Why I Feel Betrayed by Hillary Clinton’s Choice of VP and Ask You to Vote for Gary Johnson
First, let me establish my credentials: For the past six months I have spent any free time I had, and then some, campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Not officially mind you, I was no $hill. I never signed up as a volunteer nor donated to her. One day, just on my own, I created this account on Medium, as well as one on Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and Imgur because those were outlets that allowed me to respond to her detractors and encourage her supporters. Even though I did not agree with the entirety of the Democratic platform and had an uneasy sense that there was corruption within it, I went all in for Hillary. My largest motivation for doing so was the unfair way that I saw her being treated by the media, by her main opponent, and most especially, by his supporters. The vileness of the attacks against Hillary made me cry for her, for her dehumanization. I felt a great empathy that no person should be attacked so violently, so underhandedly. The misogyny levied against her pulled at something in me that pushed me to fight back, to not be silent in the face of hate, to defend Hillary Clinton the person. I knew I didn’t agree with her on everything, I knew she wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t hate her, I still don’t, and no one should either. Hate like the kind that is so casually lobbed against her has no place in our politics. We should strive to treat each other with a modicum of respect and look at candidates’ policy proposals with objectivity and reason.
But to support Hillary Clinton I had to compromise or push down some of my ideals. I was ok with doing so because the alternatives were two men I saw as frauds. The fact that neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders have to this day revealed their tax returns, while calling the one person who has, Hillary, dishonest, all the while the media sits silently allowing these men to get away with it disturbs me deeply. It should disturb you too. The fact that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia upsets me greatly. It should upset you too. They both are suspect in my eyes; they both are disqualified from the US presidency.
For the past six months I have waded into the horror that is partisan politics, burning with anger at the ignorant, deceptive and sometimes ridiculous accusations against Hillary Clinton, doing all I could to reason with people, to educate them on history, to give a different side of Hillary than the monster they described.
My Hillary, the Hillary Clinton I was fighting for, was a fundamentally good person who wanted to help others and who understood the problems, and most importantly, the solutions that would strengthen the US economy and restore a sense of belonging to everyone that felt threatened by the racism and bigotry spewing from Donald Trump’s Republican Party. My Hillary was a champion, a fighter, a uniter — who was just.
The Hillary Clinton who said to the League of United Latin American Citizens on July 14, 2016, “I see you, I hear you and I am with you.” The Hillary Clinton that told the city of Flint, Michigan, “I want to be a president who takes care of the big problems and the problems that are affecting the people of our country every day.” The Hillary Clinton that said “Race remains a deep fault line in America. Millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.” The Hillary Clinton that said we are stronger together. That was my hero. That was the person I was fighting for against the internet bullies and the mean-spirited trolls. That person would have picked Tom Perez as her VP.
The symbolism of Tom Perez would have been great. He is an Ivy League educated civil rights lawyer and former Assistant Attorney General who has personally dealt with one of the most pressing domestic issues of our time: the increased racial tension resulting from clear police brutality against innocent African Americans that has led to too many unjustified killings, and the retaliation that has led snipers in multiple cities to murder innocent police officers in cold blood. The most recent case involves a healthcare worker, Charles Kinsey, who while on his back with his hands up trying to explain to a police officer that his patient suffering with autism had a toy train and not a gun, was still shot by the police. There is no clearer case of implicit racism than this. What else is a citizen supposed to do? He should not have been required to prostrate himself on the ground in the first place, he should not have had to raise his arms in the air, but he did it anyway and he still got shot. Better training, training on implicit bias, having more police officers reflect the areas they patrol culturally, being part of the community, would help police officers treat people with respect so that a person explaining the situation is believed rather than made to feel accused and then shot, usually fatally. What happened to using non-lethal forms of control anyway? Why go right for a gun, especially when children are involved?
