Why I Voted for "Her"

I originally wrote this piece in September 2016 in response to a liberal friend of mine who was urging Democrats to basically fall in line and vote for Hillary Clinton. I agreed wholeheartedly but she went a step further and tried to whitewash her record, which I could not abide.

Right now, former Republicans (and the few sane ones left in the party) as well as independents face a similar choice to the one that I had to make in 2016 when voting for Democrats on November 6. When I came across this piece from two years ago, it reminded me of how we’ve lost truth, ethics, and a unifying moral compass in this country.

We’ve lost the ability to make grown up choices between the decent and the worst. We can’t afford to repeat that same mistake this year. This is my response (updated in past tense):

I voted for her, but I wasn't "with" her.

My motivation for voting for Hillary Clinton was the Supreme Court—and the fact that Trump is wholly unfit in every single way to be President of the United States. I disagreed with Democrats about her Senate record. I believed (and still do) that most everything she had done since 2000 had been to set herself up to be president.

She voted for the Iraq war, not because she was Senator from NY, but because she's hawkish; because she has this irrational need to be liked by people who hate her. Some may not recall but I do—she voted lock step with John McCain and Lindsay Graham on nearly all of those votes to go to war in Iraq. She was part of the Lieberman, Graham, McCain cabal in the Senate.

I didn't trust her because everything seemed to take a backseat to her political ambitions. I didn't believe that she was running for president because she cared so much about the people. It seemed to be a dream of hers, perhaps a lifelong dream, and she was willing to do whatever it took to achieve it. Fine, but I prefer a president who is willing to do the right thing even if it costs them an election, like voting no on Iraq. And this is coming from someone who was a fan of Hillary Clinton once upon a time.

I was with "her" once upon a time.

When she left her husband and moved to NY to run for the Senate I was so proud of her. She picked up the pieces and took control of her life after probably the most public humiliation ever. As a woman, I couldn't have been happier for her. Then she got into the Senate and I watched her just like I watched Biden, just like I watched Obama.

Part of the reason why McCain disliked Obama so much is not because he got beat in the 08 election. He hated him long before that. It is because when Barack Obama was first elected to the Senate, McCain tried to take him under his wing. Barack Obama declined and instead began working with Joe Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In my opinion, she was too desperate to be part of the "boys" club. I hate that. It's so weak and as a womanist, that really burned me up. If that weren't enough, I will never forget how she and Bill Clinton lost their minds in the 08 election and had the nerve to work the southern strategy against the first serious Black presidential candidate; as Democrats? Again, it only further showed me that she and he were willing to do whatever, even placate to southern racists, for political ambition.

And I will never forget when the race was all but over and everyone was asking Hillary Clinton why she was still hanging around in the race, it's June. Hillary Clinton said, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” Yeah, you never know, President Barack Obama could have been assassinated. Thank God he wasn't! But do you really want to be president that badly that you are holding out a glimmer of hope like that?

Hold your nose and vote.

Sorry liberals, I will never whitewash her record. But like many liberals, I couldn't imagine how so many on the left were planning to not vote or even contemplating a vote for Trump instead! I laid out the reasons why I wasn’t “with” her and didn't trust her, but compared to Trump, even I was willing to overlook her past and pray that she did no harm and made some good Supreme Court picks.

I know that she's very smart, but I believe that she is also very ethically challenged. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not talking points, and I didn't listen to anyone else about Clinton. My sentiments are based on my own observations over the last two decades watching her political career. Democrats spent their time telling other progressives and liberals that they were wrong for distrusting her instead of listening to us. We didn't come to this conclusion arbitrarily and I would have been as happy with a woman president as I was with a Black president. But I don't vote on those metrics, ever.

We were going to have to push her to keep her from jumping into another Iraq war because hawkish Republicans might have convinced her that it's the right thing to do. We were going to have to hold her feet to the fire in the same way that both Republicans and lefties were relentless in holding President Obama's feet to the fire.

That couldn't happen if we were already trying to blind ourselves to her flaws. I can't. I'm a realist. And because of that I voted for Hilary Clinton. I still refuse to pretend that I'm a fan or that her flaws don't exist and don't bother me. They did and still do but worse than any of her flaws, I believed that we couldn’t have a fascist running the US. Of all of the negatives Clinton had, she didn't have nearly as many as Trump and most importantly, she is not a fascist.