Letters to the Editor

• On a personal level, I like Hillary.

  [Read the article: The Hillary juggernaut]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I like a woman who feels strongly enough about the commitment of marriage that she worked things out with the guy who cheated on her and then was forced to admit it on national television. While many people see that as a weakness, in today's day of insta-divorce I consider it strength of character. If you love someone, and they do something hurtful to you (not something *harmful*, like hit you, but something that hurts your feelings), you should not immediately throw them away like a used dishrag. Hillary is a more evolved human being than the ones who are all like "He cheated on *me*, I'd cut off his balls!" The world needs more people, women and men, who are willing to forgive their loved ones their transgressions. I also like how she stood up to an organized noise machine spreading lies and hatred about her for eight years. I like that, when she was First Lady and didn't personally have to worry about re-election, she was liberal. I like that she's smart and independent. She's the kind of woman I'd like to eat lunch with.

  But I do not want to see her run for President. Because with her strong family values, her anti-First Amendment leanings and general hawkishness, her pro-business votes, and her liberal views on women's rights, Hillary Clinton would make the best Republican president we've ever had. Unfortunately she's *running* as a Democrat. And a Democrat should not publicly pander to the anti-First Amendment crowd, try to be more hawkish than the Republicans (especially now that everyone hates the war!), or vote pro-business, anti-consumer. Hillary persuaded Bill to veto the first bankruptcy bill because she understood how harmful it would be to families. Once she was senator and beholden to Citicorp and Chase, she voted for it the second time it came around. (I do not know how she voted this most recent time, when it actually became law.) As a senator, she voted the way that would get her campaign contributions from the rich and votes from the northern New York Repub-lites who are social liberals but hardcore economic and foreign policy conservatives. She doesn't go with the courage of her convictions, she goes with focus groups and consultants. That is not the president we need. Hillary lets others lead her, she does not lead.

  There are too many Republicans who hate her passionately for no good reason, and too many Democrats who have come to dislike her because of her wishy-washy Senatorial voting record. She is a senator, and senators are not electable. She does not have the charisma of her husband, and it was lack of charisma that did Gore and Kerry in. She is a Northerner (she really is -- years in Arkansas with her husband don't change the fact she was born in the North, which is why she chose to go back there to run for Senator) and Northerners are not electable -- for some reason although Northerners stereotype Southerners as rednecks it doesn't prevent them from voting for Southerners, whereas the same is not true the other way around. She may possibly win the Democratic nomination, because her money and name recognition could help her take Iowa and New Hampshire and then it won't matter that she'll be clobbered in South Carolina, but that does not mean she could possibly win a general election. If she really has the best interests of our party and our country at heart, she won't run.

  If she does run, however, I will say this. A Hillary campaign *could* be successful if she got out front on economic issues. She has the credibility to talk about universal health care, which is much more of a hot button than it was when she pushed it fourteen years ago, and she can make the argument that it is bad for American business and anti-competitive to saddle businesses with health care costs when all our developed world competitors have national health care. Maybe it won't help us beat China or India, but we sure as hell could do better against Germany and Japan if we had national health care and didn't drag our businesses down providing it. Her husband ran on "It's the economy, stupid", and as a starving grad student who couldn't keep a temp job, that's why *I* voted for him. Hillary can evoke the idea of the good ol' days of Bill's economy, she can talk up plans to help American workers retrain to face global competition, she can talk about alternative fuel research and how it's patriotic to find a way to get energy from American businesses rather than the Middle East. She can take Democratic ideas and use her centrism to phrase them in a way that appeals to pro-business Republicans (she has already lost the religious right, so basically she should not even try to pander to them, but the pro-business Republicans are still the majority of that party.) *If* she can run a campaign that talks about all the positive things Democrats want to do to fix our country and dig us out of the huge Bushist hole we're in, if she can link the ideas that what's good for the American consumer is also good for the American business, if she can come out ahead in security momism by talking about all the things Bill and she did to fight terrorism and what she's tried to do for New York since 9/11 9/11 9/11, maybe she could win. But she's going to have to do what Gore did after he lost -- she's going to have to find a spine and a fire in her belly and she's going to have to sound like she gives a damn about what happens to this country. I am not at all convinced she can. Not without losing first, anyway.

  Permalink Thursday, March 23, 2006 09:51 AM