As we gallop toward Election Day, Hillary Clinton is suspending her efforts to woo disenchanted Republicans to her side in favor of a full-throttled effort to get out the vote. This is a critical maneuver, for, despite the New York Times' current projection-- an 80chance that she will win next month-- ,those of us who had been thrown into a spin by the blessedly brief poll surge for Trump are now made queasy by the numbers of those who aren't inclined to vote at all.
Oh, they have their reasons, which aren't reasons at all in the sense they aren't reasoned or reasonable. And if you have a problem with my ready dismissal of their concerns, I ask you to cast your mind--and your gut--back to 2000, which provides a handy morality tale to share with the righteous abstainers you know or may encounter as you knock on doors in your bailiwick.
Today we remember 2000 for the Supreme Court's resolution to the Florida ballot debacle, which called the race for Bush. But remember (if you can bear it), the third party candidate, Ralph Nader and his contemptibly disingenuous message to voters: There is no difference between George W Bush and Al Gore.
He embellished this simplistic slogan drawing analogies between Gore's links to Big Tobacco and Bush's ties to Big Oil. Legions of willfully gullible Americans—i.e. those who didn't bother to delve into the candidate's well-documented pasts--Al Gore's rich history of public service in contrast to Bush's self-serving opportunism and callous indifference to the public good—bought Nader's line and passed it on with the fervor common to followers of false prophets.
I remember trying to persuade a neighbor of mine in Connecticut that she'd been mislead, but she wouldn't hear of it. And while she was fairly sure Nader wouldn't win, she was as sure there was no hazard at all in Bush benefiting from the defection of Democrats such as herself because after all, what difference would it make if Bush rather than Gore were to win?
Within a very short time the difference was profoundly, nauseatingly evident. And as time goes on, it's hard to feel any less embittered by the impact Nader's campaign has had on our country and indeed the world. Consider just two—each colossally consequential.
1. Al Gore's defeat was not just a setback for efforts to understand and curb the impact of Climate Change, but license for Bush's oil-hawking friends to go on fueling the festering global crisis.
2. Al Gore would not have used 9/11 as a pretext for invading Iraq. I'm not going to spin this out further because if you're like me, contemplating a world in which that war did not occur makes my head implode with rage at the folly, waste and ongoing devastation it has wrought.
No difference between them? Cite 2000 and ask your young abstainers—and they are mostly the young-- to decide.
Oh but this time, they may say, as they've been telling pollsters, Trump and Clinton may not be exactly the same, but they're both corrupt and not likely to give me what I want.
Well, let's look at that.
They're both Corrupt: The main charge has been that Hillary Clinton allowed special access to Clinton Family Foundation supporters during her tenure as Secretary of State. Every investigation, most notably by the Washington Post has proven that at most, Clinton's aides graciously promised to consider such requests, then never followed through.
Hillary Clinton has been a public servant for most of her life and while she has been criticized for accepting whopping speaker feeswhen out of office, thus profiting from her time in government, well, if that's corruption, then let's charge just about every former high level government official with the same thing.
At the same time, her Foundation does real good in the world- for instance, nine million people have lower-cost HIV/AIDS medicine because of the work of the Clinton Foundation. She continues to devote her passion and efforts to helping women and children, and speaks with candor about her mistakes in office and the wisdom she has acquired from them.
The main charges against Donald Trump concern well-documented ties to the Mafia in obtaining building contracts; creating a foundation in his own name to which he has not given any of his own money, and which he uses as a conduit for personal profit; being so bereft of sincere supporters at home he relies on Russian hackers to disrupt efforts to criticize him (by among other things, bringing down the Newsweek site that revealed he had done business in Cuba in defiance of the decades' old embargo, something wholly illegal and at odds with his assurance to Cuban American voters in Miami that he had always complied with the embargo). He insults immigrant groups and women, threatens 13 million people with deportation, proclaims too he will banish a whole religion, dishonors a gold star family. And then there are his taxes. Or not. As Hillary Clinton suggested in the debate and the Times disclosure of 3 pages from his 1995 filings showed, we might well assume that Donald Trump has not paid taxes for at least two decades.
This should matter to you. Taxes pay for the roads you drive, the air traffic controllers who make the skies safe for you to fly, the schools and universities you attend, the hospitals which care for you, the care of veterans and troops who have defended and continue to defend your right to vote or not, health care and food assistance to you and/or to your neighbors in need, and more. There are none more corrupt than those who benefit personally while stiffing their legal and civic obligations to their community and country.
You cannot level an equivalent charge against Hillary Clinton. Not even close. Not even far. Not at all.
Neither Offers Anything for Me: Okay, so Hillary Clinton may be older than you and your friends. You may not think she's fun, or warm to whatever. But, definitively distinct from her opponent, she doesn't refer to women as pigs or sluts or dwell on their looks and eating habits. Hillary Clinton offers women pay equity and freedom of choice, while Donald Trump has laden womens' pay equity with unjust conditions and called for women to be punished for seeking abortions.
Hillary Clinton will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will guarantee voting rights, curb campaign spending—making elections more fair and inclusive, as you'd like-- and facilitate the implementation of her proposed policies, like paid parental leave. A Clinton administration will be committed to addressing climate change in a way that boosts employment nationwide and it will elevate the status and quality of vocational/technical training to alter the impact of a changing industrial base on dislocated workers.
To all Clinton-Kaine supporters, don't keep your passion for Hillary and Tim to yourselves. You must do what you can to convince the disaffectedthat any perceived equivalence between the candidates is recklessly, perniciously false, and that to stay clear of the polls is to jeopardize their future and the rights and freedoms that matter most to them. They don't have to be enthusiastic about voting for Hillary Clinton, but they must vote for her.
Nader voters failed to recognize that threat when they cast their votes on a patently false premise. Now it's on us to dissuade the young righteous abstainers from making the same, catastrophic mistake.
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October 6, 2016
