Then I hear the comparisons on the other side. Hillary is
not trustworthy. She shows
bad judgement. She is a
criminal.
I just don’t buy into it. But I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, so I did some research on all three:
- criminality
- trust
- judgement
Criminality. Regarding criminality, I decided that my research wasn’t going to do a better job than
congressional committees and the
FBI, so I’m relying on their results here, which, after thousands of hours of testimony and investigation found no basis for criminal charges regarding
email servers,
Ben Ghazi,
Whitewater or
Vince Foster. In each of these cases there
are trust and judgement issues, but I’m confident she did not break the law.
Trust. This one is interesting and difficult to separate from the other two. A critic might argue that she’s untrustworthy because she
broke the law. As we just discussed, I'm confident she did not. A critic might argue that she’s untrustworthy because she’s shown
bad judgement, but that is really just about judgement (which we can discuss below), not trust on its own.
Trust, in my view, is a subjective belief in whether or not someone is telling you the truth. Sure, Hillary
lies. But in my view she lies in ways that every politician always has and does. Perhaps more often than some, but far
less often than her opponent.
Judgement. Here is where an argument against Hillary could carry some weight. Do we really want a president that shows poor judgment in how she used her email server, or more critically, which trade deals she supports, which wars she votes for, or how quickly she sends more security to Ben Ghazi? Well, again we need to tease things apart. Some of these are failures of judgement and some are matters of policy.
It is not poor judgement to support a
trade deal or fight for gun control or even to support the appointment of a more liberal minded supreme court justice. All of those are matters of policy over which well-informed people often disagree. On specific votes such as the Iraq war or when particular amendments make bills difficult to vote for, there is an element of judgement, but in the end I believe those judgements are driven by making tradeoffs between competing policy priorities. As it happens, not surprisingly because I’m a Democrat, when I read Hillary’s positions on real issues, I agree with almost of all them.
So on real issues of judgment that are unrelated to criminal charges, I see it comes down to these issues or “charges” from her critics:
- Email Server
- Ben Ghazi Security
- Ben Ghazi Lying
- Clinton Foundation
Let’s take them one at a time.
Email Server. It was clearly bad judgement to allow state department emails to flow in any way through her personal email server, much less all of her email. Note that I don’t believe it was bad judgement to have a personal email server in the first place - I think that was good judgement and I’d have done the same if I was in her position because not doing so (a) would have made all her personal email subject to public records, and (b) left her open to accusations that she was using public resources for personal use. But using it exclusively and allowing the mixing of government and personal emails was just plain foolish; and even if it didn’t lead to any real damage to our national interests, I recognize that it could have. That said, in the big picture of dumb decisions, it is not on the scale of major policy misjudgments on which I’d prefer to judge any candidate.
Ben Ghazi Security. The claim is that Hillary showed poor judgement in
not sending more soldiers to protect the consulate, even when asked in the weeks and months leading up to the tragic event. In hindsight, it is easy and obvious to say that she or her people should have sent more protection there. Before the event happened, though, I’m certain
it was not obvious. I believe the accounts that state that Hillary was not involved in the decisions regarding where and in what numbers security personnel were deployed across the globe. And I fully believe that had she or others in State known what would happen, that they would have taken action to protect the consulate. In short, to blame her personally for this you’d need to take one of two positions: that she is a
monster that wanted the ambassador to be killed, which I plainly don’t believe; or that she should have realized which of the dozens of threats they faced daily were real, which I frankly feel is hard work you can never get correct 100% of the time.
Ben Ghazi Lying. The
claim is that the Obama administration with Hillary as its mouthpiece lied to the American people about the cause of the Ben Ghazi attack in order to support the administration’s message that Al Qaeda was on the retreat. I believe she made a mistake that many people make, speaking as
optimistically as she could based on the
information she had getting at the time, which turned out
not to be true. No politician is dumb enough to make false statements that are bound to be disproven, and Hillary is nothing if not a good politician. Add to that the fact that she was only one person in a much larger “spin machine” (all administrations are spin machines) and I find it impossible to pin blame on Hillary for this, even if it
had been a calculated lie.
Clinton Foundation. The claim is that the foundation provides a method for rich donors (individuals or governments) to
influence State Department policy.
John Oliver has done a better job than I can investigating some of the detailed donations. But politicians have always raised money for their elections and their causes. Having meetings and fund-raisers is part of the game, and determining the difference between raising-money and “paying for influence” will be impossible until we implement
real political reform (which I’m a fan of) to get big money out of politics. Even so, Hillary anticipated potential conflict here and put solid
disclosure policies in place, which the Foundation
followed. I’m having trouble seeing much bad judgement here at all, much less any mistakes that can be pinned to Hillary herself.
So Hillary is not a criminal. She’s shown some poor judgement regarding some operational (email) matters, but on matters of policy I’m very aligned with her. I believe that government has an important role in helping the
young,
sick and
elderly; that
everyone deserves a
fair chance to get
educated, and to work hard to
lift themselves up; that everyone deserves access to quality
healthcare; and that a strong America can be a great partner with other, like-minded countries to
fight extremism throughout the world.
Though not exclusively a Hillary position, I also believe that the biggest threat to our internal politics is the
ever-increasing divide within the US between extreme views on the left and right. I’ll admit that I’m not sure Hillary is well positioned to cross this divide. In fact, I was a
Bernie Sanders supporter because I felt that challenging and resetting “the system” is the only way eventually bring the country back together (but that’s another blog post).
I can’t tell anyone to start trusting Hillary, but I can tell you that the criticisms of her poor judgement and criminal activity have been
overblown. To echo more of
John Oliver’s sentiment, if you don’t want to vote for Hillary because you’re worried about possible criminal activity, bad judgement or untrustworthiness,
you simply cannot vote for Trump. Trump is demonstrably less trustworthy, shows far poorer judgement, and is more likely to have broken the law than Hillary.
Run, don’t walk, to the voting booth. Let’s get Hillary elected, protect our planet from an egomaniacal bully, and live to fight another day for our ideals and to finally heal the divide that plagues our country.
