Decrepit Old Fool

An email from WeeDram:

I’m curious.  I’ve never understood the strong aversions many people have to Hillary.  I honestly don’t see what provokes that.  I do recognize that the whacky right has a bee in their bonnet probably because she is a strong female, but that’s just a conjecture on my part.

You gave her a parenthetical “ugh” in your blog.  Where’s that coming from?  I’m honestly curious.

I sent back a short answer, but being’s I’m a Librool Democrat and think rather poorly of our current president, it deserves a better answer.  First of all, I’m not the only Democrat who feels this way.  Look at this cartoon from Pat Oliphant:

And now look at this enlarged segment – almost my exact words.  Why?  What is it about Hillary that I distrust so?

To begin with, it isn’t anything to do with Bill Clinton.  I didn’t appreciate Bill enough while he was in office, but Bush cured me of it.  (Ill go into what exactly Bill did right, some other time)  No, my dislike of Hillary is specific to her. 

Comparing her and Obama, both have short Senate careers.  But while Obama does not appear to have been seeking the presidency before winning a Senate seat, nobody doubts that was Hillary’s intention all along. 

It’s OK to be calculating; indeed I wish our current president were more calculating and less of a “gut player”.  But Hillary’s vote for the Iraq war seems unprincipled.  Hell, even I knew the yellowcake documents were fake, and I’m just someone who pays attention to stuff.  But now she is whining that she had “bad intelligence.”  That’s Bush’s excuse and in the context of an executive making a risky judgment call, he ought to be prepared to step down for being wrong¹. 

Then there’s economics: her husband understands the profit motive, and so does Al Gore.  They regard taxes and regulations as necessary things, but they also recognize that capitalism is pulling this wagon, and to keep it well fed.  What about Hillary?

“I want to take those profits, and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund…”  Expect to see that clip again and again once the campaign starts rolling.  Especially the first six words.

Sure, I’ll stipulate oil companies are evil and their profits are obscene.  I’d love to see a future where they are obsolete because energy production is distributed into a wide portfolio of sources.  It won’t happen with the Bush dynasty in office – they have oil in their arteries.  But…

There’s a saying that if the Democrats want to change things, they should try getting somebody elected president.  That won’t happen with a candidate who gives such heavy-duty ammunition to the Republicans.  Alternative energy research² will benefit all Americans, so there’s a good case for all Americans paying for it, not just evil corporations.  (Besides, taxing corporations feels better than it works.  The corporations simply regard it as a cost of doing business and pass it onto the consumer.)

So who gets elected?  You can make a very strong case that voters always go for the more charismatic candidate regardless of ideology.³  Bill Clinton has it – he could work around almost any gaffe or misdeed.  Hillary does not, and her candidacy virtually guarantees a Republican president in ‘08. 

I do believe Hillary is smart enough to realize this, which in my mind makes her candidacy self-indulgent and unprincipled.  She would probably make a halfway good president, at least compared to the current one, but we can do better.  Naturally having been wrong about Bill, I am quite prepared to be proved wrong about Hillary.  Since it looks like she will be the Democratic candidate, I certainly hope I am wrong. 

So what about Obama?  He is a constitutional scholar, he respects the conservative world view, he has charisma, he knows history, and he is able to hold his temper under extreme provocation.  In other news, I recently found out he smokes cigarettes, which moves him up a notch in my book.  Illogical as it sounds, I don’t trust people who appear saintly.  I just hope he doesn’t start “apologizing” for it.

It’s too early to tell how the race will play out but so far the Republicans have not fronted anybody who inspires me at all. So I hope the Democrats will.

Notes:

1. Obviously I’m not saying presidents aren’t allowed to make mistakes, but this one was beyond the “Oh, well just don’t do it again” level.  When you bet the ranch, you better be prepared to lose the ranch.  In this case, “the ranch” being all the credibility of your entire administration.

2. If the oil companies were smart they’d jump on that bandwagon.  But they spend more on advertising how green they are than they do on alternative energy research.
3. Don’t believe it?  Read this analysis by Paul Graham and what it means for candidate choice: It’s Charisma, Stupid.