I am talking about love and kindness.
--Hillary Clinton, to Buzzfeed reporter Ruby Cramer in January after Cramer asked her what motivated her to run for president.
The main problem with Hillary Clinton as a candidate is something I used to like about her: She doesn't care if I like her.
She doesn't care if you like her either. There are people who consider her a fierce and loyal friend and adore her. I suspect she thinks all this talk about who likes who is irrelevant nonsense.
I suspect she thinks there are more important things to worry about than who's popular and who's not. Maybe she finds it annoying that she has to go out on the campaign trail and pretend to be interested in the one-on-one problems of ordinary people. It's possible she thinks that trying to do the best for all ordinary people ought to be enough.
She probably thinks we ought to be grateful for her service.
And maybe we should be. I'd give her a B-minus on policy, which is pretty good given the tortured way in which our government works. She knows how things get accomplished, she's temperamentally moderate and probably a little too respectful of established power. But she's taken on necessary work that I wouldn't want to do. And she's put up with a lot from the likes of us.
I don't think she's corrupt, at least not in the sense that most of her detractors seem to think she's corrupt. I don't think she--or her husband--is particularly motivated by greed. The Clintons have money because that's what happens when you pursue and attain power in this country. They don't turn it down because it provides them with another tool to promote their agenda, which is nothing more or less sinister than their particular version of the American experiment.
If the whole point of having money is to not have to think about money, then the Clintons have enough.
Trump, on the other hand, can never have enough money, because money is--or at least has been--his chief reason for existing. It's how he keeps score. It's what he exaggerates. It's his entire brand; his basic brief is that he's rich so he must be doing something right. Americans envy and admire the vulgar rich--we've always taken comfort in the idea that with a couple of lucky breaks it could be us with the fur-lined sink and the gold-plated Gulfstream. All of Trump's authority comes from his money, and so he's well-advised to closely guard the facts about his fortune. He doesn't want us to know if it's smaller than he says it is, or if he's been leveraged by foreign actors. That's why he won't release his income tax returns--no matter what the reality is, it can't compete with the fantasies his assumed wealth engenders.
It probably irks Clinton that her tax returns are available for public inspection, but she understands it as a cost of doing business. She no doubt wishes we'd just pay attention to the important stuff.
But while I don't think she's a good candidate, I think she has a chance to be a good president, and at the very least she represents the best choice available to us now. That isn't so much an endorsement of her as an indictment of us--because as rigged as the game is, we still had the chance to laugh the reality TV star off the ballot. If we weren't susceptible to short cons and wishful thinking, we'd have a lot better options. If we were a more serious people with adult-level reading comprehension skills and reasonable attention spans, we would probably be able to choose from an array of candidates whose nuanced positions might more than compensate for their conventional hairstyles and genial modes of disagreement.
But we get the sort of candidates we deserve, and a dumbed-down America infatuated with celebrity culture that gets its news from infotainment centers with a vested interest in preserving the illusion of a close race deserves both the cartoon that is Donald Trump and the caricature that is this year's HRC. It's a little too late for any of us to start complaining about how our dignity and intelligence are being insulted by a process that's been warped by our appetite for sensation. We is the enemy, folks, and we're not about to rev up the love and kindness machine at this point.
It's not hard to understand why some people are exhausted by Hillary Clinton. But a vote for the other guy is a vote for nihilism, for the sort of monkey-wrenching of Americanism that could only be enjoyed as black parody. (Is there not at least a superficial resemblance between Trump and the Church of the SubGenius figurehead J. R. "Bob" Dobbs?)
What I liked about Hillary Clinton in the old days, before she ran for any public office, was her resistance to the idiot stuff that politicians have to engage in. I like that she insists on a zone of privacy. But a certain transparency ought to required of public officials, and she's never been interested in that. She too often provides her opponents with low-hanging fruit. She can be evasive and thin-skinned.
And while I'm not sure her "basket of deplorables" remark was actually a political gaffe--it may have been calculated, and it may even have helped her a bit--it wasn't a necessary or particularly "loving" thing to say. (That doesn't mean there isn't some truth in it; sometimes you have to look around and see who you're standing with. If you're on the same side as the racists and the conspiracy theorists maybe you ought to have a good long think about which of you is the useful idiot.)
It was her indulging in the same old campaign nonsense (I thought) she used to abhor.
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/20/2016