America Needs Hope AND Help: Clinton for President

Heaven knows we needs lots of help and hope.  President Bush has created a squalid mess spreading throughout our government.  A record-breaking $3,000,000,000,000 budget.  A disastrous foreign policy.  He’s lost an entire city, and enacted a set of domestic policies drifting between apathetic and plain pathetic.  

There was a silver lining of hope in the wake of 9/11 as the country united, and the world united around us.  The American people were told to go to the mall, the rest of the world was told to go screw.  No wonder we’re scarred.

But hope doesn’t fill a stomach, it doesn’t appease the mortgagers.  Help is what we need, and I’m focused on what it will take to get us help: getting a Democratic President in the White House who will sign laws helping the American people.

Winning in November.  Mind-reading swing voters is a tricky business, and Democrats failed miserably in 2004.  It is a mug’s game I shall not attempt.

Instead, I want to look at a certain myth: Hillary’s high negatives.  As Obama’s campaign has repeatedly pointed out, they are high.  The high 40s.  Of course!  The Republican Party started attacking her twelve years ago.  I’m in my twenties (barely), and was in middle school when the machine began unloading on her. After millions poured into everything from drug charges to murder conspiracy theories, it’s amazing that over 50% of Americans favor her.  Who else could stand to that?  We know that Clinton’s negatives are high, but we also know that they aren’t too high to cost her the election.  No guessing here.

They are high despite Clinton’s tooth-and-nail fight with Republicans on everything from health care in the 1990s, to forcing religion into the public sphere (check this out), to abortion access, to privatizing social security, to condemning MoveOn.org – all fights where Obama is on the wrong side, or more often, simply absent.

Foreign Policy beyond Baghdad.  The Bush foreign policy is marked by the failure in Iraq.  Senator Obama was right in his speech in October 2002 disagreeing with the invasion, and Hillary was wrong.  There is no denying that.  Just as Obama and Hillary have been wrong when came the chance to help: the 98% of the time they have voted together to support and underwrite this disastrous adventure.  Senator Clinton, though, has never sought to undermine Senate strategy by averring the war funds will always be there, no matter what Democrats might say.

Foreign policy is more than Iraq, though.  Iraq and Iran get a lot of play, but Bush seeks to make an enemy out of a major oil exporter, Venezuela, even supporting a jury-rigged and abortive coup d’etat.  China is shifting rapidly and America is standing on the sidelines.  Russia’s democracy has been suffocated and America watches.  Africa cries for help, and America does not hear.  Europe is replacing us as the center of the global economy.  

Obama does indeed have good rhetoric on foreign policy (though his ad on foreign oil included odd statements that have never been explained).  But Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, Kim Jong Il…they all got where they are by being masters of rhetoric.  With these folks, it’s always business as usual.  They can’t be out-talked or out-charmed.  They must be out-thought.

And if necessary, out-fought.  Senator Clinton traveled to eighty-one countries as foreign leader.  She looked the decrepit autocracy of China in the eye and declared:

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

This was in 1995.  She was calling out the Chinese 13 years ago.  That is leadership.  Senator Obama has not yet been to China.

True experience, true difference.  For experience does matter.  And while Senator Clinton’s tenure in the White House wasn’t elected, she was around power.  Maybe she wasn’t in the situation room – though we’ll never know for sure – but there’s little doubt that she knew what happened there.  One thing always missing from the “but…but…but Abraham Lincoln!” defense is the fact that Lincoln was around and knew power and issues before his election: seven attempts to win office will educate a man.  There are many pathways to government experience, but the good ones are all several years long.

Experience matters not only in reaching the White House, but in signing good bills delivered to it.  Lyndon Johnson did not create the atmosphere for the Civil Rights Act, but a reading of Robert Caro will tell you just how deft were the legislative calisthenics that got it to his desk; same with the Great Society.  The cry for those laws came from the streets of America; the votes for them came in the aisles of Congress.

Senator Clinton has answered for her record.  She has been in the Senate for 7 years, true.  But she stood on her record, and easily won re-election.  She has answered for her ideas on education, health care, immigration to the people of New York and we know that they were good answers.  Senator Clinton has had to write policies that will help the Democratic Party and American people.  She shows up for votes.  

Hillary Clinton knows Congress.  She works closely and often with Master Parliamentarian Robert Byrd.  Clinton’s depth in learning the Senate from its masters shows; Senator Obama, meanwhile, formed his presidential exploration committee less than 400 days after his term began with a declaration that “I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years.”  The world is on fire, and this is no time for lessons on how to use an extinguisher.  

America needs help.  It needs a Democrat in the White House.  It needs a Democrat who can bring the legislation our country needs to the White House.  And it needs that legislation and those executive orders to start rolling on January 20th, 2009 and not a day before.  We have two candidates who could be great presidents.  I believe we have one candidate who will quickly reach the greatness that this moment calls for.

A fine patriotic song is Jackson Browne’s “I Am A Patriot”, which opens with the line “The river opens to the righteous”.  America is filled with the righteous, and we have traveled that great river before.

But we need someone who can navigate the course.  We need someone ready to take the oar.  That person is Senator Hillary Clinton.

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