OF COURSE HILLARY CAN BE PRESIDENT…BUT SHOULD SHE?

Don’t let the title fool you; I support and admire Hillary Clinton.  I worked in the previous Clinton Administration.  I believe the pundit who predicts that someday in a cemetery will lie side-by-side Presidents named Clinton.  However, because Hillary can do this, should she?

Hillary has been on a path to the White House since her graduation speech at Wellesley in 1968.  She earned national admiration and accolades long before she met the brilliant, ambitious and charismatic boy from Arkansas.  When she followed Bill to Little Rock it was a move that could have been the end of her own political career.   Perhaps she thought that furthering his political ambition would be enough. My, my, what she did for love.  It’s been said that without her, he would never have been more than the most popular professor at the University of Arkansas.  Hillary has always been a match for his brilliance and ambition, but has carried complementary skills at being organized, focused, strategic, and disciplined.  In the 1992 presidential campaign, the “buy one, get one free” theme offered their powerful synergy, and those who didn’t like that idea seemed small-minded to me. But there were many of them.  That was only the first sign that her journey on the national stage would not be a smooth one.

 

In spite of all the Clinton scandals (real and imagined) and the attacks on her and her family, and all the wounds (including self-inflicted) she has persisted, sometimes reminiscent of Don Quixote on a courageous quest to reach the unreachable.  Now, after her terms in the Senate and as Secretary of State, she has continued to build an excellent resume and established herself as a formidable, highly qualified candidate who has the strength, experience, and skills to be an outstanding President.

In 2008 there were a good many of us who decided to support Barack Obama because of a nagging fear of a return to all the Clinton Drama, which seemed inevitable, given the Clintons’ tendency to allow molehills to grow into mountains, and because of the how hateful the anti-Clintons behave.  Over time, as she performed admirably as Secretary of State and it looked more likely she would run in 2016, it began to look as though we could confidently see her as the inevitable next President.  It seemed a foregone conclusion in part because the GOP field of possibles has been so….so…….  But more than that, it was assumed that by now, eight years later, the worst of the attacks and drama against the Clintons would be over.  Wrong.

When she was questioned by Congress about the tragedy at Benghazi, many of us understood what she meant when she said, “What difference does it make?” yet she handed the haters a video weapon to use against her.  In recent weeks her opponents have resurrected her husband’s well-known “woman problem” to criticize her handling of those scandals of decades ago. Whether one agrees with how she handled it at that time, by defending and staying with her straying husband, she is tarred in 2016 as an accomplice.  Her haters have no shame; must poor Monica Lewinsky’s life be tarnished again for a mistake she made when she was 21?

During the neverending email controversy, she hurt herself by acting bitter, annoyed, arrogant, and humorless.  Then her campaign felt obligated to announce that she would be more charming and spontaneous, to chuckles and eye rolls, because this is a woman who clearly doesn’t love public life and makes her worst mistakes trying to be private.  As a young lawyer, Hillary worked on Capitol Hill during the Nixon crash and burn; she is well aware of the danger of allowing paranoia to be self-defeating, yet she sometimes shows her opponents just where to stick the knife with their manufactured scandals.

Most Americans may be “sick and tired of her damn emails” but her enemies will not be deterred now, or after she gets to the White House.  Their hatred for Hillary is so unyielding that until and unless she retires from public life, they will hound her forever.   If she were President, could she get anything positive accomplished for the American people? Or would she spend too much time fighting those who will never let her be? When Donald Trump, the highest polling GOP candidate at present, can get away unchallenged when he says that she was “the worst Secretary of State in history”, and her alleged incompetence led to “thousands of deaths.”  And even reasonable Joe Scarborough says she lies when she says there were private emails kept by her predecessors, how can she talk about terrorism, foreign policy, or any other issues, such as education, or poverty, or health care?

Hillary, do you really want this job? Just because you CAN get elected, should you?