This makes three of our four Democratic constitutional officers endorsing her (and the fourth one shouldn’t endorse IMO). Per email…
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Please share widely!
Suzanne Bump endorses Hillary Clinton, will canvass in Portsmouth.
Reality-based commentary on politics.
I’m no Clinton supporter, and I do have concerns about Sanders’s foreign policy experience, but this endorsement touches on something that is starting to really worry me.
This line:
First, that is a type of fear-based motivation that makes me very uncomfortable and could be a green light to abuses of power. Second, although Clinton does have a lot of foreign policy experience, a lot of that experience is disastrous (Iraq War, support for the drone war) and has neither made us safer nor protected our freedoms.
Given the recent events, I have no doubt that this approach will increasingly be the Clinton playbook for the election, but I think that should worry progressives.
I don’t care how confident a politician sounds. The “keep us safe” rhetoric may be politically useful, but when the underlying policy evidently includes things like suggesting no-fly zones in a conflict area where the Russians are installing their current-gen SAMs, it doesn’t suggest to me that this is a candidate whose election would in fact make us any safer. Or make anyone else any safer, either.
And that’s before we even get to the rhetoric about the security services and their ongoing desire to weaken encryption.
It’s . . . distressing, shall I say. I want to support Clinton, and I want to be able to be enthusiastic about it, but every time I start to feel remotely comfortable about it, she goes out and says stuff like this. And I remember the Iraq AUMF all over again, and think, You know, no experience and a record of voting against disastrous foreign involvements looks pretty damned good, when you put it next to lots of experience and a history of bad calls.
First, the President is Commander-in-Chief. One of his/her first constitutional duties is to keep the country safe, through military means if necessary.
Second, no person is going to get elected who cannot first convince Americans s/he will keep the country safe, no matter how good s/he is on other issues. As an American, do YOU seriously want a President who DOESN’T pledge to keep our land and our people safe?
This if anything makes me more enthusiastic about Clinton since she will be able to push back against any accusation that Democrats are weak on security.
As to your first two points – no shit!
Mimolette nor I said anything counter to those truisms. The issue is the use of this kind of rhetoric, especially by a hawk, as a reason to vote for that person. That is troubling because it stokes fears and gets people more willing to support the use of force as a means to “keep us safe.”
Yes, and that’s exactly the problem. To demonstrate being “strong on security” one has to demonstrate an extreme willingness to use force (despite very clear evidence that much of our recent forays have made us less safe, and also, you know, killed a lot of fucking innocent people). “Weak on security” has come to mean “unwilling to use force as a first resort.” This type of campaigning makes that worse.
To you it seems like Clinton doesn’t even have a questionable record when it comes to issues of war and peace, let alone a pretty bad one, so I think we just fundamentally disagree there.
What makes me comfortable with Clinton is that she seems willing to be both tough and smart, and this plays into my overall reason for supporting her of being by far the best prepared candidate. Certainly in this area that last point is probably more obvious than in any other. I absolutely do not see Clinton as a force as first resort candidate. I’d be much less enthusiastic if I thought she were. The true hawks are all on the GOP side, with Lindsey Graham probably being the most hawkish and Donald Trump being the one most likely to make things worse with his bombast combined with inexperience. On our side Sanders and O’Malley don’t have the experience and Sanders seems disturbingly reluctant to talk about it.
Clinton is both tough and smart, and I admire her on both counts. But the thing is? Plenty of very smart people have proved to have terrible judgement about national security and the use of force. And for all of Clinton’s genuine knowledge and experience as SoS, her actual statements about how to deal with Syria and Daesh (as opposed to any speculation about her temperament, or what she might think) suggests to me that she has far more confidence in the value of active U.S. military involvement abroad than I’m comfortable seeing in a president. She’s running to Obama’s right on use of force; she has advocated for that no-fly zone in an extremely dangerous area of the world; she’s releasing letters talking about how much closer the U.S. relationship with Netanyahu’s Israel would be if she were president. Sure, she sounds confident as she recommends that the U.S. take a leading role in the Syria crisis, but to my knowledge at least, she hasn’t answered the central question of why she thinks that continuing a longstanding and disastrous policy of military intervention in the region is likely to yield better longterm results now than it did the last few times we tried it. Or, if she’s not actually advocating a continuation of that kind of engagement, what exactly she’s proposing to do differently this time.
