Look, Trump is spectacularly awful. Cruz is just bad. And Rubio? Well, I support him, but his chances of pulling this off and getting the nomination are discouragingly slim. At the same time, if you asked me whether I’d vote for Trump if it came to that, I’d admit that I’m not ready to contemplate that scenario, because it’s such a nightmare.
At the same time, there are Republicans who are saying, “I’ll vote Hillary over Trump.” I can’t say that, either. There’s a good chance that I’d just not vote for that election, just the down-ticket ones.
And, no, it’s not because I’d vote for a chimpanzee if he had R behind his name — I have voted for a few Democrats, especially the pro-life ones (hard to believe that they once existed) or when both candidates were abortion-rights anyway, or for local offices where social issues don’t matter, though these days in federal elections anyway, the particulars of a candidate’s own platform don’t matter as much.
But I just can’t vote for Hillary. Three reasons:
- Corruption
- Incompetence
- Policies
With respect to corruption, yes, I know that Democrats respond with statements along the lines of “Republicans have been trying to get the Clintons for decades out of nothing more than animosity, but they’ve never been able to prove anything.” But guess what? If not for a wiretap, and the smoking gun (“I’ve got this thing and it’s f***ing golden“), Rod Blagojevich would be a free man today, as it seemed he would be for many years when it was well-known that he ran a pay-to-play system, until he finally (unintentionally, stupidly) provided federal prosecutors with the evidence they needed.
Let me give just a few examples:
First, the homebrew server. How anyone can defend using a personal server to conduct Secretary of State business is beyond me. Even without getting into the particulars of the classified e-mails, and her various defenses that they “weren’t classified at the time,” or that “it wasn’t her fault that others sent her classified info”, the very fact that she deliberately rejected a State Department e-mail address has no explanation other than to enable corrupt dealings.
Second, the Clinton Foundation dealings. I mentioned yesterday that I’m in the middle of reading Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweizer, which details all of this. And he is not a partisan hack; his prior book Extortion (summarized here), was of the pox-on-both-their-houses genre, and he’s written multiple other bipartisan anti-corruption works.
Here’s a quote from his introduction:
Given my previous focus on bipartisan self-dealing and corruption, why am I now focused on one couple? Do I simply have it in for Bill and Hillary? Am I somehow trying to derail her prospects of being elected president in 2016?
The answer is pretty straightforward: the global dealings of this political couple deserve bipartisan citizen attention as much as congressional insider trading or campaign contribution extortion did. No one has even come close in recent years to enriching themselves on the scale of the Clintons while they or a spouse continued to serve in public office. The ability of any other ex-politician, whether a former president, senator, or congressman, Republican or Democrat, to accumulate such large amounts of money in such a short period of time is unmatched. (p. 5.)
There is a lot of detail in this book, about many, many such instances, and it merits its own summary.
Some of this I’d seen reported before, such as government approval of the acquisition of Uranium One, which owns half the uranium mines in the U.S., by Russia, which (though there’s no smoking gun, because there never is in such instances) strongly appears to have been facilitated by massive sums of money donated to the Clinton Foundation or given to Bill directly to purchase speeches, by people connected with the company.
Others I hadn’t begun to imagine.
For instance, in 2007, a Swedish mining investor named Lukas Lundin donated $100 million to the Clinton Foundation. Now, Lundlin’s business model consisted of dealmaking in African countries during civil wars. In particular, in Congo (DRC), they struck a deal with the rebels, to finance them in return for mining rights should the rebels win, and, when the rebels did indeed win, they made “staggering profits” (p. 124). The donation came at a time when those profits were threatened by the 2006 Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act. And, conveniently, as much as, while Senator, Hillary spoke out in favor of human rights in the DRC, as Secretary of State she failed “to implement any of the key provisions in the law that she had strongly advocated only a few years earlier.”
This is not an isolated example; the book is full of similar stories. Donations and speech-purchases smooth the path; in other cases, Bill Clinton gave speeches for, and heavily praised, dictators, granted them legitimacy, and a place at the Clinton Global Initiative table. Can Schweizer prove, in any such case, that there was a quid pro quo? No, of course not; even under the best of circumstances, with a federal investigation, it’s not easy.
Second, incompetence. Just a few words here.
Does Hillary have any signature legislation from her time as Senator? No, not really. Her credentials rest solely on her tenure as Secretary of State, during which time:
The Obama administration supported the regime change in Libya, then enabled Islamists to come to power, leading to the failures at Benghazi.
At the same time, they sat silent as the Iranian people tried their hand at the Arab Spring, as Clinton herself later admitted was a mistake.
The claimed Russian “reset” ended with Russia building its power and becoming a threat to the West.
Third, policy.
Let’s take a gander at her website. (Or take a kuken, as Dad would say, after his time in Germany in the army.)
Some of here issues are pretty bland: she wants to increase spending on Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, from $600 million/year to $2 billion per year, which experts claim is enough to find a cure by 2025. She wants to improve access to employment for disabled individuals. She supports cutting red tape for small businesses, and taking action to improve substance abuse treatment programs and access.
