When you hear the words “Well, I just think…” in response to
a query about what someone has against Hillary Clinton, you can be sure you’re
about to enter a fact-free zone presided over by vague generalities and
rootless, disconnected ideas that don’t describe any reality. As in, “I just think she can’t be trusted”
the most frequently cited objection to her by the I-just-think people. What that actually means is anyone’s guess. My guess: It means nothing at all. She can’t be trusted to do what, exactly --
refrain from stealing your money?
Propose legislation that pleases you? Come back from the grocery store
with the right change? What? Be specific.
It’s important to understand that Hillary Clinton is not
running to be your banker, your lawyer, or your doctor. Or your mom. Or the dictator of America, as her opponent, Donald Trump,
clearly thinks he is doing. She’s
running to be the chief administrative officer of the United States – the
person who executes, but does not make, the laws of the land; who proposes, but
does not pass, legislation that comports with and advances her view of how our
world ought to work’ who uses her bully pulpit to try to persuade the people of
the rightness of her vision for the country; and who presides over the conduct of
our relationships with other countries. Neither she nor anyone else is going to
“run the country,” in the phraseology of the ill-informed. In our system, as the saying goes, the
president proposes and the congress disposes.
So the question isn’t the vague, can she be trusted. The question is, can she be expected to
discharge her duties and responsibilities competently. As for her policy ideas
– her view of the world – she has shown herself consistently to be a generally
non-controversial, middle of the road candidate, very much in the mainstream of
traditional American politics, and not an extremist or a radical. It is certainly reasonable – at least, under
normal circumstances – to not want to vote for a candidate of that description;
but anyone who would thus turn their vote over to Donald Trump -- who is
an extremist and a radical, not to mention a racist and a preening, egocentric
fool, and who surely sets a record for untrustwothiness by way of his astonishing
lies and reversals -- has lost all perspective. (How, according to the polling,
more people see Trump as trustworthy and Clinton as untrustworthy, is one of
the great mysteries of the universe.)
A generous interpretation of this “I don’t trust her”
phenomenon is that what these people are really saying is that they don’t
“like” her, in the same emotional but irrational way we like or dislike movies
stars – that there’s just something about her looks or bearing or presentation
or overall aspect that rubs them the wrong way, and that’s all they need to
know. A darker interpretation is that
these people don’t trust her because she’s a woman, whose pretty little head
can’t be expected to deal competently with the complexities of political
leadership and who is, in any case, flouting the proper role and place of women. As in, who does she think she is?
These things can explain the antipathy of Clinton’s
political opponents, but less so the visceral anger and irrational hatred
directed at her from some sectors, including, obviously, many Republicans but
even some Democrats, primarily the Bernie Sanders obsessed. Oft-cited here are
matters like Whitewater, the Clinton Foundation, email problems and,
especially, Benghazi – words which they draw like a gun as though their
meanings were self-evident and the proof they offer indisputable. In fact, they
are ginned up controversies, one and all. Whitewater was an investment in a
proposed Arkansas resort on which the Clinton’s lost money; the Clinton
Foundation has not been shown to have been involved in any serious
improprieties; the email “scandal” is one in which two-thirds (just a guess) of
the people who recoil in horror at the very mention of it and cite it as proof
positive of Clinton’s unworthiness, aren’t exactly sure what a server is; and
Benghazi, the subject of multiple investigations at multiple levels over years
and costing tens of millions, proved only that a bunch of thugs attacked a U.S.
diplomatic facility while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
None of this is to be understood as a ringing endorsement of
Hillary Clinton. My impression of her
before the wretched alternative appeared on the scene was of an ambitious
politician with no particularly interesting or inventive policy ideas who
wanted to be president not because she had a sense of mission but because she
wanted to be president. That may or may
not be a valid description of her now, but it doesn’t matter. If nothing else,
her election needs to be seen as preventative.
And there is urgency to that need.
That’s what the importance of perspective in this matter is
all about. Hillary Clinton may not be perfect and may not be one’s beau-ideal
as a presidential candidate, but neither is she a know-nothing crackpot who
understands nothing about our democracy and who would ban a religion, bomb
children, kiss up to a Russian dictator, refuse to disclose tax and health
information after explicitly promising to do so, subscribe to cockamamie
conspiracy theories including the reprehensible “birther” thing, and…well, on
and on. Still, we continue to be
subjected to ludicrously false parallels in the news media, in a bizarre effort
to not appear one-sided, as in “Sure, candidate A murdered 15,000 people with a
machine gun, but, hey, candidate B neglected to disclose a bout with the flu in
1986.”
