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Confessions of a Hillary Supporter:
'It's Not Like We Can Breathe Easy'
Let me start by saying something crucial that may surprise you. I
LIKE Hillary Clinton. At her Manhattan headquarters there's a wall
where her worker bees leave multicolored love notes. Written in my
native lead pencil, my contribution is quieter: "I love HRC because
she's so awkward, because she's so well-meaning, and because she works
harder than Obama himself." But you don't have to share my fuzzy
feelings to accept my thesis: Anyone who identifies "progressive" and
doesn't vote for Hillary will have succumbed to a cynicism that
masquerades as hope for a better tomorrow. I see two main reasons for
this: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But I promise to get to Bernie
Sanders too.
Trump first. Trump isn't merely a highly unattractive
candidate. He's the worst major-party candidate in history--by
miles. I don't mean just morally: a pathologically narcissistic liar
and admitted sexual abuser unable to control his sick contempt for
women and people of color. I mean he's manifestly
incompetent--psychologically and intellectually well short of James
Buchanan fostering secession or Warren Harding and his Teapot Dome or
George W. Bush transferring billions to the .01 percent while stoking
permanent jihad. And even in the wake of last week's sexual and
financial revelations, the evidence suggests he can still win. A month
is a long time in a presidential campaign. Trump's surprising ability
to pull himself together and pretend he's a functioning political
actor in the second debate should frighten us all.
I know, you can't stand him either. For you, Hillary is the hard
part. So as someone who voted Clinton in the primary, let me begin by
saying I don't know a single Hillary supporter who thought she'd be a
great candidate, on the issues or on the stump. Moreover, while I was
glad Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden declined the failed bloodbaths
their prospective challenges would have turned into, I was also glad
when Sanders took her on, and though I like him less now than when he
was a distant gadfly, I agree that he improved her game, plenty on the
issues and somewhat on the stump.
Hillary lacks daring as well as grace, and from Libya to Honduras,
her instinct in foreign policy has always been to fetishize
"democracy" in an obtusely formalistic way. But she has a long
personal history of doing good for people, an unmatched grasp of
policy, thousands of exploitable relationships, and a platform where
Sanders taught her plenty about the expanding limits of what's
progressive and what's politic. Never underestimate the Repugs. But
about women and children she could be a historically great
president. Far from Wall Street's pawn, she's generated a smart,
doable regulatory agenda. And do I even have to mention the Supreme
Court?
As for her legendary dishonesty, please note: PolitiFact has
calculated that she's more truthful than any pol except Obama
himself--just ahead of Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders, comically
enough. So I hope readers who don't "trust" Hillary, just like
millions of other Americans whose vote she deserves, reflect again on
why, and admit two possibilities they think they're too good for.
1) What she long ago dubbed "a vast right-wing conspiracy," which
is now far vaster, has slimed her without surcease since 1993, when
she oversaw the universal healthcare initiative Congress quashed. No
voter can be altogether unaffected by such a drumbeat--especially when
it has its putatively liberal-"objective" counterpart in a New York
Times that with its historical ties to the patrician-liberal South has
always smelled in Bill Clinton a scheming bubba out to con decent
folk.
2) Hillary is no bubbette. She's a Wellesley girl from
Illinois. But she married a bubba, and thus is tainted. It's
frightening but true that sexism represents even more of a threat to
her candidacy than racism did to the African-American one we know so
well. Sexism is woven so deeply into our biographies that progressives
have trouble copping to it, and not just in its Hill-equals-Bill
form. I mean that creepy feeling that HRC is simultaneously a
schoolmarm and a wicked deceiver, combining a bossy voice with lyin'
eyes--plus the mom who made you eat your broccoli where Bernie is the
grandpa who bought you ice cream.
So right, Bernie. On the issues he was Hillary's superior, on
implementation anything but. Admirably untouched by big money, he was
undeterred by a single attack ad or exposé of his wild socialist youth
because he was the opponent the right wanted. So he was dizzied by the
unsullied adulation he inspired just like every other new star in
history. Of course he reveled in his newfound fame after sixty years
of failing to lead humanity into righteousness. But when his wife,
Jane, reported indignantly that he'd called the Daily News's sane
follow-up questions on breaking up the banks "an inquisition," I lost
what little faith I had that he was ready to govern.