Tom Perez has experience investigating, prosecuting and advising on civil rights, worker’s rights and constitutional issues, and has sought practical solutions to help prevent hate crimes. He oversaw the division responsible for training police officers in the wake of the vicious, cruel and horrific murders of LBGT Americans like Mathew Shepard, and African Americans like James Byrd Jr., How significant would it have been to hear about his vast experiences and about his commitment to the victims of violence, on the day that Hillary made her VP announcement, July 22, 2016, when she visited the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the site of one of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
And how impactful would it have been to hear about his achievement as the United States Secretary of Labor. Again, Tom Perez could have spoken knowledgeably about policy that protects consumers and workers, like his implementation of the fiduciary standard, that FINALLY, required retirement advisors to put their clients’ best interests first, and not their own. He would have been able to discuss the need to negotiate agreements between companies like Verizon and labor unions in order to achieve mutually beneficial results. He would have spoken out powerfully about his work to allow home health care workers to receive minimum wage and overtime compensation. These issues about jobs, about opportunity, about fairness represent the other great pressing domestic issue of our country.
Tom Perez could have been an expert voice in the defense of trade, that engine that binds our world together — a multicultural wonder that allows the best products to be widely distributed, while powerfully arguing for the protection of workers, for paid leave, for equal pay for women, for job training internships. He is as prepared as anyone to ameliorate the current imbalance that seems to have decimated our middle class and made too many Americans fearful for their economic futures.
As a Latino, in this year of increased hate against non-white peoples, Tom Perez would have galvanized all of us who embrace the promise of America as a welcoming place for all who yearn to be free. The America that the Statue of Liberty symbolizes and is reflected in the lines:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
This is who we are as Americans. Our diversity is our strength. That’s the progressive value that Hillary Clinton claimed. That we are stronger together.
By all accounts Tom Perez is the intelligent, policy directed, studious, analytic problem solver that we need in leadership positions. A knowledgable, serious person. But symbolically, he standing alongside Hillary Clinton, behind the banner emblazoned in capital letters STRONGER TOGETHER, how beautiful would that message be! It would resonate. It would declare, unabashedly that we are all immigrants, that exceptionally qualified people should be given opportunity, not shut out because of the color of their skin or their ethnic background. Wasn’t that Hillary Clinton’s promise? Tom Perez would clearly counter the canard that Latinos in the US are all recent immigrants, and all low wage service workers. Latinos have been part of this country since the beginning and wealth and education levels span the whole gamut. Also, Latinos for the most part are a mixture of Native American, with origins in Asia, African and European, and so implicitly represent a great number of different traditions and cultures. Isn’t it the promise of America that all of us can belong, that we can be a multicultural quilt united by the principles that binds us as Americans, the principles of individual freedom, equal opportunity and justice for all — and not divided by sects as Donald Trump is trying to do?
It is against the overt racism of Trump’s America that Hillary Clinton could have stood up and declared that we’ve had enough and that his bigoted caricature of Latinos is inaccurate. Tom Perez would refute these old stereotypes by his presence, by being given the opportunity to speak about a more inclusive future, and Hillary Clinton standing by him, supporting him, would have channeled to all that most hopeful of chants: “Yes We Can”, “Si Se Puede”. But instead, like her vote for the war in Iraq, Hillary Clinton made the safe choice, Tim Kaine — but not the right choice. The vice-presidential pick represents her vision of the future for the United States, and instead of being one of inclusion, of diversity, the message she chose to send is one of exclusion. The “Stronger Together” banner wrapped around two privileged white people sends a chilling message to everyone who isn’t.
The Hillary Clinton I thought I supported would have chosen Tom Perez as her VP. The Hillary Clinton I thought I supported was a leader, someone with vision, someone who understood racial bias and subjective bias and strived to correct it. Now all I see is someone who panders, who says the right things, but doesn’t really understand the significance of the words.
She experienced first hand how much a sense of pride and yearning to see oneself reflected in our president created a loyal swell of support from the African American community toward senator Obama in 2008. Had Hillary Clinton chosen Tom Perez, she would have gotten an equal jolt of enthusiasm from Latinos and others who want to feel included in this country. No, it isn’t “reverse racism” to shine a light on the imbalance of power in our society, just like it is not “reverse sexism”, as Bernie Sanders perversely claimed, to support her historic candidacy over his. If our society were more fair, more inclusive, more just, you would not need to highlight this imbalance nor seek to quench the thirst for equality of representation that supporting women and minority candidates epitomizes. There would be no need, we would all obviously be treated equally and be represented proportionally in positions of power. But this is not reality, is it?
