Hillary Hiding Behind Trump

Donald Trump the Republican cartoon character Presidential Candidate is sucking all the air out of the current election race.

I can appreciate how frustrating that is for the other hopefuls. But one person who is probably quite grateful – for now – is Hillary Clinton.

Arguably the worst thing about Donald Trump’s presidential circus act is that he’s successfully stopped political commentators and journalists spending any serious time looking at what Hillary Clinton would be like as a president. This is especially odd, given that the polls make her the most likely to take the top job, compared to anyone else currently in the running.

Many people will vote for Clinton simply to be a part of history. I totally get that. A woman president has been far-too long coming. But isn’t it a little patronising, and even maybe sexist, to vote for someone just because she’s a woman? That doesn’t feel like it’s striking a blow for feminism, as much as striking a blow against it, to me.

I’d like a female president. But I’d like one who really deserves to be there, who’s been put through the ringer, and really tested.

So far Clinton appears to have side-stepped this process. She’s been allowed to get away with quite a bit as a result. We’re talking about a person who has still – to the best of my knowledge – refused to acknowledge that she used a ghostwriter to write those weekly newspaper columns and bestsellers of hers. She’s yet to explain her lying about being shot at in Bosnia, or discussing ways to beat Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries, using Bobby Kennedy’s assassination as a similar scenario to the fight she was having (serious, what was that about?)

There’s lots of other little lies too. Not just the ghostwriting, but how broke she was upon leaving the White House with her husband (nope), how her daughter was jogging near the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 (she wasn’t), how she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the heroic conqueror of Mount Everest (she wasn’t. Sir Edmund made the climb in 1953. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947).

But that’s just small stuff right? The tittle-tattle that tabloid journalists care about. Okay, I get that. The odd forgetful moment or little white lie I understand. We’ve all done it. Okay, so maybe not to this level, but we’ve all done it. Let’s look instead at her policy record:

As a Senator of New York, she was a loud, and unashamedly vocal supporter of TARP, the disastrous and economically-illiterate Troubled Asset Relief Program. And let’s not dwell too much on the equally damaging ethanol subsidies, auto bailouts, etc. It’s also interesting how we’ve all forgotten about her proudly declaring herself as the “representative of Wall Street” during her time as Senator. A declaration now oddly ignored by the Occupy crowd.

What trade agreements does she support and which is she against this week? With the flip-flopping, it’s hard to a) keep track, and b) understand what economic principles – if any – she really believes in.

Many wise heads warn that we’re looking at the possibility of another economic dip at some point soon. Will her proposed federal “infrastructure bank” (at a cost of $250 billion) really help us out in a time when we’re trying to live within our means? Hasn’t the weapons-grade failure of bailouts and shovel-ready projects got back to her yet?

She basically sided with Bush Jr and Cheney when it came to Iraq. In fact, she was arguably more hawkish than either of them when it came to linking Saddam to Al Qaeda. Her position on the failure was simply to flip-flop (again) and say that Bush didn’t pursue diplomatic avenues enough. Okay, but she specifically voted against the amendment that would have forced Bush to explore more diplomatic avenues before the invasion began. But, she seems to have been given a free pass on having her cake and eating it too.

I won’t dwell on Benghazi or the potentially federal-grade offences she may have committed with sensitive government emails, those are areas that’ve been well covered at least. Except to say that she still seems to have had a free pass on them. But let’s talk Libya. Anyone who has been concerned with Bush and Obama’s hyper-interventionism can’t help be a little concerned by her actions there, least of all referencing Moammar Gaddafi being disposed as “We came, we saw, he died”, (while laughing).

ISIS are reportedly using the areas she intervened as Secretary of State. It still hasn’t stopped her describing that unstable mess as an effective use of American “smart power”.

Clinton is a full-blown supporter of George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, and continues to wrongly describe Edward Snowden as a man who could have “gotten all the protections of a whistleblower”. That’s flat-out wrong. The rules – that Clinton fully supports – makes it currently impossible for someone in Snowden’s position to be a whistleblower. The “proper channels” she says he should have used are explicitly denied to employees in national security positions like Snowden.

In the social sphere, she’s against legalising marijuana for recreational purposes (but the states appear to be moving ahead anyway), she’s flip-flopped (there’s that phrase again) on gay marriage, only finally supporting it when it was clear most Americans now do. Also in a similar vein, only when the polls showed that people were turned off en-mass at Trump’s harsh treatment of illegal immigrants, did she change her position. But she still doesn’t fully support free speech, supported by the 1st Amendment, advocating a change to the US Constitution to limit what she worryingly describes as “unaccountable” political speech, and pushing for more governmental “backdoors” to our private data.

This is just a short list of things we haven’t talked about when it comes to Hillary. It might turn out that by the time of this year’s election, she really is the best of a bad bunch. But if that is the case, I can’t help feel that’s a depressing choice.

I’d love there to be a female US president. But I’d especially love there to be a good one.