But bigger picture:
She supports, perhaps not as massive an expension of federal governement entitlement and other spending programs as Sanders, but pretty nearly so. Her New College Compact says that no student will need to borrow to pay for tuition, books, and fees, though it’s done through a rather complex set of plans and programs (and still requires 10 hours of work/week, and an “affordable and reaslitic” family contribution). She cites this as costing $350 billion, to be paid for by “the most fortunate.” She proposes new federal funds for universal “high quality” 4-year-old preschool (no price tag). She supports increases in subsidies for Obamacare, and a “public option”. She supports substantial increases in infrastructure spending, including a “world-leading passenger rail system”, paid for through “business tax reform.” She promises 12 weeks of paid leave, paid at 67%, paid for by “making the wealthy pay their fair share.” She supports increasing Social Security benefits, paid for by “the highest-income Americans.” She supports “investing in child care” to “make quality, affordable childcare a reality for families” — though here she at least provides no details, rather than announcing another spending plan paid for by the wealthy. Now, with any of these issues, there’s a lot of room for discussion: clearly, for instance, we need provision for child care for poor families, and there’s a question of how far you extend support. But the notion that you can massively expand government spending, solely by increasing taxes on the wealthy, is foolish. As has been said repeatedly, nowhere in Europe is it imagined that the entire basket of social welfare spending can be funded by taxes on the wealthy. It is simply a fact of life that everyone pays higher taxes than in the U.S.
She is uncompromising in her support of abortion, expressing her opposition to any restriction of any kind (not so much here on her website as elsewhere), and supporting the end of the Hyde Amendment (which prevents federal funds from paying for abortion). She promises that she “will stand up to Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, which would restrict access to critical health care services, like cancer screenings, contraception, and safe, legal abortion” — a phrase that’s packed with meaning, both stating that abortion is “a critical health care service” and that (since “access” has been used as synonomous with “paid for by others”, for instance, in the contraception-mandate debate) abortion should be a government-provided service. This alone is a deal-breaker for me. I know there are people who argue that, if your preferred candidate supports abortion-rights, but at the same time, supports policies intended to make life easier for poor mothers, they might be an acceptable choice, but I just can’t do it.
What’s more, she promises to overturn Citizens United, both via a constitutional amendment (no details specified) and by “appoint[ing] Supreme Court justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections.” In other words, she announces that her nominations will be unabashedly political, so that a vote for Hillary is a vote to lock in her policies for a generation via Supreme Court appointments.
Finally, with respect to immigration, she promises to push for a legalization program, and, unless and until that can be passed, to “do everything possible under the law” to provide work permits for as many people as possible, to deport only those who “pose a violent threat to public safety,” and to allow illegal immigrants to “buyinto the Affordable Care Act exchanges” to “access . . . affordable heath care.” (Does this mean obtaining subsidies? Presumably yes, or she wouldn’t claim that they can receive affordable care.)
Now, to be sure, her positions are hard to pin down on her website — for instance, in the cases of child care and illegal immigrants’ Obamacare subsidies, above. Likewise, where does she stand on the minimum wage? She says she “has supported” an increase to $12, and also supports local efforts to raise the wage to $15. But what is her current position on the federal minimum wage?
Would she be any worse than Obama with respect to her policies? Presumably she simply would be unable to implement any of these domestic spending plans, so long as Republicans maintain control of Congress. How would she compare to Trump with respect to foreign policy? She talks tough on her website, saying that she’ll “never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon” and will defeat ISIS, hold China accountable, and stand up to Putin. But her tenure as Secretary of State doesn’t give one reason to believe she’ll accomplish any of these objectives.
But the bottom line (besides the fact that I need to get back to work — remember, I’m not “on the clock” right now but will run out of time if I don’t figuratively punch in soon) is that I simply can’t punch that chad, even, in the worst case, if it’s Clinton vs. Trump.
UPDATE:
A few words on the “the GOP did it too” response to Clinton’s e-mailing on her personal server. The only other Secretary of State to have used a personal e-mail address was Colin Powell — according to PolitiFact, neither Madeline Albright nor Condoleezza Rice did so. And there’s some context in Powell’s use of a private e-mail account, for instance, in this NBC report:
Powell, who served as secretary from 2001 to 2005, said he used a personal email account because State’s email system was slow and cumbersome. Powell is credited with modernizing State’s computer infrastructure, which did not at the time allow each employee to have the internet at their desks.
“State’s system at the time was inadequate,” he said.
But, he added, “I did not use my email account for any classified matters because I had a classified computer on my desk.”
Now, I would like for the story to have ended with, “once we modernized the system, I switched to a State.gov e-mail account, but it doesn’t. I suppose that’s inertia, or a lack of awareness of the risks of hacking at the time, or perhaps Powell’s e-mails were truly contentless and genuinely just housekeeping: “let’s meet in my office at 2 pm.”
Also, the Wall Street Journal says that, though Rice didn’t e-mail very often,
An aide to Ms. Rice said Tuesday that when she was secretary of state, Ms. Rice had a state.gov email address that she occasionally used, but not very often, and that she didn’t use a personal email address for any State Department business.
That same article says that similar-level cabinet officials have all similarly used official government e-mail addresses.
What’s more, at no point in any of the reporting around Clinton’s e-mail troubles has it been suggested that the reasons for Powell’s personal e-mail use, a slow and cumbersome State Department system, were the motivating factor for using personal e-mail. Instead, it’s been explained as “convenience” and “inertia” (from the WSJ, quoting a Clinton aide: “She had a Blackberry, she used it prior to State, and like her predecessors she continued to use it when she got to State”). In fact, an e-mail has surfaced in which Clinton rejected using a State.gov e-mail account.
Would you use your personal e-mail to conduct business? Have you ever seen colleagues do it? At least at my workplace, that’s wholly out of bounds — both for reasons of professionalism and due to the risk of being hacked.
Further update:
I’m equal-opportunity. Here’s why you can’t vote for Trump, either.
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