Instead, Hillary Clinton decided, as it happens so often to minorities, that despite clear qualifications, clear intelligence, clear workhorse ethics, a white person is preferable for the job. That was not the right message to send. Not now. Not in this election. It is particularly galling that many made the argument that since Latinos are so repulsed by Trump that she did not need to pick a Latino VP. How dismissive of a group of people that is! How ready to decide that Latinos are not really that important. And how willing to have low expectations for their potential as a new loyal voting block. How easily and cavalierly they can be excluded as members of American society.
Everybody sane is repulsed by Trump, why be so quick to drop a minority candidate from serious consideration? Why is the minority person the first to be dropped?
Hillary Clinton’s decision then, fits. It fits, given the betrayals of the Democratic Party: to not push for immigration reform early in Obama’s first term, and then for him to heartlessly lead in the number of mass deportations while the Democratic party twiddled along as a group of people, mostly poor and powerless, were being scapegoated and villified in a perverse modern retelling of the rise of Nazi Germany.
Yes, perhaps there may have been a racist backlash because Hillary Clinton dared to pick a minority as a VP, but had she done so we could have had the national discussion we need to have: that we should judge each person by their character, their qualifications, not their origins. Tom Perez is a good person and a powerful speaker, and I feel confident that as the public would have gotten to know him and seen what he brought to the table, that any immediate racial animosity would be tamed, and Hillary Clinton would have gently guided our broken and fractured country into a future where fear and apprehension of each other would be replaced by respect and acceptance of one another.
But instead, I feel that those words Hillary spoke, about seeing and understanding, were just the words of a politician pandering. Yes Tim Kaine is well qualified as well. Hillary had to choose between two fine candidates, but the fact that she chose the white male is disappointing because 1) she did it even after being on the losing end of a movement of support away from her in the 2008 election because of the yearning minorities have to be included in the power structure and the main-stream culture, and 2) she did it even though Tom Perez was uniquely prepared to guide the conversation about police justice and income inequality that are our most pressing issues now.
What a lack of insight to not embrace the opportunity to be the champion she claimed to be, to fight for Tom Perez and symbolically through him, fight for the immigrants she claims to support, the very ones that are being demonized by the new Republican Party. And what a lack of vision for the future of a more inclusive America where one’s race is not a detractor, a negative that has to be overcome by perfection, while others get to have their imperfections diminished or ignored.
It goes back to the reason that motivated me to support Hillary Clinton’s campaign as much as I did in the first place: I thought people were demanding that she be too perfect and too pure, and berating her for normal and common human failures. Her treatment clearly is sexism. NO! She does not have to be perfect, there is no such thing, and neither did Tom Perez. But somehow an Ivy League Latino civil rights lawyer with an impressive resume and deep experience in the two most important issues of our time is also not perfect enough for her? Somehow the implicit bias is so strong that it blinds people to the fact that Tom Perez has enough experience and intelligence to step into the role of president, particulary when compared to other recent presidents when elected and current presidential candidates who have or have had much less of a background in government to help them navigate the levers of power.
And therein lies the rub. The Hillary Clinton I thought I was supporting did understand implicit racism and sexism. She was introspective and saw her biases and fought against them. But that Hillary Clinton is not reality. The real Hillary apparently lets the fears decide, similar fears like the ones that led that police officer to shoot Charles Kinsey, the healthcare worker who was prone on the ground with his hands up.
Hillary Clinton found comfort in picking a white person, and felt it was too risky to align herself with a non-white person. This is implicit bias. This is the wall that keeps many qualified people from succeeding in this country.
Hillary Clinton is not the leader we need if the pretty words she says carry no meaning.
It’s been such a tough, frustrating and sometimes infuriating experience to defend Hillary from her detractors, from sexism. And I am drained. But I promise you, had she picked Tom Perez I would have done even more than I have up to now. It would have energized me and given me new life. ClintonPerez2016 was a beautiful dream that would have sustained me, but the reality is a nightmare.
The reality is the horrible realization that I do not know who Hillary Clinton really is, what she actually understands, or what her goals really are. She embraced the mantle of progressive but rejected Tom Perez, one of the few that would have been acceptable to them. The Hillary I thought I was supporting would have honored and respected the message she’s been receiving all year to unify the party along idealism and hope. She would have given form to the promises she was making, reassured doubters of her integrity, and channeled a new confident vision of progress for America by picking Tom Perez.
