Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

where i stand:

Misled about Clinton’s qualifications? Read on

demweds

Chuck Burton / Associated Press

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks Wednesday during a rally in Raleigh, N.C.

Editor's note: In this bizarre election season, I have heard some of my friends — people I consider mostly sane — call my friend Hillary Clinton a “liar,” “crooked” and “untrustworthy.” When I ask them to explain or engage, they either can’t or turn a deaf ear when the facts start to get in the way.

So I am yielding my space today to a man I don’t know -- Michael Arnovitz, who runs a marketing and advertising firm in Portland, Oregon. He wrote an essay of more than 4,600 words on his public Facebook page about Hillary’s candidacy. What I’m printing here is an excerpt, edited for space.

I think it will help give guidance and confidence to my wayward friends that Hillary would be, far and away, a most qualified president — especially when compared with the pompous, bigoted windbag who is causing Republicans to hold their noses, if not duck and hide. This commentary also will provide some intellectual assistance to the editorial folks at the other Las Vegas newspaper.

If you already support Hillary, terrific. If you don’t, these next few minutes will be well-spent. We pick up his column where he reflects on one of the biggest battles facing Hillary.

— Brian Greenspun

I do think that sexism is the primary force that has generated and maintained most of the negative narratives about Hillary.

Of course accusations of sexism always bump up against several serious impediments:

1) Almost nobody will admit to it. Conservatives decided long ago that all such accusations (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) are standard liberal baloney whose only real intent is to shut down debate, and liberals tend to possess a sense of moral entitlement which leads them to consider themselves automatically exempt from all such accusations. (Side note: if you did roll your eyes above, there’s a good chance I’m describing you here. Sorry.)

2) Overt sexism is significantly more likely to be tolerated in our society than overt racism. It is a low-risk form of bigotry and discrimination that rarely damages professional or political careers. Because of this, far fewer people worry about crossing that line.

3) We have formed a sort of collective blindness to sexism that allows us to pretend that we are on top of the issue while simultaneously ignoring the many ways in which it actually permeates our society. (There’s a reason it’s called a “glass” ceiling.)

4) Unlike men, women who make demands are still often seen as unfeminine and inappropriately aggressive, bordering on deviant. And if the people most aggressively pushing against the glass ceiling are “broken” or “deviant”, it’s easier to justify dismissing both them and their concerns.

Let’s look at the issues people are using to disparage Hillary Clinton. Let’s consider the issues of dishonesty, scandals, money and Wall Street.

1) Honesty: Hillary is a politician, and like all politicians she is no stranger to “massaging” and/or exaggerating the truth. And, yes, on occasion she will let loose a whopper. But is she worse than other politicians? Internet videos such as the one titled “13 minutes of Hillary lying” appear to be mostly examples of Hillary changing her position over several decades, combined with annoying-but-typical political behavior. But similar videos show Donald Trump doing an even more extreme version of the same thing. Why is he not being accused of this type of mendacity?

In fact, there is very little dispute that Trump has been significantly less honest on the campaign trail than Hillary. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, he is in fact the least-honest candidate that fact-checking group has ever analyzed! So if the issue of honesty is really that important, why are so many people (on the right and left) holding Hillary to such an obviously different standard than Trump?

2) Scandals: Webster’s dictionary defines a scandal as “an occurrence in which people are shocked and upset because of behavior that is morally or legally wrong.” But here’s a question: Are scandals still scandals if nobody actually did anything wrong? And I think that’s a fair question, because Hillary’s political foes love to point out all the times she has been implicated (directly or indirectly) in scandals. Not surprisingly, they fail to point out that she has always been cleared of any wrongdoing.

Compare, for example, the treatment Hillary is getting due to her private email “scandal” to that of Gen. David Petraeus. Hillary has been accused of hosting a personal email server that “might” have made classified documents less secure, even though the documents in question were not classified as secret at the time she received and/or sent them. For Clinton to have committed a criminal act, she would have had to knowingly and willfully mishandle material that was classified at the time she did so. After months of investigation, no one has accused her of doing that, and it doesn’t appear as if anyone will.

