Hillary Clinton was chosen to be the next president years
ago.
She knows it, and while she can’t fully admit to how starkly
and literally the fact is true without revealing the choreographed farce of an
election being carried out, that attitude has shaped her campaign all along.
Her honesty is not up for question. Even the most sycophantic Democratic Party
apologists cannot deny that she’s flip-flopped on countless issues between her
career in Washington and her bid for president, and the pretense that her
deleted e-mails were due to some legitimate mistake and not a willfully immoral
and dishonest attempt to protect herself politically is obtuse to the point of
idiocy.
While it’s clear that she really does want to make things
better for the American people, she doesn’t seem to hold any strong values; her
presidential platform has been crafted, over the past few years, to achieve the
greatest mass appeal among mainstream progressive-leaning voters. With a few exceptions such as requiring
maternity leave, her attitude makes it obvious she doesn’t care too strongly
about any of the policies she advocates.
To her, they’re political bargaining chips. Implementing more of her plans scores
political points, improves her legacy and popularity, and strengthens the
position of the Democrats, her team. But
if giving up a position in a compromise helps her score more points elsewhere,
well then that’s just fine too.
As a progressive politician, having political stances that
change over time isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The political landscape is always changing, and views that are moderate
to progressive at one point often look outdated and even backwards a few
decades later. Flexibility, and the
willingness to change one’s politics over time, are essential for staying
relevant over as long a political career as Hillary’s. Nevertheless, lacking strongly held values as
president means the petty details of mainstream politics will influence the
future of the country more abruptly than the long-term issues that need to be
solved.
In 2016, Hillary is auditioning for the part of president of
the United States. She has to appeal to
the voters, and while losing the election isn’t a real possibility, getting as
many people as possible to show up and vote ‘yes’ strengthens her team, the
Democrats, and is temporarily her main concern.
So, lacking any strong values besides what is deemed acceptable by
progressive policymakers and the mainstream media, she’s shaping her platform
around what the public wants.
To an extent, she’ll be accountable to all the things she is
advocating in her campaign. She needs to
make good on some of her promises, in order to win 2020’s approval process for
a second term. Delivering on what she
offers voters helps the Democrats score more points.
But during her term, in the years where there is no election
and the three years before she needs to focus on her reelection, she isn’t
directly beholden to voters. Much more
significant are the factions in Congress, the corporations who fund her
campaign and her political allies, and the special interest groups working to
trade political favors for preferential treatment. If a genuinely good idea has too big an
impact on profit margins, or adversely effects an industry that pays off enough
Democratic congressmen, don’t expect her to fight for it. Conversely, if a problem is too deeply
entrenched in political corruption, it isn’t going to get fixed in the next 4
years.
Listening to her speak, it’s obvious she isn’t going to help
all the people she’s calling on for votes.
On many issues – most notably, financial sector reform and income
inequality, but likewise criminal justice reform, trade negotiations, and
infrastructure investment, just to name a few – she promises solutions but
offers nothing, just a vaguely worded set of platitudes about making things
better and, at best, a politically correct corporate-approved plan that will be
so loaded with pork, political compromise and poor regulation that it causes
more problems without solving anything.
All this being said – how bad is it, really, to have a
dishonest, self-serving politician with no real values and little integrity in
charge of the most corrupt, dishonest, inefficient institution since the fall
of the Soviet Union?
through the corrupt quagmire of Congress. And a politician, like Bernie, promising to
make a real difference would unify his opposition, bringing together not just
those with an objection to his policies but all those who are afraid of
change. Worse even than Obama, he would
have faced a political gridlock that demanded compromise on issues that would
have been utterly unconscionable. And in
terms of implemented policies, real changes in what the government does for
people, he might not accomplish much more than Hillary will get through – at
the cost of great economic and social upheaval.
If the US were still a true democracy, electing a dishonest
politician with her values and platform set by her party, campaign sponsors and
media approval such as Hillary would be unacceptable. But our country’s political system today is a
corrupt mess of corporate payoffs, special interests and partisan dealings that
is toxic to anyone with real honesty, integrity, or values. And given her moral flexibility, her desire,
on some level, to make things better, and the consistently progressive agenda
she’s been led to adopt – and, let’s be real, the fact that she’ll be a woman
in the most influential political role in the world – her appointment as our
next president is another step forward into the future.
