Why I’ve Been With Her

In 2008, I thought Hillary Clinton was warmongering, entrenched, corrupt, and dishonest; I didn’t like her. I was irritated at her candidacy, and disturbed by the inevitability of her nomination for the Democratic ticket. And so when she lost the primary, I was both surprised and psyched.

Then on February 17, 2015, I had surgery to cut out a piece of the tendon in the front of my knee to construct a new ligament underneath, causing me to be nearly immobilized in bed for the next 2 weeks. Laid up, I watched a good amount of TV to pass the time. Among my watchings was the 2015 Conservative Political Action Committee Convention; as a political junkie, I was glued. This was no average CPAC Convention — it was the coming out party for a massive slate of Republican presidential candidates, and the party’s major test match before primary season began. As I watched potential future presidents of our country speak, I grew increasingly worried. I’ve campaigned against every Republican candidate for president since 2000, before I could vote. But at no point in the past was I as deeply fearful of where they would lead our country. But one by one, each of the 2016 GOP candidates went on stage and proved themselves to be dangerously misguided, flippantly uninterested in democracy, and eager to pander to the forces of extreme political conservativsm that have undermined our country’s progress in recent years. And Donald Trump wasn’t even there, wasn’t even a blip on the radar, wouldn’t still announce his run until 3 months later (for the record, John Kasich wasn’t there either). I decided then that whoever this woman was, Hillary Clinton, again the clear favorite for the Democratic nomination, I’d choose her, double down on her, because for sure she was better than all of the alternatives — in fact, was our best hope at saving us from them. So I committed to doing my part to help her fight them off. But that was the last time my support for her came as a reaction to the GOP’s candidates (and trust that I will not spend energy trying to convince you to vote for her out of fear for her opponent, because that’s not why I am) — because what that caused me to do was to take a second, real look at her.

I read up on her, a lot. Mostly I read criticisms of her — since that’s what my facebook newsfeed was (and still is) filled with. Instead of reading it all as a skeptic, as a predisposed Hillary hater, I read it all with an open mind. And I discovered a person I hadn’t seen before.

I discovered a person who, with her own hands, constructed one of the most powerful political platforms in human history — through a career in public service, focused mostly on supporting those most marginalized. She grew up in a middle class family, as did Bill — they didn’t come from wealth or dynastic power. In college, coming from a conservative, Republican, family background, she developed progressive politics, became an anti-war advocate and ally to Black student activism, and used her graduation speech (the first student speech in the history of the college) to boldly call out the patronizing, pro-Vietnam-War, US senator who spoke before her. In law school and immediately afterwards, she focused on low-income children in our criminal justice and education systems, traveling the country to do investigative research, developing published analysis and policy proposals to improve the lives of poor youth. As an attorney, she represented those too poor to afford legal counsel. As First Lady of Arkansas and the country, she crafted legislation to improve public education and expand health care access. And then, unlike nearly every first lady before her, Hillary Clinton didn’t retire from public life after her husband’s presidency, as she definitively could have (and as most among us would have) done, instead continuing on with her hustle as a public servant. She has often quoted Marian Wright Edelman that, “Service is the rent we pay for living, it is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.” And unlike nearly every president before him, Bill Clinton didn’t retire either — instead he criss-crossed the globe, founding one of the most widely respected international development foundations (including by me, and I’m skeptical of nearly all foundations, especially the large international ones). And then, after all this, I was leveling at them that they were too powerful. I was mistrustring them because they’d hustled too hard in service, built too large a network of connections, amassed too much wealth off of books and speeches, and accumulated too much global knowledge and political prowess. So then I chose to see things differently — to see their power for what it was, built primarily off decades of goodwill, service, and otherwise total badassery.

I also discovered a person who friends and enemies alike described as one of few politicians who always does her homework, and who listens. Jon Favreau, Obama’s famous prodigy speechwriter, who more or less hated Hillary Clinton in 2008, published an endorsement of her in February of this year, stating that she always took the briefing books home at the end of the day and returned the next day the most knowledegable person in the room, not because it was expected of her, but because she took her role seriously, and fought to understand and to create change in ways that could have no possible benefit to her political career. Me, I suspect her incredible preparedness may also be because she’s spent decades fighting off being crowded out by the most powerful, aggressive, arrogant men on earth. The mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown say she went above and beyond to reach out to them after their personal tragedies, and more than anything, to listen to them — and then to promise to work towards racial justice reform. Army generals say that unlike most politicians, she sincerely cares to understand and support their needs in the field. Relief workers from Ground Zero say no one else did more to get them the respect and health support they deserved than her, especially after they were forgotten by our public policy. Some people criticize her for changing positions and playing politics. I’ve come to choose differently — to see her as someone who hears out public concern and prioritizes it over personal belief, to act as an agent of democracy rather than as a demagogue. I don’t expect to always agree with my president — in fact, I seriously hope not to, that would be shady. I hope they’ll listen and learn from everyone they serve, including supposed enemies, because that’s fundamental to democracy, and the best shot at ours’ survival.

