“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”

 Guest Post by:

Judy Klass, Truman Scholar, D.Phil Political Science/Latin American Studies, bookish wonk.

Thanks to the person who sent me an A2A for one version of this question. I have seen articles saying that Hillary wants to run again — I think it’s hype. Some are by people who present her as a power-mad Lady Macbeth. They read great significance into the fact that through her organization she sent emails to people saying what Trump was doing on the border was “horrific.” 

Well, first of all, it is horrific. Hillary has spent much of her life trying to help children and families. Of course she’s going to be horrified by child abuse as deliberate national policy. Secondly, lots of people sent out emails about that: lots of political figures like Elizabeth Warren and lots of political groups, in emails asking for money. Warren and others are running for the election in November. 

Hillary is leading a group called Onward Together, helping candidates who are running in November and in 2020. Many other groups and figures send public denunciations of the awful things Trump does far more regularly than Hillary does. Many include those denunciations in emails trying to raise funds.

I recently read Hillary’s book What Happened. It’s a smart, straightforward, sometimes funny and occasionally wistful book. Some people in this thread ask about why Hillary ran, what the compelling reason for her campaign was. She says in the book that she ran for president because she thought she’d be good at it. I think she would have been terrific. She’s smart, well-informed, hard-working, and actually good at reaching across the aisle, as she proved as a Senator. 

She stands up to enemies of the US and is fearless about doing what she thinks is right, as when she advised her husband to stand up to the genocide the Serbian Christians were waging against the Bosnian Muslims (he listened, and bombed the Serbs out of Kosovo, without getting any Americans killed), and when as Secretary of State she called out Putin for his abuses. (That one came back to haunt her.) 

She had thoughtful, careful, fully realized policy proposals in many areas: for green energy and infrastructure; for growing jobs in regions hard hit since the Recession; to end the college debt crisis; to raise the minimum wage; to create universal pre-K education for four-year-olds; to pay for all these things by having the rich pay their fair share; to end Citizens United; to reform our criminal justice system … Bernie’s policy proposals were often rip-offs of hers and not as detailed, and of course Trump has none at all — just headline-grabbing soundbites as he goes back and forth on a crucial issue and fires off incoherent pronouncements on both sides of it.

Those who said oh, there’s no compelling reason for her campaign have never thought about how little girls look to leadership and see mostly old men, or how a smart, competent person might see problems they want to address by serving in office out of love of country and religious belief in making a difference. 

I think both of those things motivate Hillary Clinton. And as she says, suddenly, finally, some people are waking up to how the near absence of women from government hurts us all.

Nevertheless, I’m pretty confident that she won’t run again, and I think she is right not to run again. 

Some responding to the above merged question say oh, she lost to Trump, how could she, she’s so awful. Well, she won in democratic terms by three million votes, and that was with Putin, Comey, Assange, Bernie and our moronic news media working overtime, throughout the election year, to smear her and bring her down. 

If Trump is so easy to beat, why did he trounce fifteen Republican rivals in a series of debates — only to lose all three debates to Hillary? As someone else says in response to this merged question, she is a terrific debater. She beat Bernie in all nine debates and Trump in three. She would have trounced Trump in the foreign policy forum, if that pig Matt Lauer had not interrupted her every sentence with scolding and flak and more garbage about her emails. 

Unlike all those experienced Republicans, Hillary was not afraid of Trump. She did not cower and cringe before him as they did. Her mother told her when she was little to go outside and face down a neighborhood bully, and she still has those tough fighting skills against bullying little boys … But. She is not charismatic the way her husband is, or Obama is. She prefers town halls and debates to the format of being a rock star and trying to rock the arena. 

In some ways she’s the anti-Trump; he thrives on an adoring crowd, but she’s actually a rather private and self-effacing person. She’d rather talk to people one on one, and she’d rather talk about policy issues than self-promote.

We need a charismatic rock star candidate — in 2020 more than ever. In the final months of the 2016 campaign, Hillary kind of hid behind Beyonce or President Obama or Michelle Obama or Elizabeth Warren. They all kind of overshadowed her at events, even when she was there with them. That won’t do in 2020. The candidate should be the one doing the heavy lifting on the campaign trail. 

Hillary was absent from the public eye too much during crucial weeks in 2016. It wasn’t just that she had pneumonia for a while and had to recuperate, and it wasn’t just that she was off doing important debate prep, and it wasn’t just that CNN focused every day with drooling obedience on relaying whatever morsel of nonsense Putin and Assange had farmed out to them via wiki leaks, and never discussed issues of substance. 

I heard Joy Reid and a young NY Times reporter talking, when Hillary’s book came out, about how they each asked her for an interview countless times during the campaign, and she kept turning them down. The young woman from the Times mentioned how Hillary says in her book that the Times has been unfair to her and Bill since the Whitewater nonsense. Okay, that’s true. But you couldn’t turn around during 2016 without seeing Trump. Everywhere. 

Again, Hillary is a private person, and she has been publicly scalded by smear campaigns against her and Bill for 25 years, and too many “journalists” were making a driveling false equivalence between Trump as a sexual predator and Bill Clinton as a guy who had a consensual relationship with an adult college graduate who made passes at him, which was exposed several years later against the wishes of both of them. And he’s a guy who’s been accused for years by professional Clinton bashers of other things — women paid thousands of dollars by Roger Stone to try to turn the second debate into a circus. 

I understand Hillary doesn’t want to go places where people might ask her bogus gotcha! questions about that stuff. But — if you’re running for president and the other guy is hogging all the media coverage … you really do need to get out there …

Yes, the media only covered the horse race and the wiki kompromat morsels and Trump being colorful and outrageous. It’s true they did not want to discuss policy. But she could have done ads where she sat at a kitchen table and said everything she wanted to do as president — talking right to the people past our idiot TV news media. She talked about those things in debates with Bernie, but not enough during the national campaign. Telling us to “go to the website” to learn more is not inspiring. She had substance on her side, and she did not play to it enough. 

Also, she was wrong to listen to Michelle Obama’s dictum “When they go low, we go high.” You don’t have to go as low as the Republicans, God knows, but you do have to call them out in blunt, stinging, vigorous terms, again and again, for their lies and contemptible, treasonous, bigoted statements, policies, campaign trail stunts, voter suppression tactics, etc. If your response is too restrained and tasteful and high-minded, you wind up getting spattered with mud like Michael Dukakis. They define you, they smear you and they bury you.

I saw Michael Avenatti talking recently about how he might run because we need to win in 2020, we need someone who’s charismatic and a street fighter … As I’ve said, Hillary is a street fighter in her own way, but she is not charismatic. I’d wish for someone with her knowledge of policy and vision for the future, not just a celebrity lawyer, to beat Trump … Or not even Oprah — those kinds of people would be infinitely preferable to Trump, but since he lacks all substance and he’s been tearing apart our government institutions, it would be great to have someone who really knows those government institutions to build them back up. 

Elizabeth Warren is tough and smart and has more charisma … I don’t know if she can do it, but maybe. I’d also look to someone like Stacey Abrams, who’s running for governor now in Georgia. A smart, brave, charismatic woman like her may be the way to go.

The way I see it anyway!

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