A fleeting thought on Hillary

Just finished reading a New York Magazine adaptation from Michael Wolff's forthcoming book about the Trump Campaign and White House. It was a very good read, though I was extremely frustrated with the lack of sourcing (which will hopefully be remedied in the book itself).

I then made the mistake of scrolling down far enough to read some of the comments. One of these said something about how Hillary was such a terrible candidate for Trump to have been able to beat her given his team's major deficiencies. And it made me think something that I haven't heard very many people say: We let Hillary's character get assassinated. We let her look like a bad person and a crook. All of us, from Hillary herself on down to her little supporters like me, let it happen, and we let her become a bad candidate.

I loathed Hillary in 2008 for no particular reason other than that she was campaigning against Obama, and there were some things that looked disingenuous (for example, double-fisting whiskey shots in a Pennsylvania(?) bar). And I mistakenly hated the idea of an individual mandate for health care, which she supported and Obama opposed at the time. My distaste for her was disproportionate to her supposed offenses, though, and I don't know why. Maybe because I had an unconscious bias again women, or maybe because I really hated the idea of a Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton string of presidencies, or maybe something else. But it was a feeling I saw reflected manifold in 2016 across the country.

I started to grow out of that very shortly after the 2008 campaign ended, when she and Obama reconciled and she was picked to be Secretary of State. I grew to respect her a lot. And when 2015 came around I was 100% on board the Hillary train, fulfilling my ongoing role of being, as one person put it, "anti-anti-establishment". While many of my friends and family took delight in the unfolding trainwreck that was the Republican primary process, I was horrified from the moment that Trump started gaining traction in the polls, and that feeling never left. I expected and feared that he would win the nomination (though I didn't expect him to take the presidency too), if for no other reason than that it would be devastating to our politics, which was already historically hyper-partisan, facile, and littered with ad hominems.

What started as a continuation of the old anti-Clinton lambasting train took a more cutting note with Trump. She has her flaws, to be sure; she isn't the perfect candidate or a perfect person. She is a weasely politician a lot of the time. But I fundamentally believe that she is a damn good person, and someone that I can trust on every metric that I need to trust a president. But in our discourse Hillary became a bad person, and the media essentially took this as given. Trump and the Republican campaign put out so much invective that it seemed like the neutral observers could only latch on to some of it--often getting a lot of blowback in the process--, letting the rest filter slowly into our minds whether we wanted it to or not. A few years back she was a very popular member of Obama's cabinet, but now she triggered an all-too-familiar revulsion in so many people.

And then Trump won. He won for a lot of reasons, but he couldn't have done it against someone who had a positive approval rating. I don't know what we could or should have done, but we damn well didn't do a good job. Republicans, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the campaigns, the press, the people; we all failed our country. Some of us worked really hard and did really important work, but in the end, on aggregate, we did it wrong. Hillary Clinton shouldn't have been tarred and feathered the way she was, and she shouldn't have lost. We succeed together, and we fail together: too simplistic to sum up my feelings, but good enough for a fleeting thought.