Two viewpoints on the question of Hillary Clinton's fitness for the office of the presidency
Yes: Kathleen Schipano
America is always changing, always finding new technologies, new trends, new policy issues, new threats overseas, new problems.
We need a president who is knowledgeable enough to come up with new solutions, and that’s what makes me so ready for Clinton.
One of the social issues that Washington has botched in the past is the issue of women’s health. This issue has long been ignored and mishandled by men who are not physically or emotionally equipped to speak on the subject. Clinton is the voice that women need.
We cannot count on a man to understand the gravity of our fight to have the right to truly choose what happens to our bodies. Her pro-choice platform and goals of making abortions and feminine health services available to more women who need them is what this nation needs in order for women to have true freedom of choice.
Not only that, but she supports the availability of contraception that would lessen the need for abortions.
Who better to handle these turbulent times of foreign relations than someone who has served as an ambassador and dealt first hand with negotiations and international relations?
Her intolerance for tax cuts for big business give me at least some hope for the future of this country’s economy. She recently came out and said what every economically struggling American knows: trickle-down economics is a failure.
Big businesses are shipping jobs overseas to let as little trickle down as humanly possible. Greed is real, and if the job of the government is to protect everyone’s right to a fair shot, they have to account for that and stop giving breaks to the wealthy and hold them accountable for monopolizing the country’s wealth with their business practices.
These businesses need incentives to create more jobs in this country, not be rewarded for doing the exact opposite through tax breaks.
She wants to reign in the idea that anyone can have a gun anywhere at anytime, and with the ludicrous number of shootings that have happened in the past few years, few months, few weeks, it is about time. As a former first lady, a former secretary of state, and a former member of Senate, Hillary Clinton knows politics. She is the embodiment of Democratic values and will bring those values to the White House and actually execute them. I believe that she will be a strong candidate not only for the first female president but for what is best for the nation.
No: Ben Crawford
Barack Obama won the presidential nomination twice in a row because he is a serious man. He did not win it because he was black.
Obama was a person who was capable of leading the country, and the American people recognized that capacity in him. He proved it time and time again in his handling of the Lehman Brothers collapse. By the end of the 2008, it was not about race anymore. It was about electing a man who knew what he was doing.
Because of his fitness for office, those who even thought about playing the race card against him in that campaign got a good smack in the face for their trouble.
And the people who brought the concept of race in that campaign were the Clintons.
Who were the first few people who began to email about Obama’s “potential ties” to Islamic terrorist groups? Clinton staffers. The person who called Ted Kennedy, begging for his endorsement in the primary by saying “A few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee?” Bill Clinton, pleading on behalf of his wife.
I hope you get the picture by now. Hillary Clinton and those who work for her are not morally serious.
“Who cares about 2008?” comes the rejoinder. “Shouldn’t the fact that a woman could be president overshadow her mistakes?”
No. No, it shouldn’t, because her mistakes have real consequences.
While working on her health care overhaul during Bill’s administration, Hillary deliberately postponed American intervention in Bosnia because it was “a Vietnam that would compromise health care reform.” According to Sally Bedell Smith, her input was the “key factor” in putting off the bombings.
It took four years for the Clinton Administration to get up and stop the massacre of civilians in Europe.
By that point many, many people were dead.
In other words, she is directly responsible for the deaths of more than a quarter million men, women and children because she felt that trying to help them would get in the way of her health "message."
(And what happened to that sordid piece of legislation? It simply failed. It would take a more serious person, a decade later, to develop a national health care system.)
So, what are we to make of this Hillary Clinton person? She is certainly a powerful speaker. She is knowledgeable about how to maneuver in politics.
But she is not a morally serious human being. Which, for me, makes her unfit for any sort of high office, let alone the presidency.