Yet not only did he beef up the platform more than seemed possible,
he now agrees with me on Hillary and is doing something about it on
campuses nationwide. Pullquote: "I know about as much about
third-party politics as anybody in Congress. And I want anybody who's
thinking about voting against Hillary Clinton, and casting a protest
vote because she is not all they would like her to be, to understand
what the consequences for the country and the world will be."
Sanders isn't worried his legions will vote Trump. He's worried
they'll support Brexit-cheering, vaccination-neutral MD Jill Stein,
the Green nominee, or internationally clueless deficit wacko Gary
Johnson, the Libertarian, rather than giving up their dreams by voting
for how much worse things won't get. I worry too. So let me back it up
a little.
In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader because I hated Joe Lieberman. As
few younger readers will recall, consumer crusader Nader was the Green
candidate, while Lieberman was Al Gore's veep pick, a pompous
family-values right-Zionist who would support his asshole buddy John
McCain against Obama in 2008. It's a lesson in realpolitik that
instead of cold-shouldering this warmongering prig, the newly elected
president courted Lieberman, who ended up providing essential support
in the struggles for Obamacare and against "don't ask, don't tell." In
2000, however, I was too good to cut the popinjay any slack. I never
bought the "Gush-and-Bore" fatuity that the two candidates were
indistinguishable, but a Gore who lost New York would lose
everywhere--if my state of residence had been remotely in play I would
have voted Democrat. Since it wasn't, I voted third-party--not for the
first time, but definitely for the last.
Also in 2000, Nader had a more influential supporter very close at
hand. Under the headline "A Green Light for Nader," my then-employer,
the Village Voice, endorsed his candidacy and plastered his face on
the cover--in part to move issues, but also because many Voicers
considered the Clinton-Gore record "dubious" and dreamed the Greens
would gain federal funding by snagging 5 percent of the vote. I wasn't
involved in this decision, but I approved of it. Only then I found
myself disquieted by the logic of an unbylined dissent published in
the same pre-Election Day issue, which reminded us that Nader had
dismissed gay and abortion rights as "gonadal politics" before it
delivered a takeaway to remember: "As wise as the candidate is about
life in a conglomerate state, he can't tell the difference between a
party compromised by the culture and a party that embraces it."
So then Bush won by dint of his 537-vote margin over Gore in
Florida, where Nader received 97,488 votes. Without wasting column
inches on the many specious arguments that now surround this tragedy,
I'll note three facts, two of which concern only my feelings. 1)
Although I liked Nader's class politics, I disliked the man, a
puritanical prune I thought would make a lousy president. My vote was
strictly ideological except insofar as I disliked Lieberman even
more. 2) Since it was quite conceivable that the Voice endorsement
(and cover!) was good for 538 or more Nader votes in Florida, I felt
guilty about my complicity and still do. 3) In 2004 I shoehorned into
the April 27 Voice Harry G. Levine's Googlable "Ralph Nader, Suicide
Bomber," which provided all the proof I'll ever need that it was
Nader's conscious, egomaniacal goal to "punish" the Democrats by
torpedoing Gore's run, most shamefully by campaigning heavily in
Florida after promising not to.
Whatever political twist you want to put on it, the brute
arithmetic seems to me incontrovertible. If Nader doesn't target
Florida, Gore gains at least the half-percent of Greens he needs to
win. Instead, Bush wins, and as is only slightly less
incontrovertible, embarks upon our nation's most disastrous
presidency: Iraq, Great Recession, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Roberts and
Alito. I felt implicated even before 9-11--the first and most damaging
of the Bush tax cuts that would eventually total $1.3 trillion became
law in June. But the clincher was the mendacious, cruel, and
horrendously conceived and executed Iraq invasion, which turned the
Middle East into the hellhole of bin Laden's dreams just as the
hundreds of thousands of us who marched against it thought it
would. Dubya had to be beaten in 2004--and I had to help.
Thus it came to pass that in 2004 I became one of the many corny
Americans who volunteer for the Democratic Party. In presidential
years, New Yorkers like me focus on swing states, by telephone and if
we can door-to-door; in off-years I've phonebanked close congressional
races all over the Northeast. My biggest commitment was one of my
earliest, when a Devo devotee my wife and I knew wound up managing
John Kerry's Akron office--we spent a week there and got a friend, a
nephew, and our daughter to join us. In 2008, I spent two long
weekends canvassing Northern Virginia, and in 2012 bussed down to
Philly and Bethlehem with my union.
