Now that Trump is the official nominee for the GOP, and Clinton will be made official next week, for what it’s worth, here’s my take on all of this.
With Trump winning as presumptive nominee in May, I realized that the only hope was for Hillary to be president. There are reasons Trump inspires a Supreme Court Justice to break protocol and speak out, and a reason a slew of historians by profession feel obligated to put Trump in context as a dangerous anomaly. I have been incredibly vocal against Trump because he is manifestly unqualified for the job. There are so many reasons, I forgot half of them.
As a life-long Libertarian/Republican, Hillary and Slick Willie were always anathema to me – I am not a fan of the Democratic party, and I never voted for a Democrat in my life. Also, many of my Bernie-supporting friends were upset about Hillary’s nomination, and I wondered what any left-wing person would have against Hillary? Especially when compared to Trump. So, I realized, I better revisit this, because if Hillary is the only option, I better reevaluate her. So, I googled things like “what’s so bad about Hillary Clinton” and also “Why Hillary?”
Of course, up popped all the controversies. Vince Foster, Travel Gate, her unelected attempt to push Universal Health Care. All the Bill Clinton controversies – Monica Lewinski, the impeachment, the hair cut that stopped LAX for half a day (ok, I just remembered that – that was not in the Google results). Benghazi. Her waffling on Gay Marriage. Her defense of a rapist in 1978-ish (and oh, how she laughed when she said she could not trust lie detectors). And the email servers.
Two patterns arose.
First Pattern: Most of what she does that pisses people off, she does because she wants to get something done, and she doesn’t care or think about the emotional ramifications, or “optics”, of her actions.
Travelgate. She brought in her own people. She wasn’t thinking about the people that were already there. Seemed heartless. No, I say it was pragmatic, and expedient for her.
The defense of the rapist. Well, she is a lawyer. I heard her interview on the subject. She did what every defense lawyer is bound to do, which is mount the best defense she can for her client – and she went to extraordinary lengths to do that – even flying to New York to work with the one forensics expert who could possibly find the evidence to get her client guilty – and found he could not because the police and the prosecution screwed up the evidence. I thought to myself : Man! I want her for my defense lawyer. She did a great job, and the prosecutor should have been skewered for botching the case. Hillary was laughing at the inadequacy of the so-called “lie detector” not at the victim in the case. She is a wonk, and she is clinical.
The email servers. She didn’t want to fool around with government email servers, which probably didn’t have Blackberry access or even remote access to them, so she set up her own server with her team at her house. She mixed her personal email with her official email – and felt she could manage that. I believe she did it to make her job easier, not to hide what she was doing, or to evade email discovery. And the rules were fuzzy. So why not? I don’t see malicious intent here, only pragmatism. It was a mistake, but not a stupid one. It was an attempt to escape bureaucracy, and bureaucrats hate that. I read the materials, such as I could. The FBI made the right decision not to recommend prosecution in my opinion. But – again, she was not thinking about how it would look to do this, or the emotional impact it would have on those that assume she is doing yet another thing wrong.
So – upshot of the first pattern: I believe she has a touch of something like “Aspergers.” She is a wonk, is clinical, and does not necessarily suffer the emotions of people or think about how things “look.” I get that. I’m actually kind of like that. People assume ill intent when actually she just doesn’t think about or care about their emotional reactions. Such a difference from her husband!
Second Pattern: She has been relentlessly pursued by professionals for over 23 years trying to discredit her, find crimes, remove her from office, etc., etc., etc. She mentioned the “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her and her husband, and guess what? She is and was right. Look at the cussing GOP convention as the latest ridiculous attempt to discredit her. Governor “shut down the bridge!” Christie “prosecuting” Hillary from the podium, spewing discredited accusations, and getting resounding cries of “Guilty!” from the mass of GOP operatives. I thought: She has been hounded by people who know how to hound people for decades, and she is still standing. She’s never been found guilty, she’s never even been prosecuted. And yet her detractors continue to claim she is a lying criminal.
So: She is a wonk with a touch of Aspergers, AND she has lived through an onslaught of slings and arrows flung by the best in the business, basically unscathed. And, she has the skills to do the job – even if I can’t fully support her platform. So, yes, I can live with having her as president. And I think she will do as good a job as any Democratic president could – certainly better than Carter.
And – I want Trump to lose, and lose big. I want every GOP cynical hack who supports this guy to be out of politics when this is over. Look, Trump is not a bad guy in general as far as I can tell. But, just as I would not ask for Trump to operate on my heart or fly my plane, I cannot support him running the country. He has proven through his own actions, stated opinions, and his contradictory policies (stay out of the Middle East but eradicate ISIS, free trade but impose tariffs on China and Mexico, “embrace” LGTBQ but support a ban on gay marriage in his own GOP platform). I want Trump to lose so bad that the entire field of Trumpism is sown with salt, leaving that hate-filled faction of the GOP a barren wasteland, forever fruitless. Trumpism is not Conservatism. It needs to be forever banished. A landslide loss in November will do that.
So, go Hillary!