I actually find Sanders’ refusal to talk about this as if it were a pure military issue, and as if there were no doubt that the U.S. should take a leading role in a military response, much more reassuring than Clinton’s certainty. And I find it encouraging that he’s not reflexively signing on to the idea that Daesh is both of itself a gigantic existential threat to the U.S. and one that can usefully be addressed by the proper application of American military might. Neither proposition strikes me as nearly so obvious as conventional wisdom would apparently have it, and I don’t have any problem at all with a leader who’s able to say, “Yes, Daesh is evil and dangerous, and we need to think about how to deal with it, but it’s not such an overarching emergency that we should let it overshadow the importance of what we’re seeing today in Baltimore.”
In fact, I think the candidate who can maintain that basic perspective is more likely to keep us safe, and less likely to give terrorists exactly the response they’re looking for, than the one whose instinctive reaction is to suggest that we send in the fighter jets. And worry later, if at all, about what it’s going to cost in blood and treasure, what it’s going to cost in civil liberties and our relationships in the world, or what the lost opportunities will cost us.
I guess she is a little closer to my own view on these things as well, but I do think she has perspective in spades, especially when compared to the alternative from the GOP.
In fairness, at the moment Hillary Clinton is competing with Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley for the Democratic nomination.
Any of the Democratic candidates has “perspective in spades” when compared to any of the GOP candidates. While true, that observation doesn’t help choose among Ms. Clinton, Mr. Sanders, or Mr. O’Malley.
I support Ms. Clinton, but I do so in spite of her hawkish stance on these questions. I view this hawkish stance as one more item on a growing list of things true progressives are going to have to manage about her if she is elected. It does not help that her actual track record is, in fact, pretty negative regarding her hawkishness.
In a perfect world, I’d like to combine the stance and view point of Mr. Sanders with the political chops and experience of Ms. Clinton. In the real world, we have to choose one or the other.
I choose Ms. Clinton, and I do so with GREAT reservations about her stances on war, peace, and privacy.
And if Hillary Clinton is our nominee, I’ll be proud to support her against any of them. (Although I’ll admit that I don’t quite see the giant gulf in experience and political chops that you point to. Except on hands-on foreign policy, at least; and there I can’t help thinking that a record of extremely dubious judgement calls in matters relating to foreign policy is a nontrivial countervailing consideration. Failing upward may be great for the beneficiary, but it’s not great for the organization or country, and it’s always a risk when you privilege experience for its own sake over evidence of results.)
That aside, though, I’d be less concerned about supporting Hillary if I thought that we were going to have any ability at all to “manage” her policies if and when she’s elected. So in all seriousness, do you see any practical prospect of our being able to do it? If so, how? I’m not sure how we’d have more leverage with an elected officeholder than with a candidate asking for our support. And yet, the best we could apparently do with her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership was to get a cautious, deeply-hedged statement that she didn’t support it based on what she knew at that moment and the state of the agreement at that moment. And that statement was made only after trade promotion authority had passed over the objections of most of the Democratic delegation in both House and Senate, and has been followed by her further statement that okay, she doesn’t support it, but she’s not going to do anything to try to keep it from passing Congress, either: not even asking Democrats who’ve endorsed her not to vote for it.
I suspect this sounds more like an anti-Hillary argument than I mean it to be. I’d be genuinely grateful to be convinced that I’m worrying too much, and that there would indeed be ways of influencing her decisions in the Oval Office. To the extent that this is an argument, that is, it’s one I would rather lose than win. But real concerns are real, it’s the presidency, I’ll take all the reassurance I can possibly get.
About summarizes my own thinking on this as well. I will still vote for Sanders in the primary precisely because I believe he has been a more consistent progressive and to allow social democracy into the mainstream of our party and our national political discourse. His persistent desire to avoid discussing gun control and foreign policy will be a massive liability in the general election, and it’s something he and his team should address, especially since his answers are actually pretty reasonable. The nitpicking over this just makes him look unready, untested, and uninterested in a job that fundamentally requires him to command our armed forces. These questions can’t always be answered by income inequality or I voted against the Iraq War.