Why
It Won’t Be Hillary
By
Leonard
Zwelling
I would love to see Hillary Clinton be the
next President of the United States, but I don’t think it is going to happen.
It has nothing to do with her qualifications for no one
is more qualified than she is, but that was true in 2008 as well. It is not
because of all of the baggage she brings from Whitewater to Monica, although
those things don’t help. It’s not because it is hard to feel sorry for her
leaving the White House without millions in the bank because even if that were
true then, it isn’t now. She and Bill are very wealthy from books and speaking
alone. It doesn’t even have to do with the fact that she is a woman, because
even though that won’t sit well with some in a President, folks who won’t vote
for a woman in general obviously wouldn’t vote for her anyway.
I think the real reason Hillary Clinton
will not be the next POTUS is because to do so she will need the votes of many,
many people who could be her sons and daughters or perhaps even grandchildren and
she is viewed as yesterday’s news by many of them. And, she is viewed as part
of the generation that got us into this mess in the first place.
If the election of Barack Obama taught us anything, it
is that the American public wants the next new thing, the next shiny coin on
the beach, the next new flavor in its politicians. (Every year there’s a new American Idol.) Hillary is old news at a
time when the way things were done and have been done by the establishment is
viewed with great skepticism by the people whose votes she will need to win.
And who can blame them?
In foreign affairs, the American leadership has been
lacking since the Gulf War and Bush 41. The rise of Al Qaeda occurred on Bill
Clinton’s watch as did the embassy bombings in Tanzania and the incident
involving the USS Cole. These all predated W.’s Presidency. 9/11 was the
natural outgrowth of an inadequate US response to those events. Then when we
did respond, we waged very costly war against an enemy that was largely a gang
of thugs instead of doing what you should do with a gang of thugs, capture
them, kill them and make it unattractive to others to join them. Armies don’t
do that. Police do and they do it well and less expensively if you let them
(see Zero Dark Thirty).
Now, across the Middle East a sectarian war has taken
hold that threatens to engulf every state besides Israel as Muslims fight
Muslims. It’s the Jets vs. the Sharks on the oldest battlefield in the world.
The seeming separate war in Israel with Hamas is another in the many chapters
of two peoples vying for the same land and a microcosm of all the rest of the
sectarian hate in that part of the globe.
No matter how she tries, Hillary cannot escape the taint
of this situation whether Benghazi had happened or not. That it did happen on
her watch just gives fuel to the isolationists she is likely to have challenge
her if not in a primary, surely in the general. I suspect the next President of
the United States will be anything but an internationalist which is both
unfortunate and dangerous in this global economy, but should not be surprising.
(See
NY Times Magazine of AUG 10:
In domestic affairs, she is clearly tone deaf on the
most immediate of issues to the majority of Americans, the economy. Hillary—you
are rich! Get over it. Now what are you
going to do to create economic incentives to allow people to better their lot
without turning the government into an ATM? Of course, it will be fun to watch
her duck and weave around health care as she both supports the ACA and
challenges it for she is way too smart to not know it is a farce and unlikely
to address the real issues plaguing real Americans needing health insurance as
well as access to affordable care of any kind.
Health reform is something Mrs. Clinton knows very well
from her experience trying to do it when her husband was President. She knows
the debate about whether or not access to affordable health care is a right or
a privilege has yet to take place and formulating policy without resolution of
that debate is foolhardy.
It is very sad indeed for me to consider that the Baby
Boomers, my generation, gave us only two Presidents. One couldn’t behave
himself or tell the truth under oath and one couldn’t control the urge to use
the awesome power of the American military in a silly attempt to avenge 9/11 or
show Daddy who’s our Daddy, but to do it in Iraq.
Hillary would be the third Baby Boomer President if
elected, but I believe that the country has had enough of us Boomers.
Who can blame them?
Thanks for the Beatles. Bushes, Clintons, our time is
over. Your favorite Beatle may have been Paul, but it is the Paul named Rand
who may have the upper hand on the Lady Boomer (see that NY Times Magazine
piece from AUG 10, link above).
You heard it here first, but remember. I am usually
wrong!
