Why did I vote for Clinton?
The two pro-Hillary articles I found most convincing were these:
1- The New Yorker’s endorsement, here.
2- Zompist’s take down of Trump, here. Also see here.
It’s time for a female president. HRC is immensely qualified for the job and her opponent isn’t even close. She will improve upon the successful policies of Barack Obama, not roll back the clock on the progress we’ve made over the past eight years. Her policy positions are outstanding.
What about the scandals?
Most of them appear to be trumped up by Republicans for purely partisan reasons. Bengazi was a tragedy but not a scandal. The email server was sloppy but ultimately not that big of a deal. With all the voluntarily released emails plus the hacked stuff, HRC is (whether she likes it or not) one of the most transparent candidates ever to run for president in a general election. She has been scrutinized and re-scrutinized and re-re-scrutinized, and for the most part we’ve seen there is no “there” there. Republicans have admitted that their attacks on HRC were motivated by a desire to thwart her campaign for presidency.
Two of the scandals, though, are genuinely disturbing. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others at the DNC sided with HRC’s campaign against Bernie Sanders in the primary (conspiring to politicize his atheism). And Donna Brazile sent HRC’s campaign debate questions prior to debates with Sanders. The profound lack of ethics shown by these supporters of HRC is troubling.
And then there’s Bill Clinton. But that’s a topic for another time.
So do I have concerns about HRC? I do. I’m concerned about the ethics and the judgement of those around her. And on a policy level, I’m concerned that she will be more interventionist than Obama and lead our country into unnecessary wars.
But Hillary Clinton is the correct person for this moment. Obama has steered our country in the right direction. Now we need a steady hand on the tiller to keep things moving forward. HRC’s calm patience and strong work ethic, her piercing intelligence and dogged determination, her dedication to the middle class and her focus on substance over soaring rhetoric are exactly what we need now. She has the potential to be a great president.
She also has the potential, if she’s not careful, to deliver the presidency and both houses of Congress to the Republicans in 2020. I hope she’s not so blinded by defensiveness about WikiLeaks that she cannot fix the problems in her organization that WikiLeaks have revealed, because if those problems aren’t fixed they will poison her presidency, assuming she wins.
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