Last week I wrote about engaging people, mostly millennials about the need for them to vote and to do so wisely and not emotionally in the piece titled “How to encourage idealists (and others) to vote for Hillary Clinton, ” It was an exchange with a reluctant voter.
Choosing who to vote for was easy for me. I have reached the stage in my life where I really mean what I say completely. It is not about personality etc.
My vote is a mechanical and mathematical calculation normalized for the best attainable policy outcome. No more. No less.
Politicians are not the ones I look up to. Not Hillary, not Obama, not Kennedy, none. When they do good things, I commend them. When they hurt the populace, I raise hell.
The American people, those deserving of praise based on deeds, are my heroes. Thus, picking Hillary Clinton based on the policies we are able, if we stick together, to extract was an easy choice.
I did not vote ‘against’ Donald J. Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton. Now my (our) work begins.
My first choice in 2008 was Hillary Clinton. To be clear, as a black man, I wanted to see then-Senator Obama win just to break down yet another barrier that showed definitively that the presidency was open to ALL Americans. The reason I stuck with Hillary Clinton then was that I liked her, she was qualified, she spoke my values, and I believed she could win.
Obama won Iowa, a white majority state. While pleasantly shocked, I stuck with the candidate I thought had the best chance of winning the general election. After Bill Clinton made some dismissive remarks with racial connotations about Obama’s win in South Carolina and watching white voters reaction to President Obama, my mathematical formulation changed. I mechanically switched to then-Senator Obama.
I liked both candidates. I worked hard for the Obama campaign believing that we could drive this one home. In my conservative town, I saw Republicans holding house parties. Republican parents were telling me that their kids turned them on to Obama. Obama had big rallies at campuses throughout Texas, and they worked.
These people were supporting President Obama with a passion. They were in love. They also understood the historical nature of an Obama presidency and these kind people wanted to be a part of it.
That enthusiasm worried me. Neither Obama nor anyone else could live up to the expectations of many of his supporters. We paid the price for this directly in 2010 and 2014. In effect, many fell in love with the candidate and not the candidate effecting policy. As well, many fell out of love with the candidate when the president felt the gravitational pull of the presidency and had to act on it. But he always maintained his charisma.
Hillary Clinton is paying the price in many ways for the President’s successful campaigns. First, she does not have his charisma nor magnetic personality that unfortunately many base decisions on at times. Democrats and progressives fell in love with Obama expecting him to do all that they thought he would do and are subliminally holding Hillary Clinton accountable for Democrats not being liberal enough. Many judge her flaws using different metrics than they use for all the other males in this cycle, let alone all males. Many discount Clinton’s early and continual work where she fought civil rights, childcare, and healthcare. Many allow others to create an unbalanced facade of who she is, a self-serving politician, like ALL politicians, who also want to do good but who has already done a whole lot of good.
We must not fall in love with candidates. We must vote for the candidate we believe can best effect policies that support the poor and the middle-class. That requires compromising.
No vote is a wasted vote. As Americans, we all have the right to vote as we choose. A vote, however, can be wrong. A vote can be emotional. The problem is that your vote is permanent and its effect long lasting. A coal miner voting for Trump because he says he will bring back coal jobs is a factually wrong vote. A vote for Trump or a third party candidate because one wants to stick it to Hillary Clinton (that is, the caricature of Hillary many have gullibly accepted) is the wrong vote because, in the process, one undermines their own economic, health, and personal security.
Unless some unfathomable event occurs, Hillary Clinton will be the next and first female President of the United States. But not too fast. Isn’t the fact that Donald Trump defeated 16 more qualified candidates — well maybe sans Ben Carson — to become the nominee, an unfathomable event?
When the election is over, irrespective of who wins, Hillary Clinton will be living the comfortable life of a multimillionaire with international stature. Donald Trump will be living a comfortable life as a multimillionaire, an abusive and conniving charlatan. Gary Johnson will continue being an internationally clueless millionaire with a hidden Ayn Randian motif. And Jill Stein will continue being an economically and socially conscious millionaire who demands a purity she fails to live up to in her investments.
Something to remember, voting for Trump is tantamount to following the pied piper to some hinterland. Making a statement by voting for a third party in this election is a valueless statement as it has absolutely no upside for the poor or middle-class. It gives a warm feeling to the two millionaires running for the Greens and the Libertarians. But most importantly, sticking it to Hillary Clinton in this election is no different than burning down your neighborhood to protest the lack of support or service in your community. Make your vote matter.