In any election, there are two fundamental aspects in selecting a candidate: qualifying experience and credibility; and ideological alignment and commitment to the issues.
I’m optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s presidency, and fully support her candidacy, for exactly those reasons: she’s experienced, competent, and has for her entire life been dedicated to the issues that I define as progress, from civil, women’s, and children’s rights to health care.
Experience
For half a century – since the early ’60s – Hillary has been involved in public affairs and public policy, serving public office for 13 of those years, including the Senate and Secretary of State. That matters. She’s smart, knowledgable, well-versed, well-traveled, and also weathered, beleaguered, and still persevering. That matters, too. A lot. Especially in this political climate.
Dedication to the issues
She’s also committed to the issues, and not just in rhetoric.
- Children and Healthcare: She’s been championing children’s rights and healthcare since the beginning of her career. She chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and served on the boards of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Arkansas Legal Services and the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s.
The 1993 Health Security Act, or HillaryCare as was sometimes quipped, didn’t muster the support from conservatives, libertarians, pharmaceutical companies, and even some of her own Democratic Party, but it did lay the foundation for the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, twenty years later and is certainly an indication of her commitment to people’s health and well-being and universal health care.
- Women’s Rights: She is a champion of women’s rights and has personally contributed to advancing them, including through her global initiative, “No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project.” Her own 2008 presidential candidate concession to Obama captures some of those sentiments:
“Although we were not able to shatter that highest and hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it has 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time, and we are going to keep working to make it so, today keep with me and stand for me, we still have so much to do together, we made history, and lets make some more.”
- Civil Rights: Most impressively, she is a life-long advocate for Civil Rights, and has been since a teen! As the DailyKos reports:
“At age 21, unknown Hillary Clinton made headlines. She and her [Wellesley commencement] speech were featured in a Life Magazine article about the activist ideals of the class of 1969. She had led protests to protect black civil rights. She had accomplished civil rights goals. She advocated active civil disobedience to better African-American lives, to make the changes that passive compliance and blind trust had failed to make.”
(You can listen to excerpts of that speech here.)
Something interesting I only learned about Hillary is that she had been an active young Republican in the 1960s until hearing a Martin Luther King speech in Chicago and then attending the 1967 GOP convention (at 20 years old) where she denounced the Republican party as being racist. She has, since then, been committed to the Democratic party.
I realize for some that stokes the critique that she is opportunistic, fluctuates in her policies, or ‘flip-flops.’ And my rebuttal to that oft-invoked critique is that this is exactly the kind of admirable pragmatism that she has demonstrated since she was a young activist and upcoming politician.
The Republican Party of the 1950s and early 1960s was the more supportive of Civil Rights. As the table below highlights, only 19, or 10% of Republican House Members and NO Republican Senators voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act bill, compared to 107 (nearly 50%) and 18 (35%), respectively, of their Democratic Counterparts.
As many know well, the Democratic Party of that era was largely propped up by southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats, who despised the Republican Party of Lincoln (who had freed the slaves). By the mid and especially the late 1960s, essentially once President Johnson fully endorsed the Civil Rights Movement, the Dixiecrats defected and Civil Rights became a key component of the Democratic platform, which continues into present day. And Hillary had the pragmatism to move with the more progressive party.