But instead, her choice of Tim Kaine as VP is proof that she values crooked cronyism over the lives of the poor and vulnerable. This is how she will govern. You can expect that she will reward a long line of her cronies before the common good, before what is best for our country and its people.
Tim Kaine is a man who has accepted more than $160,000 in gifts, like a $18,000 Caribbean vacation, from companies that wanted to do business in Virginia. There can be no doubt that this kind of corporate cronyism is not in the best interest of the public. It should be obvious to everyone that the corrupting influence of money on decision making pits what is best for citizens against what your “friend” wants; this is bad governance and undeniably wrong. The fact that crooked politicians have written the laws to make it legal to accept these kinds of gifts in Virginia reveals that the system is rotten to the core. In this country, where slavery was legal, women were property and currently people use the term “illegal” to dehuminize migrants and refugees, nobody should need to be reminded that “legal” does not mean moral. Not only is the corporate cronyism of the type that Tim Kaine practiced a bad omen for Hillary Clinton’s presidency, it demonstrates how this kind of cronyism keeps minorities from getting opportunity, it keeps poor people from advancing, and it sustains a kind of class system that values connections over merit. None of this is just.
Being jolted by a betrayal so profound as I felt when she picked Tim Kaine has broken wide open the lid I had placed on my ideals. That lid had allowed me to support Hillary even though she was not perfect and even though the Democratic Party did not function in the way I hoped government would.
The truth is that I am an independent. I don’t believe public service workers should be unionized. Government should work for the citizens, we the people are the union, and anybody who is not working hard or is not competent should not have eternal job protection in some government agency. The same thing goes for public schools. The teachers union should be abolished. For the most part, it stands in the way of and hurts students, particularly poor ones who are squeezed together in failing schools and treated like criminals creating a devastating and racist school-to-prison pipeline. It is such high hypocrisy that the Democrats tout teachers and public schools but most of them choose to send their kids to expensive private schools. Even the teachers that teach in these schools send their kids to private schools. The Clintons, The Gores, The Obamas — none chose the DC public schools for their kids! What shame to purport to be for the poor and not allow vouchers or charter schools, that is, competition, so that poor parents can also choose better schools for their kids. This is a matter of justice. Our failing educational system is a major reason why our students are not competitive and why high tech companies hire employees from overseas on visas. Is it any wonder that resentment and powerlessness would result from this?
The truth is also that the government is too big, too inefficient, and should not be involved in massive programs like universal healthcare that decrease competition and therefore innovation and cost constraints. The evidence is crystal clear about this given the fact that even our most cherished and vulnerable citizens, our veterans of war, were neglected and mistreated because of despicable care at the Veterans Health Administration. A better approach is to let veterans choose where they want to get their healthcare, and not force them into subpar government run facilities with long wait times. Like school choice, we all should be free to decide for ourselves and not be made to pay very high taxes just to limit our choices down to a single noncompetitive, poor quality solution that does not even work for most. But at the same time I cannot be a “pure” Libertarian because I believe the government should provide a wide safety net, should have a strong EPA, should invest in research, in infrastructure, and should set health, education and safety standards and have regulatory powers. There should be a regional minimum wage that provides for a living wage, but because the cost of living varies widely across the country a national minimum wage does not make sense. Someone working full time, all available work hours, earning the minimum should be able to afford decent housing and the staples of life, and not be forced to live out of their cars. It is precisely because there is racism, sexism, and bigotry that talented people, hard working people, can only find low paying jobs. It is not right to punish them twice over by letting companies exploit their work. The government needs to protect workers’ rights, workers’ lives. But socialism and communism are disastrous dependencies that rob people of their individual drives. Anyone reading about what is happening right now in Cuba and in Venezuela, seeing the devastation that socialism and communism have brought repeatedly everywhere, cannot rationally support these forms of government. They are clearly and unambiguously harmful to the average person. Moreover, our national debt weakens our enonomy and puts our security at risk. We should live within our means; we cannot afford massive government run programs.
