Love and Kindness Towards Hillary
I am a Hillary Clinton supporter, and a few weeks ago, a follower on Twitter, who happens to be a Bernie Sanders supporter, linked me to a blog post on Daily Kos, Why Do People Hate Hillary Clinton So Much?
This was not a troll of a BernieBro. It was tweeted at me with the context of “For consideration of your followers and mine,” an attempt at shared understanding. The blog post tries to explain, with the aid of Politifact, DW-NOMINATE scores, and OpenSecrets.org, why Hillary Clinton is not truly the anti-liberal monster caricature that some portions of the interwebs have made her out to be.
The blog post, in and of itself, is not groundbreaking. If its audience were those who believed Clinton is a corrupt, amoral, conservative, it alone probably convinced few people otherwise.
My first response to it was along the lines of, “Funny […] because this is pretty much… what… we’ve… been… saying…”
Funniness and effectiveness aside, it eventually got me thinking.
Now, I can only speak for fellow #liberals, but I do have the attitude that many people on the left do not actually hate Clinton, but they hate what they feel she represents.
They hate the ‘lying, unliberal, special interests establishment’ that Hillary Clinton embodies for them.
First of all, that is just one definition of “establishment.”
Second of all, wanting to take it out on Clinton is unfair on her as a person and as a women in politics. This is a necessary read:
When I was 22, I got a death threat in the mail. I was the co-president of the Wisconsin chapter of the National…medium.com
No, unfair does not mean “illegitimate.” People are free to not support Clinton, for any reason. That is fine, they have that right. Also, people do have honest-to-God, specific, problems with Hillary. Okay! But I do hold that it is Clinton-as-the-specter-of-‘all things liberals hate,’ not her as a person, that is the biggest factor in those collective feelings.
So, that just leads me to examine why I, over these last eight years, have developed a sincere and deep sympathy and support of her.
In some ways I owe her. Hillary Clinton, and my support of her during her first run for president in 2008, when I was eleven years old, is the reason I started following politics, and why started to love it.
Hillary Clinton is who made me who I am. I cannot separate my personality and being from what she sowed in me in that ’08 campaign.
And since then, and since knowing more about her career and life, and since this current campaign started, I feel more for her.
Watching someone who has taken so much abuse, for so long, and keep rising, is inspiring to someone who has felt under attack for years.
This article, overshadowed by Iowa and every subsequent primary contest, is my choice for best article so far this year:
Here is Hillary Clinton as seen by many: calculating, lacking principle, lacking conviction, driven by power and…www.buzzfeed.com
This portion stuck with me in my heart:
This was 1993. She is first lady — a few months into the job, head of her husband’s health care effort, split between the White House and the hospital room in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her father lies brain-dead, 18 days after a stroke. There is a speech she can’t get out of — 14,000 people at the University of Texas — and on the plane ride to Austin, in longhand, she sketches out a second appeal for the same “mutuality of respect.”
…
What she wants to talk about hinges on a simple question of how we can, as humans, better treat one another. To Hillary Clinton, this is politics. She’s talking, literally, about “going back and actually living by the Golden Rule.” She’s talking about a “great renaissance of caring in this country.” Part of the challenge is the vocabulary. “A lot of this is hard to talk about,” Clinton admits. “I’m not real articulate about it.”
The speech and subsequent interviews — earnest, unembarrassed, and decidedly open — are laughed at in Washington. Columnists call her a New Age “aspiring philosopher queen.” One compares her remarks to “a cross between Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech and a term paper on Siddhartha,” with all the “distinctive marks of adolescent self-discovery.” The New Republic asks: “It is good to hear the First Lady is also pro-meaning, but before we sign on, one question: What on earth are these people talking about?”
That she suffered such loss, and then tried to use that loss to create good, only to be mocked, breaks my heart. Anyone deserves better than that. Everyone deserves to be listened to and have those channels of emotional dialogue opened.
So every time I see what I feel is an unfair attack or story-line, I just get drawn more towards her emotionally.
One could even say I like her more now than when this campaign began!
Now, feeling indebted to someone, and liking them, doesn’t necessarily mean one supports them. Those thing just makes my support for Hillary Clinton better.
I support Clinton because she has the right priorities, priorities I share.
I support Clinton because she can get things done.
I support Hillary Clinton because I believe in her.
Now, this is just me. Again, people can choose not support her. I do not want to use this post to try to convince anyone.
But that Daily Kos post got me thinking… about feelings. And, I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about feelings, especially positive feelings about someone I feel has not gotten their due in positivity.
After all, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton has become a subversive act.
