[The Soup Nazi]

From The Village Voice:

Confessions of a Hillary Supporter: 'It's Not Like We Can Breathe Easy'
By Robert Christgau
Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 12:40 p.m.

 

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.

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