I'm a confident person, but I don't find this work easy. Sure, the
commonest task is simply to make sure preselected sympathizers, most
of them registered Democrats, are on our side, and then that they
vote. But false hits are numerous because our lists are always
dated--revising them is a key goal. Anyway, nobody likes getting
unsolicited phone calls, or having a stranger knock on the door and
ask questions--no wonder every form has a "Refused" box, and that a
few refusers are actively hostile. On the phone or the street, the
high percentage of no-answers and not-homes can get depressing. And it
takes me a while to hit my groove when I do make contact--check for
down-ballot support, ask enthusiasts to sign a pledge card, be sure
people know their polling place.
But if this grunt work is tedious, it can also be
exhilarating. Most exchanges are pro forma, but every fourth or fifth
contact will require a conversation in which I impart something, learn
something, or both. In Akron I remember the military man who requested
email documentation debunking the anti-Kerry Swift Boat slander, the
black family whose second-story abode could only be reached by ladder,
the left-wing barber whose refrigerator magnet now affixes an Obama
pic to my front door. In Alexandria I was moved to tell an uncommitted
young white woman, "No matter what you decide, Obama's smarter" and
hear her reply, "I know." In Bethlehem my wife touched a hard-up woman
with a sick kid by describing our own child's healthcare saga. In
Allentown a few weeks ago, I watched the phenomenally together
daughter of a phenomenally friendly Spanish-speaking mom register them
both a month after they'd moved down from Long Island. And whenever I
sensed an opening, I told people that Hillary had been under partisan
attack for decades and that almost all of it was lies.
On the last long blocks of my Allentown route, a succession of
not-homes on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon was bookended by a sweet,
serious registered black nineteen-year-old male and a stoner-looking
unregistered white eighteen-year-old male who both reported that they
weren't voting. I think the black kid heard me when I pointed out that
he was so young he felt as if the scandal-free calm of an
administration the opposition never stopped vilifying was normal when
in fact there'd never been a president as no-drama as Obama and never
would be again. And the white kid had the grace to let me spiel after
muttering that his one vote couldn't possibly change anything. I told
him that by the brute arithmetic he was right--practically speaking, a
single vote is never decisive. Then I told him what I've believed
since long before 2000: that voting is devotional, an act of faith in
a highly imperfect system that is nonetheless the best form of
government anyone has put into practice, and that I hoped someday he'd
accept that. Stupidly, I lacked the presence of mind to leave a
registration form.
This is electoral democracy's most embarrassing secret, and it
explains a lot. One reason young citizens are so unimpressed with the
franchise after spending years nurturing individual uniquenesses
they're still working on is that it's a vivid reminder of how
infinitesimal each of us is--less than one 300-millionth of the
citizenry. Bernie Sanders conjured a collectivity that could assuage
such insignificance, and although his fans should ask themselves why
Trump's very different collectivity is so much bigger, you can see how
converts who believe they spearheaded a political revolution could be
disheartened by talk of "incremental" change, a word you'll note has
faded from HRC's rhetoric.
So not only do I join Bernie in urging his fans to vote for
Hillary, I urge them to understand that third parties have been
distractions in this country since the Whigs cleared the way for
Lincoln. I pray they pursue what we damn well hope is a political
revolution not just by protesting when HRC does something untoward, as
she will--a misbegotten Syrian military incursion seems all too
possible--but by undertaking work slower and grimmer than stuffing a
caucus: infusing a Democratic Party desperately in need of
strengthened infrastructure and young blood.
If you're with me, on the other hand, just visit
hillaryclinton.com/events, or drop in at 52 Broadway with your
cellphone and find something to do. The harder you work, the less
strictly devotional your participation is likely to be. And though
things have been looking up ever since the first debate, it's not like
we can breathe easy. The latest WikiLeaks attack, a debate stumble, a
health scare, a terrorist event, Deutsche Bank going south, polling
errors, turnout shortfalls with hurricane-damaged Florida leading the
way, an Election Day certain to be an appalling mess, the sheer
unpredictability of the process in this most anomalous of election
years--any combination of these could make things way too
close. Anyway, we don't just want to win--we want to win so big across
the board that Clinton will feel obliged to activate her platform and
that Trump's racist, xenophobic chauvinism will seem a perilous tack
even to the saner Republicans who are right now scheming to deliver
the U.S. to Big Capital in 2020. These are the historical realities
all Americans now face. Own them or else.
Village Voice, Oct. 11, 2016
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