I also discovered one of the most respected people in American and world history, who endured decades of hate and attempts to disable her, daily assassinations, only to wake up each day to do it all over again. Gallup conducts an annual poll among Americans to determine the most admired man/woman in the world; Hillary Clinton has come in first place for the past 23 years straight, more than anyone else male or female. Statistically, she is widely respected whenever she is in office. But when she runs for office, the numbers change dramatically — public perception then shifts to see her as untrustworthy and power hungry. I suspect we’d find these numbers correlate closely with the volume of attack ads against her. Is she fundamentally untrustworthy and dishonest? In 40 years in public office, she’s been through numerous public scandals, and all of them have fallen off — in not a single one of them were any major accusations substantiated. Still, folks try. She’s even seriously been accused of being the cause of her husband’s sexual infidelity. During the primary election this year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune used data from Politifact to conclude that she was the most honest of all candidates in the election, more so than Bernie Sanders. In reality, she tries to share the nuance of political reality, but we don’t care to listen — we prefer soundbites instead. It doesn’t matter that a $15 an hour minimum wage today would cripple some parts of the country and would be inadequate for others, or that free college tuition would end up benefiting the already-rich and wouldn’t effectively address educational access for the poor. But what I believe is truly dishonest is much of the fiction-posing-as-fact that I’ve seen posted about her in the last year — accusations that she recently accepted money from the private prison industry, or that early in her career she willingly represented a child rapist and laughed at getting him a plea deal. Folks also believe she is beholden to the interests of the financial services industry because she has taken significant contributions from them, and that’s understandable. To that, she challenges them to examine her record and see where any of her Senate legislation or votes reflected bias, and to date no one has been able. Folks also doubt her interest in working to overturn Citizens United — and fail to realize that the Supreme Court case arose over advertising for an anti-Hillary film during the 2008 election, and that her released emails show that she has been strategizing to overturn it since the day the decision was handed down. In reality, in some folks’ eyes (I may be looking at you), the woman can do no right. And it’s come to be my firm opinion that the bulk of the negative impressions that most liberals have of Hillary Clinton (including my own previous ones) are the product of decades of conservative attacks on her, of the adoption of right-wing propaganda by the American left. American opinion of her by age group is pretty clearly delineated by the point at which she became the First Lady — those who were conscious before that time tend to admire her and know how hard she has hustled, and those like me who came into political awareness after that time tend to be skeptical of her, influenced by a decades-long barrage of attacks. I’ve chosen now to unlearn the propaganda I’d been fed, and to do my homework to understand the pretty honest person she actually is. Politics is an art of power-building and negotiation; I will not fault her for knowing how to play it well, even while I may not like all the rules she has to play by, and even while I advocate to change them.

And I discovered a progressive. I discovered a woman who is unapologetic in her pragmatic advocacy for women, for children, for people of color, for LGBT folks, for folks of varied ability. She taught me that reproductive freedom is not just a matter of control over one’s body, it is fundamental to unlocking personal and economic self-determination for more than half of our population. She was the first major force in the fight for universal health care in America. Way before our recent onslaught of mass shootings, she was a strong advocate for gun control, co-sponsoring and voting for legislation in the Senate to close the gun show loophole, to ban assault weapons, and to support manufacturer liability. Yes, she was in part responsible for the 1994 crime bill which added to mass incarceration, particularly of Black males. That is a cross of hers to bear. But bear in mind, it was so widely popular at the time of passing, which was a very different time in America than today (almost impossible for us now to understand), that Bernie Sanders voted for it, as did almost the entire Congressional Black Caucus. I will not tell you or anyone how to feel or how to interpret it, but there is no specific evidence to substantiate that she used the term “superpredators” in a racist manner when talking about gang violence that was plaguing many urban communities, but she has anyway acknowledged the unnecessary severity of the term, and has apologized for the one time she used it. She also agrees that big sections of the crime bill were a bad idea — and she has taken it on herself to begin to repair the damage done. Michelle Alexander, whose book “The New Jim Crow” should be required reading for all Americans, famously wrote an article this past year about why Black Americans shouldn’t vote for Clinton — a piece in which she herself acknowledged her arguments’ deep flaws, recognizing the gaps in assumptions she was making and proceeding to make them anyway. While in the Senate, Clinton introduced and co-sponsored legislation to restore voting rights to those with criminal records and to eliminate the racially unjust imbalance in sentencing between crack and cocaine convictions. Her campaign platform has early on outlined a call for the end of mass incarceration and for police and criminal justice reform. Before any other major politician would, without hesitation she called out the racism that played out in Ferguson and Baltimore, and has stood by the side of the past years’ victims of police and other racist violence, to a degree that has caused the mothers of those victims to almost unanimously endorse her (the notable exception is the mother of Tamir Rice, who has endorsed no one). Early in the primary process, she had the endorsement of 85% of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (the most liberal members of our federal government, in a group founded and chaired by Bernie Sanders, and of which he is still a member). Is John Lewis, the civil rights icon, now approaching the end of his life, an idiot? Is Sandra Bland’s mom, Geneva Reed-Veal, entrenched and corrupt? Maybe. Or maybe Hillary Clinton has the support of these folks, and of the clear majority of Democratic primary voters of color (including Black voters, particularly older ones) because she’s continued to show up for them since the start of her career, because she’s proven that she’s an ally and that she’s down to do her part in the fight. And yes, it matters that she’s a woman — not only because diverse leadership is fundamental to successful democracy, and not only because more women in power may help shift the imperialistic tendencies of human civilization to date, but also because American society continues to egregiously marginalize women in ways we haven’t yet remotely addressed — so it’s time. So now I choose to see that not only is she a lifelong progressive, and a symbol herself of our collective evolution, but that she also has a deep and unique understanding of how to make progress a reality.

