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Edited on Wed Mar-26-08 09:41 AM by ElsewheresDaughter
(If you are still undecided today then here’s a thought: If you want ‘change’, and we all do, then you have to have a change agent that knows the system and has the contacts to create that change. Perhaps my thoughts as to why I desided to support Hillary Clinton will be helpful.)
Since I am grounded in Practical Politics, my first concern in any election is winning.
Whoever we pick as the Democratic nominee will be attacked as if they have stinking, slimy baggage by the Republican Party, the nominee and, more importantly, the slimy political world that surrounds the GOP. These ‘independent’ organizations have a sole purpose: to attack relentlessly, in the most vicious possible ways, the Democratic nominee. There will never be a ‘clean’ candidate that is exempt from their attacks.
Who, then, I began to think is best equipped to handle the vicious, continuous attacks that the other side will launch? So who could best stand up and fight?
Hillary Clinton has, as she has said, taken this incoming fire for 15 years or more. Ken Starr spent $75 million of our tax dollars digging for dirt to use against her and he came up empty handed. She’s had her patriotism questioned, her sexuality questioned, been accused of being a murderer, been accused of much more and yet she’s still a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.
She’s tougher than boot leather while having a human side. Those are assets that our candidate needs. Hillary Clinton has developed thick skin and the ability to remain calm in campaign combat. Yet, she also knows how to listen to the American people.
Qualifications? She’s a successful, liberal US Senator. She’s won a Senate election that was none too clean by fighting back and campaigning in all the non-traditional places in NY. She went to conservative, Republican based northern rural areas and won them over with smart policies, substantive talk and the fact she simply listened! In that most unlikely of places, she won with 67% of the vote. And then in 2006 she won re-election.
I like that she sticks to policy and not continuous personal attacks when she talks, but I also like that she also takes the time to listen when she’s campaigning. (I can testify that having a candidate disciplined enough to force herself to listen to others when it would be so much easier to rush to the next event is unusual in itself.)
I am convinced that Hillary is strong where others, including Barack Obama, would be weak and inexperienced. She will fight the filth machine of the other side with vigor and calmness. She knows how to outmaneuver them.
She’s a warrior. It’s a term seldom applied to women. Yet being a warrior is what she’s been from her Watergate committee staffing experience, through several terms as the First Lady of Arkansas, working on multiple corporate boards fighting for equal rights for workers and women and during her years as First Lady of the US traveling the world. She learned first hand in those travels the foreign issues and realities. Hillary Clinton has made the personal contacts that are will be so valuable in the White House. She has consistently fought for the underdog and the American people. She was a warrior without anyone using the term.
Hillary Clinton knows how to form coalitions on Capital Hill to get the job done! She has, that ‘bad’ word this election cycle, ‘experience’. JFK, perhaps one of the most inspirational speakers in his day, had 8 years US Senate experience and had taken a run at the Vice Presidency in 1956. He knew government from the inside.
JFK was not an outsider condemning the system and all those in it. If you want change in government you first have to learn how to operate from the inside to get the laws and policies changed. We learned this time and time again from JFK to Bill Clinton.
Hillary Clinton, to use her term and much to my surprise, is ‘my gal’. I voted for her twice for Senator, President in the NY Primary and will do it again in the general election.
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