I’m proud of the discussion we’ve been having about the national election and the viability and relative benefits of the various candidates. (Okay, we haven’t been talking about the Republican candidate, and I don’t expect us to.) I composed this post initially as a comment response to Suzette’s comment on the “Am I Sexist Because I Support Obama?” post.
Go read the full comment thread, but I’ll copy Suzette’s most recent comment here for your convenience:
Evidently, we have “differences of opinion” on several levels and several issues here. On a side note, now we can understand WHY politicians don’t say how they “really” feel about people and things because if they did they would always offend somebody, somewhere. That’s why they all talk in that “politically correct” carefully thought out lingo. I have called Obama “Bama Rama” and all sort of, what I think, are funny names. To me it’s deserving. I suppose I coulda shoulda have put the “O” before “Bama” but I have such little respect for the dude that…….I can’t bring myself to do that. I didn’t think my comments were “tacky” and as far as them being “offensive,” that’s sort of like beauty…it all depends on the individual who’s looking, reading and/or hearing. Like I said Pete, on the Presidential Candidates, I think it’s fair to say, “we see and hear things very differently.” However, I am glad we can express it here and hope I don’t wear out my welcome. I’ll understand though, if what I say, becomes “too much,” tacky, offensive or whatever. Life goes on.
Here is my response:
I have no problem at all with you saying what you really feel, Suzette. I was just disappointed that your real feelings for your party’s potential candidate for President are so low that you’ve resorted to calling him childish names.
I’d like it if you could explain those feelings to me. No one has been able to successfully explain to me why Clinton is a better candidate than Obama using facts and reasoning based on their proposed policies and statements.
Where you see waffling and double-dealing in Obama, I see unprecedented truthfulness and pragmatism. For example:
This week, Clinton has been bashing him because his former foreign policy adviser (who has been right WAY more often than she’s been wrong if you go back and read her policy papers and books) told the truth in an interview. She said that Obama would evaluate the situation on the ground in Iraq once he takes office and has access to more information than he can currently get as someone who’s not in the administration, and make his decisions about troop withdrawal based on that information.
Clinton says that means Obama is not serious about his stated goal of getting our troops out of Iraq in 16 months. In fact, her stated position is in most ways NO DIFFERENT from Obama’s. The difference is that she is unwilling to commit to timetables, unlike Obama.
So, does that mean that Clinton will NOT listen to her advisers and the military leaders on the ground and will just yank people out of Iraq as soon as she takes office? I hope not. She’s telling people what they want to hear in order to get elected. Period.
If she doesn’t intend to listen to her advisers (which she has made comments to the effect of), then that frightens me for two reasons:
1. If she’s the kind of president who is “the decider” and doesn’t surround herself with or listen to people who disagree with her and provide her with honest and accurate assessments of situations, then I fear we’d be in for another 4 years of Bush-like autocracy.
2. If she’s the type of leader who says “This is going to happen.” and then proceeds to make that thing happen regardless of means used to achieve it, then again, we’re in for another 4 years of autocratic rule.
You know what pisses me off about Bush more than ANYTHING else? It’s not the fact that he’s destroying our public school systems in favor of public funding for religious schools, nor that he’s systematically neutering regulatory agencies by appointing industry lobbyists to lead them, although those are two of the many things.
What pisses me off the most about George W. Bush is that he COMPLETELY and BLATANTLY ignores the will of the People of this country. People he’s supposed to serve. The People to whom he’s ostensibly accountable, although that accountability goes through a cowardly Congress which is unwilling to check his power because they ALL want a piece of it.
Hillary Clinton comes from that tradition. The tradition of ball-busting, winner-take-all politics that has gotten us into the multiple messes we’re in now. She has demonstrated repeatedly that her own personal ambitions are more important than ANYTHING else. She has demonstrated that the ends (winning the Democratic nomination) justify the means (her scorched-earth tactics against Obama) in her campaign, and I think that’s a pretty good indicator of both what her administration would be like, and how she would approach policy decisions, both foreign and domestic.
No one in their right minds, including Barack Obama, is going to deny that he’s ambitious and seeks power. That’s the nature of people who run for any national-level political office. The difference is that he hasn’t demonstrated that he’s willing to destroy everything in his path to get there, which Clinton has repeatedly done. She has been DIRECTLY CONFRONTED (as usual it’s buried at the bottom of the article) about her misstatements and occasionally outright mistruths about Obama’s past and his policies, and she has brushed off those challenges as “difference of opinion.” This is the same logic that Bush has used to ignore global climate change, among other things. Bush sees FACTS as opinions upon which people can disagree. Apparently Clinton does, too.
To me, Hillary Clinton represents the old guard school of politics. I see her bringing more of the same partisan conflict (with the added bonus of infighting within the Democratic Party) with her presidency. I don’t think she has the political will to fight for REAL progressive initiatives, because I don’t think that’s what she sees as important. To her it seems the only important thing is that she be in power and that her party gets the opportunity to exercise the same kind of stranglehold over the legislative process that the Republicans have for the last 12 years. That’s not how politics should work.
So, there you go. I’ve laid out part of why I prefer Obama over Clinton. None of it has anything to do with “he inspires me!” or “he’s a great speaker, I’m under his spell.” I think both of those sentiments are valid, though, just as my generation’s parents did with regards to John Kennedy.
We’ve suffered through 8 long years of crushed dreams, disappointment, misery, and death. What’s wrong with some hope for a change? Why does the candidate who reaches out to people to help them up get made fun of for being “deluded” and “naive?” Isn’t that “hand up instead of a hand out,” as Obama puts it, all that Americans have been asking for since we rose up against King George III?