There are reasonable criticisms to be made of Clinton, and I've made some of them. At the time we voted in Maryland, she and Sanders were both choices a reasonable person might make. He, a populist firebrand from Vermont, without much practical experience, particularly in foreign policy. A lifetime of devotion to civil service. In Europe, he would be a moderate; by American standards, he is on the left.
Clinton, on the other hand, has a lifetime of experience. There has never been, in my lifetime and perhaps the lifetime of anyone now breathing, someone who had a better breadth of experience than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States. She has relevant experience from the legislative and executive branches and from service at the state level as well. There was not a person in either party's primary season who could match her experience, nor - as Obama said at the convention - has there been an actual President who was more qualified than she. Certainly not himself, having served only as a Senator, nor any of his predecessors, who had served (FTMP) as governors in the recent few decades.
Her policy positions seem to be somewhat to the right of Sanders, but not much. She has been somewhat more hawkish than he, and I expect that to continue. The many, many criticisms of her have been mostly baseless witch hunts: Benghazi, TravelGate, and so on. You could, for each, find something done during the W. administration that was similar or far more dramatic, that did not lead to similar outrage then. You didn't like TravelGate? Where was your outrage when the US Attorneys were let go? You don't like deleted emails (which the FBI found was blameless), where were you when tens of thousands of emails were mysteriously deleted during an active investigation under W.? You don't like that an American diplomat died in a hostile country during the Obama administration? Where were you when American diplomats died other times?
I'm not saying she was blameless for each of those things - though I do believe she was, w/r/t Benghazi - an investigation costing the United States millions and millions of dollars, with no reasonable likelihood of discovering anything new and useful, and which did not discover anything new and useful - nor am I saying she was not. I am just observing that the *number* of scandals surrounding her is irrelevant to me, because most of those "scandals" have zero weight. It's math: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 1. I'll give you 1 for the recent email thing, but only one. It's barely a blip.
Anyway. She skews slightly to the right of Sanders, and in another country would also be considered a moderate. She is not as charismatic as Sanders, nor does she make solutions to our problems sound simple. But perhaps that's because solutions to complex problems are not simple, and that distinction might be why she has tended to come out slightly more truthful than he is when Politifact compares them side-by-side.
Not that Sanders is still in it, but he's a useful benchmark for a discussion of Clinton, because he recently competed against her and it's fresh in people's minds.
As you can see from the above chart, Donald Trump has been scored as a person responsible for many falsehoods. Similar charts comparing him to other Republican candidates, earlier in the primary season, showed him as a purveyor of more falsehoods than Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, to name just two. He
does not tell the truth. His manner of persuading the American people to vote for him involves belittling people with nicknames - Crooked Hillary, Little Marco, etc. - and re-tweeting things that appeal to him, without regard for their provenance or their truth.
His policy positions appear to range from impractical and unfeasible (building a wall across the border with Mexico) to outright un-American (banning Muslims from entering the United States). He pulls and reuses campaign material from known hate groups, and endorses violence at his rallies. He does not appear to be able to let go of criticism, allowing even minor distractions - a crying baby at a campaign event, a 10-minute speech from a civilian at the Democratic National Convention - to push him to responses that do not appear to be thoughtful, respectful, compassionate, or polite. As Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake recently said, in response to Trump referring to her as a "joke," "if he can't take criticism from 'a joke,' what's he gonna do when somebody real comes for him?"
If the "real somebody" is reasonably adept at manipulating a person like Trump, then Trump may very well
play into his hands.
It is also publicly verifiable that Trump's campaign has already left behind a trail of unpaid vendors and service providers, and in his business affairs he has decades of history of fraud, bankruptcy, and abandonment of his debts and his associates. As Michael Bloomberg (billionaire, and former mayor of New York) said, in his endorsement - remember, as an Independent - of Clinton: "Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's run his business. God help us."
Quoting the
Houston Chronicle, which has a decades-long, almost unbroken string of endorsements for Republican candidates for President, which has *already* endorsed Clinton: "These are unsettling times, even if they're not the dark, dystopian end times that Trump lays out. They require a steady hand. That's not Donald Trump."
For myself, I absolutely reject the false narrative that these are two sides of the same coin. You may not like Clinton as a candidate, but the fact is she is qualified for the office, just as Obama - a former Senator - and Bush - a former Governor - were qualified. She is, in fact, more qualified than both. All three said or did things during the campaign season or earlier in their lives that might cause a reasonable person to hesitate before pushing the button bearing his or her name on election day.
She might not be your preferred choice, but she can be trusted to be an experienced person trying to do a good job as President of the United States. You can say she favors moneyed interests, and there may be some truth to that, but she has fought for civil rights, access to health care, and other middle-class issues over the years, and there's no reason to think she will stop doing so. She is a
qualified candidate. I can extoll her virtues at great length, and acknowledge that she has some drawbacks.
There's no reason to think that Trump is even aware of how little relevant experience he has. Consider that he recently assembled a team of economic advisors to help him put together an economic policy, and
only three of the thirteen members have actual experience in economics. He does not have relevant experience in government administration, and he does not appear to be interested in addressing the fact that he has no relevant experience. That is dangerous, and it is coupled with his temperament, which I discussed above.
His decision not to release his own tax returns stands in intriguing contrast to his unprecedented demand that President Obama release his birth certificate, though there was no credible reason why Obama should, and in fact he already had (IIRC, Trump was demanding the "long form," when Obama had already release the short form, though the Governor or Secretary of State or whatever of Hawaii had already vouched for it, and there had never been credible evidence that Obama had been born anywhere else). A tax return would be particularly important for a self-proclaimed businessman with ties to foreign banks and foreign powers and private businesses, but the American people are denied the opportunity to see it, notwithstanding Trump's own unsupportable demand to see the current President's birth certificate.
I can have this discussion as either "vote for Clinton because she will be a fine President, she is qualified for the job, and the criticisms of her are either completely or almost completely unfounded," or as "vote for Clinton because she is at least competent, and her opponent is a danger to the nation, and she is not. A drowning man may prefer a motorboat, but he would certainly be content with a life preserver." Either way, I'm arriving at the same clear choice.
My
, without name-calling.
