A Closing Argument for Voting for Hillary Clinton

There are so many reasons not to vote for Donald Trump.  For some, that is all the motivation needed to guarantee their vote for Hillary Clinton.  For others who have heard the GOP's manufactured "Clinton scandals" for years, hesitancy remains about Clinton.  Personally, I do not know why, when Trump is such a horrific and dangerous individual, anyone moral can support the man.  Other than racism, ignorance, male chauvinism and/or bigotry towards others that Trump has fanned so well, I don't understand the attraction.  I truly wish some of his supporters would take a long look in the mirror and admit which of the former motivates them to support Trump.  A column in the New York Times makes a closing argument of why voting for Hillary Clinton is the right thing to do on Tuesday.  I agree with the author.  The piece is worth a full read.  Here are highlights:

[I]n this last column before the election I want to pitch you the reasons to vote for Clinton and not just against Donald Trump.

I’ve known Clinton a bit for many years, and I have to say: The public perception of her seems to me a gross and inaccurate caricature. I don’t understand the venom, the “lock her up” chants, the assumption that she is a Lady Macbeth; it’s an echo of the animus a lifetime ago some felt for Eleanor Roosevelt.

In fact, what makes Hillary Clinton tick has always been a 1960s-style idealism about making the world a better place.

Clinton has made thousands of compromises and innumerable mistakes, her pursuit of wealth has been unseemly and politically foolish, and it’s fair to question her judgment on everything from emails to Iraq. But understand this, too: At the core she is not a calculating crook but a smart, hard-working woman who is profoundly concerned with getting things done for those left behind.

Aside from shattering the glass ceiling for women, Clinton would bring three particular strengths to the presidency:

First, she knows the world exceptionally well and is essentially a very bright, disciplined nerd who traveled to more countries as secretary of state than any of her predecessors.

Second, Clinton had a history of playing well with Republicans when she was in the Senate and secretary of state, so there’s some small hope that we could inch back to governing.

“She is extremely well respected throughout the world, handles herself in a very classy way, and has a work ethic second to none,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said in 2012.

Third, Clinton cares deeply about impoverished children and others who are voiceless. In Arkansas, she started an early childhood program. In Washington, she helped establish CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which supports more than eight million needy American kids.

One of America’s foremost needs is to address inequality and cycles of poverty. These are issues that Clinton has wrestled with for more than 40 years.

Some of you are thinking: But the emails! The foundation! Benghazi! So let’s look at the standard accusations.

Benghazi has been examined by at least eight panels, and not one uncovered major wrongdoing by Clinton. The Clinton Foundation created conflicts of interest — and saved countless lives from AIDS. Yes, Clinton appears to have set up her own email server to evade FOIA searches, which was sneaky and wrong, but State Department officials for many years routinely have conducted business on their own email accounts.

Of course, for many, the greater appeal of Clinton is that she’s not Trump. He simply falls outside the norms: A fraudster who seems a racist, who has cheated people not only at Trump University but regularly through his career, who boasts of sexual assaults and whom 17 women have publicly accused of improper behavior, who has flip-flopped 138 times by one count, who lies every five minutes by another, and who has less public service experience than any incoming president in history.

But my point is that this election is not just a weighing of two scoundrels; Clinton is better than that, and she is in politics because she cares about something larger than herself.

[T]oday’s widely held caricature of an avaricious, selfish and manipulative crook is to me just plain wrong. Sure, she compromises, she sometimes dissembles and at times her judgment has been flawed. But fundamentally she is a morally serious person whose passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society. That’s her real conviction.