Why Hillary's defeat matters

If you support a progressive agenda, then support a progressive candidate.

It’s no secret that I am a Green and will vote for Ralph Nader in November. And although I was initially enthused by some of his foreign policy comments, I've soured a bit on Barack Obama.

In recent months, he’s chosen to appease the gods of political correctness. These gods demand no deviation from the religion of militarism (Obama's commenting about bombing Pakistan!). These gods equate disagreeing with the Israeli government 0.01 percent of the time to promoting a second Holocaust.

This has undermined Obama's claim to being bold, his promise to bring a new kind of politics to Washington .

That said, Obama's effective clinching of the Democratic nomination is important because it is the triumph of a certain kind of politics over old-style sleaze-and-divide that G. Walker Bush and Hillary Clinton represent.

Now bear in mind, I don't think a President Obama would fundamentally transform American foreign policy. I don't think he will live up to then-Gov. G.W. Bush's observation (almost immediately betrayed by Pres. G. W. Bush) that, "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us."

I think Obama would change the tone of foreign policy, but not the substance. If elected, he'd return us to a (Bill) Clintonian 'kinder, gentler empire.' He'd make sure that all wars of aggression were multilateral.

Yet. a kinder, gentler empire is still an empire.

A multilateral war of aggression is still a war of aggression.

But Obama's nomination matters less because he won than because Hillary Clinton lost. Here's why.

I've noticed a recent trend in Africa and the Middle East for countries to become de facto monarchical republics. Dictators hand off to their sons. You’ve seen it in places like Syria and Togo. You’ve seen sons made heirs apparent in many other faux republics like Gabon, Egypt and Cameroon.

Had Hillary been elected this year, America would’ve risked turning into to a similar banana republic. The US could’ve been ruled by either a Bush or Clinton for 28 consecutive years. Perhaps longer if Brother Bush from Florida had decided to run in 2012 or 2016. Hillary’s defeat was bad for dynastic politics and as such, it was good for democracy.

Hillary was a victim of double standards she and her supporters promoted.

She said she wanted to be judged by the same standards as male politicians, But when you criticized her objective flaws, such as her being the favorite candidate of corporate special interests, you were reflexively dismissed as misogynistic, as hating strong women.

She said the media was sexist because it made a big deal of the fact she cried (never mind that this was the same media that massively overplayed the Howard Dean Scream in 2004) but she had no problem making statements implying or even stating explicitly that women make better leaders than men.

Liberal-minded people, the people most open to voting for a non-white male candidate, objected to these double standards. They resented being called sexist because they asked fair questions. They resented the suggestion that not supporting Hillary was a slap in the face not to a woman, but to all women.

She made people most likely to support her into the people most likely to loathe her. The harshest comments I’ve heard about her in the last six months have been not from the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ but from liberals and progressives who were offended by her and her most rabid supporters' affront to their sense of fairness.

There are 300 million Americans, about half of whom are female. Many of whom are as smart and talented as Hillary but without her air of cronyism, of presumptuousness, of arrogance and, most gallingly for a ‘feminist’ icon,’ of nepotism.

To most liberal-minded people, it seems fair to say, "I’d vote for a good female candidate but Hillary isn't that candidate."

But Hillary supporters treated a vote against her as a vote against all women, as a vote against womanhood, as a rejection of female equality.

It’s no coincidence that Obama’s speeches are rife with the word ‘we’ while Hillary’s overuse the word ‘I’.

The biggest single reason so many Hillary supporters are bitter is because they thought the nomination ‘belonged’ to her before the first voters were cast.

That makes it so they think Obama 'stole' the nomination that, in their delusional minds, rightly belonged to her before the first vote was even cast. Their rejection of her was, in their eyes, the height of ingratitude.

This mentality exemplifies why it's good that Hillary lost. Any president needs a healthy ego, but we've seen damage that can be done by a president with a gargantuan sense of entitlement and an absolute belief that people owe him something.

The reason Obama’s win is good isn't so much because Obama's a transformational candidate. He's not.

The reason it's important is because political office should be earned, not given. It should be a race, not a coronation. Obama is certainly flawed, but he's far less bad than Hillary. Kudos to Democratic voters for thinking for themselves and making their own decisions rather than listening to the media-decreed conventional wisdom of last December and January which had already anointed Hillary the next president as a foregone conclusion.

The US has spent eight years being misruled by a corporate-owned president with a massive sense of entitlement, with no moral compass, who thinks the rules and the laws don't apply to him, who divides people for his personal benefit and who felt like he had a God-given right to absolute power because of who he happened to be related to.

The Democrats rejected Hillary because so many of them saw the every single one of those qualities in her. And in doing so, they did the nation a favor. In doing so, they gave America the small hope that one day in the future that the Democratic Party might actually break the shackles of corporate control and nominate a truly progressive candidate.


Update: You need more than vague talk about 'change' to impress me. I can't remember the last non-incumbent candidate who DIDN'T talk about change. I can't remember the last non-incumbent nominee who DIDN'T promise to shake up Washington. And fearmongering like the 'a vote for Nader is a vote for (insert Republican Devil Incarnate du jour)' lie only repels me. But when you start doing stuff like this, now you've got my attention.