Why My Heart is “with Her”

A Bernie Sanders supporter — a young, liberal woman, previously a registered member of the Green Party, who recently became a Democrat for the purposes of feeling the Bern’ — told me she had literally never encountered a true Hillary Clinton partisan. Mind you, this is Florida, where Hillary won the primary by a margin of two-to-one. She asked me why I was a Hillary supporter.

The answer is embarrassingly tough for me to articulate. So much of the narrative of this election has been premised upon the Hillary v. Bernie contest being a head v. heart dynamic. And so that’s the thing that makes it so difficult for me. My heart is inextricably with Hillary.

Some of the reasons for that can be explained with the head.

I worked for Hillary in 2008, doing her Florida fundraising. I had trouble reading “Game Change” when it came out because the scars were still so raw from the trench warfare I lived and breathed for the first half of 2008. I’ll never forget the fact that my last few months on the campaign my salary was being paid out of her pocket, while she kept the effort afloat with personal loans and the campaign fell into debt that would take years to repay.

I’m also the father of a young daughter. It’s become almost trite to say, “I want to tell my little girl she can be anything when she grows up, even President of the United States”. Trite as it might be, it’s true and it’s a powerful feeling. But I want more than that for my baby girl.

There’s a viral YouTube video of a young black girl — maybe 6, maybe younger — who just loses her shit and starts crying unconsolably when her grandmother breaks the news to her that Barack Obama won’t be the president for much longer. This little girl has never known a world in which Obama isn’t president, and it’s devastating. If Hillary wins and gets reelected, my daughter will be ten when her successor takes the oath of office. She won’t be destroyed like the hysterical Obama girl, but I want her to spend her formative years only knowing a woman president, and being more than a little crushed when it comes to an end. (Which will be a good memory for me when she inevitably rebels and becomes a right winger, much as Hillary shed her Goldwater Girl roots to be who she is today.)

So those are the logically explainable rationales for why my heart beats so loudly that “I’m with her. I’m with her. I’m with her.” But those reasons alone cannot explain it, just as any intellectual justification to an emotional response can only tell a partial story.

With apologies to my Bern’ Bro’s, and Chris Mathews, Hillary Clinton inspires me. She makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and Martin Sheen in the West Wing-patriotic and proud. The fact that I have to qualify that statement with an apologia should be demonstrative of how far outside of the conventional wisdom that it is. But for me, it is unadulterated, unequivocal fact.

This woman inspires the hell out of me, and I don’t care who knows it or if they question my sincerity in saying it. I find it hard to watch Hillary speak for an extended period of time or read long-form articles about her and not well up, at least a little bit, with prideful tears.

I was at the Univision-sponsored debate at FIU and I choked up a little bit when Hillary admitted that the business of campaigning didn’t come naturally to her like it did her husband. But I almost lost my shit like that little black girl finding out Obama isn’t president for life when Hillary answered the question from a mother of five whose husband had been deported and was unlikely to reunite with his struggling family.

I don’t know how or when or why the woman who went to China and declared that, “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights” stopped being inspiring. I don’t know the answer because I’ve basically never known a world without Hillary Clinton, and in that time she has never ceased to make my heart sing, forget about the head.