Wednesday, August 24, 2016

The Worst Thing You Can Pin On Hillary

(w/ Update: hello again Crooks and Liars readers! Thank you Tengrain for the Mike's Blog Round-up link! Please stay and peruse the rest of the blog today, I hope there's more here to your liking.)

It's not the fake body count that the Far Right keeps pinning to her.

It's not the questionable email server, or Benghazi.

It's not how she forgave Bill for his out-and-out cheating.

It's that, well, basically, nobody in the media likes her.

It's this nitpicking like obsession with her Unfavorable numbers, that if only the Democrats had nominated somebody who was truly hugely popular - shut up BernieBros, Sanders was too abrasive and too Left-wing to make it - we'd be seeing a 50-state landslide for "Insert Democratic Savior Here" able to overwhelm congressional gerrymandering to secure major Senate and House wins.

It's like high school all over again.

You go to war with the President you have, not the President you wish you had.

Hillary is unpopular. Fine. Let's stick with that.

Hillary is also competent, intelligent, well-versed in the mechanics of how government works not only on the floor for voting but in the back-rooms where deals are made.

Hillary can be - will likely be - more bull-headed and obsessive than Obama has been, but where Obama let the obstruction ride to allow his Republican opponents to self-implode, Hillary will likely go all LBJ (remember, Hillary is Active-Negative by my estimates) and wheedle, press, maybe even outright bully her opponents into submission. Meaning that a lot of the stuff stuck in gridlock - our needed funding for schools and highways, fixing our income inequality, tweaking Obamacare to close the gaps starting to show in our healthcare reforms, pressing harder on foreign policy to stop a lot of the ongoing wars in Syria perhaps - will finally break out. These are still - despite the probability of blowback and screwups - worthy goals to support.

At this point, fuck the popularity contest part of political campaigning.

It's time to vote for the competency. For getting shit done.

I'm with her.

3 comments:

dinthebeast said...

I think she once said, a long time ago, that she should never run for office because nobody would vote for her because she's "too aggressive." So I guess, to me, it just depends on what you're aggressive about, and I happen to agree with most of her policy positions, and feel like she's probably moveable on the ones I don't (with copious amounts of pressure from the left.)
And maybe the rest of it is just realism: I'm not going to avoid a good car mechanic because they smoke cigarettes and wear a baseball cap, so I'm not going to avoid a politician because she gets things done by making deals with a lot of different people. That's part of the job, and I want her to be good at it.

-Doug in Oakland

Green Eagle said...

It is absolutely not like high school, unless the mean girls in high school were getting paid by America's richest billionaires to pump out their lies.

Paul said...

so... that would be the high schools in California and Texas then...