What’s more, the current complexity of our tax code is regressive. It allows the wealthy and well connected, like Mitt Romney, to pay less taxes than the average middle class worker, and some people like Donald Trump to pay $0 taxes. The complexity is tantamount to an added tax for paying your taxes because most people need to hire a professional to file taxes at an average cost of $200. It is the working class and the poor who are hurt by the US tax code, but you haven’t heard a peep about this from the Democrats because they want to protect their cronyism. This is a matter of justice. A simpler tax code, where people only pay taxes on products they buy–a consumption tax, is what Gary Johnson, the Libertarian currently running for president, is offering. Food and basic necessities would be not taxed, they would be prebated, so the poor would not be unfairly punished. If you don’t buy anything other than basic necessities, you pay no taxes. But if you buy a yacht, a gold watch or a bottle of perfume, you pay taxes when you make those purchases. Companies/corporations/businesses make purchases so they would be paying taxes. But there would be no added income, payroll or estate taxes. We would all be free of the April 15 burden. Like school choice, he is right that this is the correct direction for our country, for the poor, for the working class and for the wealthy.
Gary Johnson is not perfect, but his platform, his focus on fiscal responsibility, curtailing unsustainable spending, encouraging school choice, allowing for a robust flow of immigration dictated by the marketplace with migrants protected from exploitation and scapegoating through efficient work visa distribution, and above all his belief that we all should be treated as individuals free to make our own choices as long as no harm comes to others, and not as sects fighting one another, makes him very appealing. Having a more efficient, fiscally responsible government would help reduce the tax burden on people and help build a stronger economy.
I write this not with the intention of punishing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats because I didn’t get what I wanted in the selection of her vice president. I believe some are doing the best they can, and obviously how I see problems and solutions is likely not how they see problems and solutions. This isn’t a grudge out of pettiness. If you think it’s petty or small, you’re not listening. For all the issues that I care about, I’ve lost confidence in Hillary Clinton’s and the Democrat Party’s ability to recognize the root of the problem and advocate for the best solution, the just solution. The people I thought had this judgement would have chosen Tom Perez as VP.
My intent is to not remain silent when I see an injustice, as I did when I invested all my energies in her campaign.
Hillary Clinton is the victim of sexism and misogyny, which is unjust and a real shame. If it weren’t for those attacks we could have been having policy discussions, talked about the value of unions in the private sector, and perhaps about their detriment in the public sector, about fiscal responsibility and the importance of balancing the budget while upholding the functions of government that it does well and that we all need. But the media, and her opponents, turned this election into an assassination of her character instead, which served no one.
Yet I cannot help but put the blame on Hillary Clinton for sending the nasty, deflating and negative message that it’s too risky, too divisive, too un-American to choose a superbly qualified Latino like Tom Perez for Vice President. Again the words, “stronger together,” are pretty, just like the praise for public schools sounds grand, but she chose a private school for her kid and chose to ignore our diversity in her VP pick.
That’s not the America I want; I’ve had enough of being pandered to. I’ve had enough of the soft bigotry of Liberals when the results are essentially the same as the overt bigotry of right-wingers. The correct choice was Tom Perez. I’m not bowing down in the face of Trump’s triumph of racism, I’m not cowering in fear, in order to support an equally pernicious form of bigotry. It is from a position of strength, in knowing what is right, what is just, that I take this stand.
Don’t ask minorities for their vote and then ignore them election after election while their standard of living remains unimproved generation after generation.
Obviously the two major political parties have failed our country, and so with the shock of Trump rising and the lack of vision and leadership to change our current track emanating from the Democrats, maybe it’s time to reset and let a new party take power.
No platform, no candidate, is likely to be perfect or perfectly aligned with anyone’s ideals. As voters, we have to compromise on some things to get others, but in doing so we expect that those things that were promised are delivered. For me, Hillary Clinton meant the promise of inclusion and the defense of minorities against a dangerous tide of hate. She failed to deliver that by not choosing Tom Perez.
And so, I call on all good-hearted decent Republicans and conservatives, all minorities who are done waiting for a savior that never comes, all Independents that want to see real change in the status quo that protects individual freedoms, while rejecting a police state and a nanny state – I call on all of you to support Governor Gary Johnson for president in this 2016 election. He is on the ballot in all 50 states and therefore has a legitimate chance to win. But most importantly, the future with him looks a lot brighter. #USA #LiveFree
