Journal Roblimo's Journal: Gaining respect for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney 1
One sad but salient fact about America's current standing in the world is that lots of our old allies now dislike our country, and countries that used to mildly dislike us now openly hate us. Our next president had better be used to being hated and attacked and called names, and able to function competently in an international atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. Hillary Clinton has been repeatedly attacked by right-wing nutjobs, left-wing wackos, and every single candidate for president in both parties, yet she keeps on keepin' on. Whether you love Hillary Clinton or hate her and call her names, you've got to admit that her ability to withstand hatred is a necessary quality for a post-Bush president, and that she deserves our respect (and possibly our votes) on that basis alone. But another necessary quality for cleaning up the G.W. Bush mess is managerial competence, and this is an area where Mitt Romney is the only shining star in the current constellation of candidates.
Remember how Romney turned around a hopelessly inept (and corrupt) 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics Committee? That was a stunning management feat. He didn't do badly as Massachusetts governor, either, or as the founder and managing partner of Bain Capital, where he ran (or hired people who ran) an impressive array of well-known companies.
Forget Romney's religion and political positions for a moment. Think of the president not only as commander in chief of the world's most potent military force, but also as CEO of our country's most important "company" -- one to which we pay large sums of money every year (in the form of taxes) and from which we expect high level of service in return. Romney is totally qualified to deliver good value for your tax dollars, and deserves your respect (and possibly your vote) for that reason alone.
Now back to Hillary Clinton. Use the search words I hate Hillary on Google and you get links to over 2.5 million pages. Some of them are as strident as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talking about the United States or Israel. Others sound more like North Korea's crackpot "dear leader" Kim Yong-il.
Wow.
We need a president who can stand up to people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Yong-il and G.W. Bush's good buddy and fellow torturer, Vladimir Putin.
Sen. McCain stood up to his N. Vietnamese captors, and deserves huge props for that (as well as extra "presidential qualification points" for being a veteran), but in recent years he's shown a tendency toward irrationally angry responses to personal attacks. Much as I respect McCain, I do not want a president who might suddenly nuke another country because its leader calls him some of the same nasty names our more disgusting "Republicans" use to describe Hillary Clinton. I also don't want a president who is (or whose core supporters are) comfortable using personal insults to describe a U.S. Senator and former first lady. People who would do that are likely to call Putin or Chinese premier Chang Chun-hsiung or someone else with a large nuclear arsenal a poo-poo head or some other insulting, childish nickname, thereby setting off a worldwide atomic war that would end civilization as we know it.
A hard choice...and some help making it
I am not overly impressed with this year's crop of presidential wannabes. Huckabee would be a cool choice for some sort of ceremonial entertainment post, since he's the best guitar player and singer of the bunch. Ron Paul is also suitable for a ceremonial post. If we had a cabinet-level Department of Doomsaying, he'd make a great head for it. But electing Ron Paul as president would be as stupid as hiring a strict vegetarian to run a meat-packing plant or a PETA leader to run a mink coat factory. Edwards is a lawyer who made a bunch of money on class-action suits and by taking 35% and 40% of poor people's "pain and suffering" judgements. We can get dozens just like him by looking through the Yellow Pages. Bill Richardson seems like a nice guy, but doesn't really stand out in a crowd. Rudy Giuliani would be a great head for the Department of Post-Distaster Speechifying but is otherwise problematical (corrupt friends, tendency to wear dresses, messed-up personal life, etc.), and as for the rest of the field.... if I can't remember their names, neither can most other Americans, so they don't stand a chance.
One cute thing I found online just a few moments ago (isn't the internet fun?) was a quiz that supposedly helps you find the candidate whose stated positions on high-profile issues most closely match your own. It showed that my best "match" on the Democratic side was Joe Biden, and that my best Republican match was John McCain. It also showed that, based purely on ideology, I should support Ron Paul over Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.
The thing is, as I age, I find myself increasingly likely to base my personal voting choices less on ideology than on demonstrated competence. Compromise may be a dirty word to many partisan purists, but it is at the heart of the American system of government. Our Declaration of Independence and Constituion were both compromises, the result of protracted negotiations between northerners and southerners, big-state people and small-state people, federalists and states-righters, and so on.
Remember the post-Katrina mess in New Orleans? I'm sure that even the most partisan supporters of both (Democratic) Louisiana (now former) governor Kathleen Blanco and (Republican) U.S. (soon to be former) president George W. Bush were sickened by how poorly these two elected offiicials handled hurricane relief efforts. I was disgusted by both of them, too, and I don't recall worrying about their positions on stem cell research or homosexual marriage while I watched the way-too-late evacuation of the New Orleans Superdome on TV.
We need a government that, more than anything else, is capable of handling disasters and even -- when possible -- preventing them.
This is why I make my voting choices the way I do, and why a general election choice between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney would be a hard one for me to make, while choosing either one of this pair over any of the other (current) potential nominees would not cause me to lose a minute's worth of sleep, even though I disagree with both of them on many hot-button political issues.
Insults (Score:2)
Because that would disqualify pretty much any Democrat, no?
Just a thought.