellbeing of millions of people depended on your ability to deliver a debate performance that’s knowledgeable but not wonky, composed but not robotic, exceptional but relatable, presidential but womanly — wouldn’t your natural reaction be to lose your shit?
Hillary, though, has an uncanny ability to comport herself in exactly the way she believes will best achieve her ends, to play her cards at exactly the right time, to recognize the second- and third-order consequences of her every move, to accrue and spend political capital with mechanical precision. This rather ties into my first point. She thinks, prepares, and then acts. She never simply reacts.
To her opponents, this is horrifying — and well it should be. Sean Hannity says she’ll be “President Obama on steroids.” Laura Ingraham says this election is the “last stand for America as we know it.” This is what’s holding the Republican Party together: the threat of what Clinton could accomplish.
But even to allies, this can be extremely unsettling. It can feel like she doesn’t care about you, and like she’ll say or do whatever she needs to in order to get your vote.
And thank god for that!
In the last year, a tide of white nationalism has rocked the entire Western world, with far-right anti-immigrant parties winning unprecedented electoral victories throughout Europe. Meanwhile, straddling grassroots insurgents on the left and right, personally disliked by 53% of Americans, and facing an extremely hostile media environment, Clinton has not once dipped below an electoral college majority.
In short, she is a political machine. And for this progressives should be grateful. Clinton gets blasted on the left for taking money from interest groups and giving speeches at banks. But if you think you can get elected in 2016 without a $500 million war chest, if you think you can be a New York senator without shaking hands on Wall Street, you’re just not being honest about the realities of electoral politics. Yeah, Clinton has gotten her hands dirty - and that's okay. That is, in fact, is the very model of how change happens within massive, complex institutions.It’s an inconvenient reality that for every MLK you also need an LBJ - someone who knows the gears and levers of Washington inside and out, who collects notes from hundreds of meetings with activists and academics and turns them into policy, who builds coalitions and woos opponents, who sits at the damn desk and signs the damn bill.
One of my favourite, although less known, quotes from Hillary Clinton is:
I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws. You change allocation of resources. You change the way systems operate.
You're not going to change every heart. You're not.
It may not me a pretty way to do things. We may wish we lived in an ideal worlds where the system can be changed from without. But, the reality is that this is how change happens - it's dirty, it's ugly, and it can only be done by recognising that the system is the system. It is the way to move forward.
For those who bothered to stick around, thank you. I realise it was long, but, as I said at the beginning, my reason for choosing to support Clinton can't exactly be distilled down to a bumper sticker.
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