Last edited Mon Feb 8, 2016, 05:20 AM - Edit history (1)
not entirely negative about her.
My concern with Hillary is encapsulated in the Alan Alda/Meryl Streep/Julie Harris movie The Seduction of Joe Tynan , about a decent, idealistic young political rising star whose only goal is to get into a position of power so that he can do good work to benefit the people of the country.
Unfortunately, along the way up the ladder he has to keep making deals and compromising, until by the time he finally does get into the powerful position, he is hemmed in on all sides by the constraints his compromises and deals have created for him. He can't do any of the good things he has always has wanted to do, always intended to do, because he now has no choice but to play the game according to the same corrupt rules that everyone else plays it by.
I fear that is what might have happened to Hillary. I also fear that her suspicious nature, bordering on paranoia--as well justified as it certainly is, considering all the unfounded attacks that she has suffered from what really and truly is a vast right wing conspiracy--leads her to make such unforced errors as refusing to provide those speech transcripts, thus allowing people to imagine worst case scenarios.
Many of her worst political choices were made because she was afraid that doing anything else might undermine her political future. The IWR was such an error. She, like many other Dem office holders, was deliberately painted into a corner by the Republicans, and most of them voted for the IWR because they were terrified, especially after 9/11, of being painted as weak on defense in an election year. As a woman, she especially felt she needed to prove herself tough enough to make the hard choice to go to war if necessary.
(Needless to say, people like Bernie stood on principle, though, and made the right choice, even if it might harm them politically.)
I believe many of Hillary's hawkish positions derive from that same sense of needing to prove she can be tough and send troops to war.
Her sense of being under siege also leads her to surround herself with unquestioning loyalists whom she has known for years, but loyalists all too easily become yes men and yes women. If they think she is headed in the wrong direction, they won't rock the boat by disagreeing with her, but even worse, they might have surrendered their own mental independence to the point of seeing everything through Hillary colored glasses, so that they don't actually have independent points of view.
Quite apart from that risk, though, there is also the fact that many who have proved their loyalty, so that she is willing to take their advice, simply give lousy advice. I am thinking of people like Mark Penn, who apparently isn't working with her campaign this time, but who was widely blamed for some of the worst missteps of her 2008 campaign.
I don't doubt that in Penn's absence she relies on other long time friends whose advice she doesn't question enough, even if it is not exactly good advice. Loyalty seems to be her first concern, not whether the person has good judgment about how to run a campaign.
I like Hillary in many ways and will certainly support her if she is our nominee, but I honestly don't trust her judgment, and I also worry that her high negatives/low positives (even among those who would normally vote Dem) will hurt her in the GE, even as the hatred for her on the right brings the rabid right wngers out in droves to vote against her.
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