Hilary Rodham Clinton will most likely be the first female POTUS.
Frankly, I am not thrilled. I was – I am – an ardent supporter of Bernie Sanders. There are several key policy issues where I agree with Sanders and vehemently disagree with HRC. Those are:
- The Israeli-Palestinian conflict – Sanders confirms Israel’s right to exist and its right to fight terrorism, but he open decries the treatment of Palestinians under the current apartheid system in Israel. Clinton’s responses have been uniformly pro-Israeli policy or a cautious hedge. Neither of those things thrill me.
- The environment – Sanders is hands-down a better environmentalist. Sanders has been ardently anti-fracking and anti-Keystone pipeline. HRC supports fracking and has refused to take any sort of stand on the Keystone pipeline. One of the things I like the least about HRC is her tendency to give Ebenezer Scrooge’s “safe and terrible answer”; instead of boldly supporting many environmental causes, her phrasing leaves her lots of wiggle room to compromise or she avoids comment.
- So-called “free trade agreements” – Clinton has been very in favor of free trade agreements, although she is starting to wriggle away from that stance as the election nears, in part due to the support Sanders received from labor because he absolutely refuses to condone any of the job-killing, slave-wage creating, underdeveloped-nation exploiting crap inherent in free trade agreements like the TTP. Sanders was always against NAFTA, which Clinton supported whole-heartedly. NAFTA has indisputably harmed the American workforce.
- For profit prisons – Sanders was always firmly against these modern-era slavers, while HRC was quite happy to take their money and give them the nod. Nevertheless, the groundswell of support Sanders received for his stance against for-profit prisons has moved HRC sharply to the left of late, speaking out for criminal justice reform. Considering that lobbyists for these monstrosities have been pouring cash into her campaign war chest, I am reluctant to believe her until I see some concrete action.
- Minimum wage – Sanders has been a prominent fighter for a $15/hour minimum wage for a long time. HRC has been willing to argue in favor of a $12/hour minimum wage but thinks the ungodly largess of $15/hour should be left up to individual states. This is having her cake (look, I’m for a living wage) and eating it too (look, I am pro-business). I don’t really like that kind of milquetoast waffling.
Obviously, I am not crazy about HRC. But I am also too smart to believe any of the crazy-sauce coming from the right regarding her emails or Benghazi or her supposed crookedness and I know she has several excellent qualities. She is a brilliant woman and a bone-deep political animal who is adept at handling Washington red tape. Her policies are at least moderate and even liberal at times. I know she gets a ton of undeserved negative press and that a lot of attacks against her are coming from pure patriarchal sexism.
She will be at least as liberal as Barak Obama has been — so to the right of Richard Nixon and smack dab in moderate Republican territory.
I would, of course, prefer not to have to chose a moderate Republican when what I want is a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but Hillary will be getting my vote. Why? Because the other option is Donald Trump.
Trump is a racist, sociopathic, narcissistic liar whose grasp of politics is even worse than his grasp of business. I cannot even vote green to protest the right-wing shift in the Democratic party because splitting the vote might make Trump POTUS. That know-nothing yet know-it-all dumbass does NOT need to be anywhere near a position of authority … and certainly not around nuclear weapons.
Just once, before I kick the bucket, I would love to have and actually dyed-in-the-wool liberal to vote for. *sigh*