The Right Choice for the Left
U.S. News and World Report
By Robert Schlesinger | Managing Editor
Sept. 30, 2016, at 6:00 a.m.
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a college friend with whom I had gone back and forth on Bernie versus Hillary during the Democratic primaries (he felt the Bern, I was with her); he remains unsatisfied with Clinton and floated the idea of casting his ballot for Jill Stein. What follows is a revised version of my response, making the case for Hillary over a third-party alternative:
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First off, Stein is a vaxxer-symp crank (see also this). But your point is presumably that she's not Hillary. When you wrote in early September you asked if "this Hillary thing" could be any worse; even then I wasn't sure which thing you were referring and the news cycle has since meandered back to Trump. I imagine you were talking about the collection of pseudo-scandals the press focused on then, touching on Clinton Foundation emails and donors and her not immediately telling the world when she got pneumonia. For the most part these "scandals" were overblown – "optics"-driven mountain-making out of what were largely molehills. Pretty much each story had a paragraph saying something like: None of these revelations indicate any illegal activity, but they raise questions about Clinton's reputation for &c. &c. For specific, thorough dissections I commend you to this, this and this.
Hillary Clinton is of course not a perfect candidate for a number of reasons. She's the obverse of the famous Mario Cuomo-ism that we campaign in poetry but govern in prose – poetry's not her thing and it hurts her on the campaign trail. The email server decision was (as she's said) dumb. She is instinctively too secrecy-prone and press-averse; why she went months without talking to the reporters covering her is a mystery because when she does she's pretty good at it, as evidenced by the fact that she's been doing it for some weeks now quite capably.
Your case against her seems to be that she is of the system rather than someone who stands against it. And in one sense you're correct. She's not a revolutionary; she's not a radical; rather than focusing on changing wholesale our politics she has focused on working within the system to accomplish progressive goals. Watching her debate Sanders I was reminded of John F. Kennedy's self-description that he was "an idealist without illusions." The arc of her public career has been to work, yes through the political system, for progressive and liberal goals. You can quibble with whether she's sufficiently progressive or too willing to make trade-offs but the idea that this has all been a clever path to payola is silly. So is looking at the totality of her career and concluding that she's some sort of corporate stalking horse or unreconstructed Goldwater Girl. Is she a Sanders progressive? No. But he's one end of the spectrum, not its entirety. For more detailed cases for Clinton's liberal bona fides see here, here and here. (And for what it's worth, Harry Truman, JFK and Bill Clinton were all seen as insufficiently liberal in some quarters and history adjudges them pretty well.)
Think about it: We're both old enough to remember when Hillary was second only to Ted Kennedy in terms of liberal paragons. The fact that she's now viewed with suspicion among some progressives has as much to do with how our politics have shifted leftward and how the right has relentlessly demonized both Clintons for more than 20 years as it does with corruption or a rightward drift on her part. It's some trick to be seen as the devil by both the activist left and most of the right.
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http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-30/trump-isnt-the-only-reason-for-progressives-to-vote-for-clinton-over-stein?emailed=1&src=usn_thereport
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