Why Hillary Clinton

[Iamaartist]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-north-patterson/why-hillary-clinton_b_9829044.html



While Hillary Clinton has effectively secured her party’s nomination, her primary campaign has been difficult and distinctly un-poetic. By personality and inclination, Clinton is prose. Which, fortuitously or not, makes her a fit for the temper of these fractious times, where patience, pragmatism and a mastery of policy count for more than soaring rhetoric and promises which cannot be kept.

Our politics is trench warfare. The Republicans are dug in, protected by a bulwark of gerrymandering and demographics which means that, out of 435 congressional districts, all but 35 or so are electorally impregnable. So, too, are roughly 45 red state senators — not enough to make a majority, but sufficient to sustain a filibuster. And the machinery of polarization — including a media which tells right-wing voters what they want to hear — blocks transformational change.

We may not like it. But our quarrel is not merely with our current noxious politics, but with the founding fathers who, fearful of popular excesses, gave us political institutions ideal for dividing power and resisting change. Unwittingly, they embedded within our Constitution a system which is now exploited by a GOP mired in stasis and self-interest. The political front moves, if at all, by inches instead of miles.

In this environment things like single-payer health care are casualties of war. The question is how to carve out territory where progress, however incremental, is meaningful and lasting.

Take Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act. Imperfect and incomplete as it may be, Obamacare has delivered health insurance to about 20 million Americans, with the greatest benefit to the poor, minorities and struggling workers. Not only is this important — in the Hobbesian world of our politics, it was optimal.


From the day he entered office, Obama had to claw for every inch of political turf in the face of unrelieved opposition to any legislation he offered. Often, he had to stretch the limits of his executive authority to achieve anything at all.

In short, we elected a man who campaigned in poetry, and found that prose was writ in mud and paid for in partisan bloodshed. One doubts that, today, he would campaign quite as he did in 2008 — indeed, he did not do so in 2012. Now Hillary Clinton is campaigning as she must govern — as a combatant, not an innocent, whose greatest weapon will sometimes be a veto.

She understands that progress in health care, infrastructure, financial regulation, tax reform, the environment, and limiting money in politics can only come through a mastery of detail and a keen sense of the potential, and limits, of presidential power. She is coming to the job prepared.

Long article more on story........

Is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton wants to lead that kind of country? Or that Donald Trump does not?

Her task is to make more Americans see her as that leader — and to believe that our future is not a given, for good or ill, but a choice. If she succeeds, then she can bring this better country closer to reality.

[liberal N proud]

1. Great write up

"patience, pragmatism and a mastery of policy count for more than soaring rhetoric and promises which cannot be kept"

[Iamaartist]

2. She is the only one...

But some just cant see that......there will be no fear while she is office..she will do her best to make sure our country is the best....and safe....she has the experience and the smarts to do so....

[SharonClark]

3. Good post - thanks

[beachbumbob]

4. Exactly

[pandr32]

5. Excellent piece of writing