History will be made today, Tuesday, November 8, 2016: After 240 years of unbroken democracy, Hillary Rodham Clinton will become the first woman to be elected President of the United States thus becoming the most powerful politician in the world. She will beat Donald J. Trump to become the 45th President of the United States. And I want to be part of that history.
I will join millions of other Americans to vote for Clinton, not just because Trump is a proven racist, sexist, misogynist, protectionist, and authoritarian, but because Clinton is superior to Trump in qualifications, experience, preparedness, doggedness, loyalty, morality, and, yes, stamina, the quality Trump exclusively arrogated to himself during the first presidential debate.
It’s not all rosy for Clinton, for sure. She continues to be criticised by political opponents for the attack on the US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, in which four Americans were killed while she was Secretary of State. Similarly, her careless, but not criminal, handling of official emails opened her up to attack by Trump and other Republicans. So were her high speaking fees and support for controversial trade treaties and the Iraq war. Because she was not viewed as sufficiently forthcoming and provided misleading information about her role in the Benghazi attack and her use of a private server for official emails, a label of untrustworthiness was attached to her by political opponents, which dogged her throughout the campaign.
But, then, we must remember that Clinton has been under public gaze for over 35 years, precisely since January 1979, when she first became the First Lady of Arkansas, a position she held for nearly 12 years, while her husband, Bill Clinton, was twice the Governor of that state. She has since been the First Lady of the United States for eight years; Senator for the State of New York for eight years; and Secretary of State for four years. This is her second run for President, each campaign lasting about two years.
A graduate of the Yale Law School, Clinton had a promising legal career before veering into politics. At various times, she was a law professor, a partner in the reputable Rose Law Firm, and a member of the impeachment inquiry staff during the Watergate scandal. It is the combination of her professional and political accomplishments that endeared her to many supporters at home and abroad.
Without a doubt, Clinton entered the 2016 presidential race as the most qualified and prepared candidate. However, not everyone will be voting for her for the same reasons. Some will be voting for her because of her qualifications and experience, while others will be voting for her because she is “hardworking, intelligent, moral and sane”, as columnist Joe Klein puts it in the latest issue of Time (November 14, 2016). Yet others will be voting for her because of her well-articulated policies and plans as President.
Moreover, there are those, including the victims of Trump’s abusive tongue, who will be voting for Clinton just to prevent Trump from calling the shots from the Oval Office. Here’s how Senator Elizabeth Warren puts it at a campaign rally, referring to Trump’s calling Clinton a “nasty woman” during the third presidential debate: “And on November 8, we nasty women are going to march on our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you (Trump) out of our lives forever”. Similarly voting for Clinton (or against Trump) are most immigrant minorities, particularly Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, who have been denigrated one way or the other by Trump.
This is not to say that Trump lacks supporters. By building a sense of grievance among voters, particularly older Whites without a college education, and others who felt that the Republican establishment had sidelined them or that the system was stacked against them, Trump has been able to develop a base of voters who are ready to swear by his name. Throughout the campaign, he sought to maintain this base, rather than expand it, by repeating anti-establishment, anti-immigration, anti-trade and, particularly, anti-Clinton messages.
Throughout the campaign, Trump referred to Clinton as “crooked Hillary” and painted her as a “liar”, a “criminal”, a “nasty woman”, and a product of a “broken system”, by capitalising on her email troubles, high speaking fees, and even her husband’s sex scandal. Even when the FBI twice cleared Clinton of criminal wrongdoing in the email investigations, Trump continued to hammer away on her “criminality”. Trump used this negative campaign literally to hold captive many fearful and unformed voters, who are brainwashed to believe that a Clinton presidency would spell doom for them, while a Trump presidency would bring a boom: “I will make America great again”, he repeatedly assured them.
Yet, here is a man who, himself, lied about just everything; abused everyone, from fellow Republicans and political opponents to President Barrack Obama and the Pope; attacked America’s trade and foreign policies; exploited tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes for over a decade; and bragged about groping women. He even cast a shadow on American democracy by calling it a “rigged system” and vowing not to accept the outcome of the election, “unless I win”.
True, Trump is well-known as a shrewd businessman, who created a global Trump brand, but he is much less known for his sharp business practices, which have attracted repeated litigation and led to multiple bankruptcies. Compared to Clinton, Trump was an unorthodox presidential candidate, one who never held elective or appointive political office before running for President.
But make no mistake about it. Trump is no fool. His apparently unscripted negative campaign stumps were deliberate. In the last weeks of the campaign, it became clear that he used them to stoke fear in his supporters about a system rigged against him and against them: “This is a conspiracy against you, the American people,” he once told supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, pointing to faceless global elites, media organisations, financial institutions, the federal government, and even his own party leadership as participants in the plot.
While many voters remain hooked to Trump, some out of party loyalty but most out of the fear of the unfamiliar and the complex, others have since seen through his strategy and concluded that he is not fit for the office of President. That’s why many voters will go to the polls today to vote against him.
But I am not going to vote against Trump as such. After all, the American political system produced him and its capitalist economy nurtured his business. He is not an intellectual but he is smart enough to take advantage of the system. But he is not a product of the system that I would recommend for my grandchildren or even for anyone aspiring to political office. He is, in fact, an exploiter of the system.
Rather, I am going to vote for Hillary both for her many positive attributes and for openly running on the Obama legacy. Without a doubt, some White males are scared about the prospect of one minority (a woman) succeeding another (a Black), fearing that they are losing their country. It is a prospect they must learn to live with as the population of minorities, especially Hispanics, continues to swell.
Already, a study of early voting results shows that about 40 million Americans had cast their ballots by Friday, November 6, 2016. The results show that Clinton is ahead of Trump by at least nine points, with various minorities voting overwhelmingly for her. At the end of the day, the groups Trump so unabashedly despised and denigrated are going to put his opponent in the White House.
Will Trump concede defeat? We will know tonight or early tomorrow morning.
Punch
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