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Hey, Clintonoids, Stop Bullying Me About My Vote
Posted By Ted Rall On October 4, 2016 @ 1:57 am In articles 2015 |
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To my many friends and readers who plan to vote for Hillary Clinton: please
stop bullying me.
Also please lay off other people, progressives and liberals and traditional
Democrats and socialists and communists, citizens who identify with the
political left, who plan to vote for Dr. Jill Stein or stay home.
I'm not going to vote for Donald Trump. I agree with the mainstream liberal
consensus that he should never hold political power, much less control over
nuclear launch codes. He's dangerous and scary. But that doesn't mean I have
to vote for Hillary Clinton.
So I won't.
1. The main reason that I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton is the
same exact main reason that I'm not going to vote for Donald Trump: I don't
vote Republican. Being age 53, Nixon was the first president I remember.
Hillary Clinton's politics (and her paranoia and insularity) remind me of
Richard Nixon's. I can't bring myself to think of a Democrat as someone who
solicits millions of dollars from Wall Street or votes with crazy
Republicans (like George W. Bush, whose stupid wars she aggressively
supported) to invade foreign countries just for fun. She plays a Democrat on
TV, but we know the truth: she's a Republican.
2. I'm anti-political dynasty. There should be a constitutional amendment
banning anyone related by blood or marriage to a former president from
running for the presidency.
3. There's a big difference between an impressive resume and a list of
accomplishments. Hillary has the former, not the latter. I hold her resume
against her: she has held tremendous power, yet has never reached out to
grab the brass ring. As senator, her record was undistinguished. As
Secretary of State, she barely lifted a finger on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, contributed to the expansion of the Syrian civil war, and is more
responsible than almost anyone else for destroying Libya. What she did well
she did small; when she went big she performed badly.
4. #MuslimLivesMatter. More than a million people died in Iraq. She voted
for that. So she isn't, as the current Clinton campaign meme goes, merely a
"flawed" candidate. Voting for the violent deaths of over a million people,
and the maiming of God knows how many more - when there was no reason
whatsoever to think Iraq had WMDs - is not an "oops, my bad" screw-up. Those
were real people, real human beings, and they're dead because of her. You
don't get to soak your hands in that much blood and just walk away, much
less into the White House.
5. She still hasn't made an affirmative case for herself. By clinging to
President Obama, she's running as his third term. The standard way to pull
this off is to present yourself as new and improved: the old product was
great, the new one will be even better. Her campaign boils down to "I'm not
Donald Trump." No matter how bad he is, and he is awful, that's not enough.
Watching her in the first presidential debate, at the beginning when Trump
was besting her over trade, I kept asking myself: why doesn't she admit that
the recovery is good but has left too many Americans behind? Why hasn't she
proposed a welfare and retraining program for people who lose their jobs to
globalization? A week later, the only answer I can come up with is that she
has no imagination, no vision thing.
6. She has made no significant concessions to the political left. Frankly,
this makes me wonder about her intelligence. Current polling shows that the
biggest threat to her candidacy is losing millennial, working class, and
Bernie Sanders supporters to the Green Party's Jill Stein and Libertarian
Gary Johnson. She would not have this problem if she'd picked Sanders as her
vice presidential running mate. Even now, she could bag the millennial vote
by promising the Vermont senator a cabinet post. Why doesn't she? For the
same reason that she won't embrace the $15-an-hour minimum wage (she gets
$225,000 for an hour-long speech but wants you to settle for $12) - she's a
creature of the corporations and therefore the political right. She's not
one of us. She doesn't care about us.
7. My vote is worth no less than the vote of someone who supports a major
party nominee. So what if the polls say that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump
will be elected president? Why, based on those polls, should I strategically
vote for someone whose politics and personality I deplore? By that logic,
why shouldn't they change their votes to conform to mine? I have my vote,
you have your vote, let Diebold add them up.
I don't have a problem with you if you plan to vote for Hillary. This year
is the best argument ever for lesser evilism. But the fact that we are
selecting between two equally unpopular major party presidential
standardbearers indicates that the two-party system is in crisis, if not
broken. We need and deserve more and better options. The only way to get
them is to start building viable third parties - voting for them,
contributing money to them. What better time to start than now?
Anyway, there's absolutely no way that my refusal to vote for Hillary will
put Donald Trump into the White House.
How do I know? Arithmetic. The closest state margin in an American
presidential election was four, in Maryland in 1832. Like you, I only get
one vote. Whatever I do can't and won't change the result.
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