And as President Obama said last night, and as I’ve been ranting about for more than a year now, we’ve never in the history of this country had anyone more qualified run for the presidency, ever. And that’s no coincidence. She has worked twice as hard as everyone else in the game, because she has had to, to get to this point. She knows domestic policy, she recognizes those unseen, she has had more to say about how we sustainably grow economic opportunity than any other candidate who ran this year, she understands our national defense, and she is deeply familiar with the dynamics of the world outside our borders. I would have liked to see her talk more to-date about early and K-12 education, about fighting climate change, and about national housing strategies. I would like to see her be less eager to exert force in the name of international peacemaking. The Obama-Clinton legacy of civilian casualties from drone strikes is just wrong. And I still don’t get our recent intervention in Honduras. All that means is that these are now the issues I have to press her on, as the nominee, and hopefully as our new president. And that is key to all of this — that democracy is a living, participatory act. Truthfully, I was both resentful and skeptical this year, on multiple levels, when some (generally not so young, and generally not so melanin-rich) folks said they were newly activated by Bernie Sanders. Because eight years ago, a Black man mobilized a much larger progressive coalition, and then put out a mass call to action after he was elected, to which most folks responded by just going back home. Some of us did not. I took it seriously. I felt deeply inspired when Obama said we had to be the ones we’d been waiting for, that we had to build brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand. So I started teaching youth about social and environmental justice, I started doing community organizing to fight climate change, and I founded a nonprofit to help transform my city’s relationship to food, labor, health, and sustainability. Today is the same — no matter who wins, our work doesn’t end on election day, it only then begins. As a public servant, Hillary Clinton has proven herself malleable to our interests. You can choose to call it pandering or dishonest. I choose to call it public service and representation. On day one, we have to advocate for the policies we want to see, and then we ourselves have to be the architects and builders of that change.

And that leads me to my final contribution to the conversation, which for me is most important of all. *I believe in American exceptionalism.* I am probably the most patriotic person I know. This is not because I’m unaware of all the terrible things this country has done — in reality, I’ve spent more time learning about, absorbing, and trying to see myself implicated in that stuff, than most people. I’m not convinced that human beings can successfully co-exist peacefully through democracy, but I believe that trying to do so is our best shot against the alternative, to having our fates decided for us by a single, exploitative, and maybe even charismatic, dictator. So I think this boldest and most difficult of experiments that is the United States of America, the evolving practice of co-self-governance that continues to define the model for the rest of the world, is worth committing ourselves to. That’s why George Washington refused to be our president-for-life, that’s what Abraham Lincoln knew was at stake if the country split. Democracy is slow, painful, and often ungratifying, having to put aside frustration to endure heavy compromise. But if you believe it yields no change, if you don’t see the massive evolution that has taken place in this country over centuries and even in the last decade, then you’re willfully choosing ignorance. In the course of today, you yourself will say and do things that 10 years from now you will regret, that you will come to realize was flat wrong of you. And hopefully you’ll recognize it and decide to change. That’s our evolution. And that’s what’s made possible when we coalesce diverse viewpoints to govern together, when we fight the dangerous lure of the politics of anger and rejection, anger being the antithesis of democracy, and instead commit ourselves to contributing to the long arc of justice. I think Hillary Clinton embodies these principles, I think she has lived them throughout her life, has hustled for decades to commit to the slow, grinding promise of democratic process. Whether you choose to believe that is on you. I do.

Or, more simply put: I now see a brilliant badass, who will make a great leader of this country. So, I’m with her.