Petraeus, on the other hand, while he was director of the CIA, knowingly gave a journalist, who was also his mistress, a series of black books that according to the Justice Department contained “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions quotes and deliberative discussions from high level National Security Council meetings and (Petraeus’) discussions with the president of the United States of America.” Petraeus followed that up by lying to numerous government officials, including FBI agents, about what he had done. And let’s not forget that according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is itself a court-martial offense. And I remind you that none of this is in dispute. Petraeus admitted to all of it.

Petraeus’ violations were significantly more egregious than anything Clinton is even remotely accused of. And yet Republicans and other Hillary foes are howling about her issue, wearing “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirts while insisting that this disqualifies her from public office. Meanwhile, even after Petraeus pleaded guilty to his crimes, conservatives continued to make fawning statements about him. Arizona Sen.John McCain stated that “All of us in life make mistakes, and the situation now, I hope, can be put behind him …”

3) Money: OK, let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through healthy speaking fees. The idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular, for example, Paris Hilton was paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid more than $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.

And let’s talk about the more cerebral cousin of the appearance agreement, which is the speaking engagement. Is $200,000 really that unusual? In fact, the All American Speakers, Bureau, which represents Clinton, represents 135 people whose minimum speaking fee is $200,000. Luminaries who get paid this much include Guy Fieri, Ang Lee, Cara Delevingne, Chelsea Handler, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Michael Phelps, Nate Berkus, and Daniel “Larry the Cable Guy” Whitney.

Before he ran for president in 2007, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270,000 per speech. It’s estimated that in the five years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?

And speaking of corruption, after leaving the Florida governor’s office Jeb Bush made millions of dollars making speeches. This includes large sums he collected from a South Korean metals company that reaped more than $1 billion in contracts from his brother’s presidential administration. Speaking to an Indian newspaper about this type of thing, Bush said, “This is the life of being the brother of the president.” Do you remember reading all about that while Jeb was running for president? I didn’t think so. Jeb got a pass too.

4) Wall Street: First things first. No, the majority of the money Clinton has made from speaking fees did not come from Wall Street. In fact, it’s not even close. She has given nearly 100 paid speeches since leaving the State Department, and only eight were to “Wall Street” banks. Nearly all of her speeches were to organizations such as the American Camp Association, Ebay, Cisco, Xerox, the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, the United Fresh Produce Association, the International Dairy-Deli-Bake Association, the California Medical Association, A&E Networks, the Massachusetts Conference for Women, the U.S. Green Building Council, the National Association of Realtors, the American Society of Travel Agents, Gap, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, etc. Hillary got booked fairly often because she is interesting and popular, and because there’s a great deal of status attached to having her speak at an event.

Listen, does Wall Street have influence with Hillary? Grow up, of course they do. Wall Street is one of the key engines of the American economy and as such has enormous influence with everyone. Everyone. Don’t kid yourself on that point. And aside from anything else, she was a two-term senator of New York, and this made Wall Street an important corporate member of her constituency. The issue is not influence. The issue is whether paid speeches and campaign donations alone are proof of corruption. They’re not. And the last time I checked there was an important difference between association and guilt, between proof and slander.

Am I not supposed to notice that a media frenzy has been aimed at Hillary for accepting speaking fees of $225,000, while Trump has been paid $1.5 million on numerous occasions with hardly a word said about it? Am I supposed to not notice that we are in an election season in which Trump, a proud scam artist whose involvement in “Trump University” alone is being defined by the New York attorney general as “straight-up fraud,” is regularly calling Hillary “Crooked Hillary” and getting away with it?

What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: Presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for traits perceived as being “manly” — physical size, charisma, a forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success any more than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.

And actually, this only makes her victory all the more amazing. And maybe it’s OK if we pause for a moment from the accusations and paranoia and just acknowledge her enormous accomplishments. In the entire history of our nation, only six presidents have also served as secretary of state. Only three have served both as secretary of state and in Congress. By any objective measure, Hillary is not just the most qualified candidate this season, she’s one of the most qualified people to ever seek the office. The New York Times, in endorsing her, stated that “voters have the chance to choose one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in history.” Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg stated, “She is probably the best-qualified presidential candidate ever.” Even Marco Rubio, former choice of the GOP establishment (and tea party love child), stated in a Republican debate, “If this is a resume contest, Hillary Clinton is going to be the new president of the United States.”

Hillary is nobody’s idea of perfect. Fine. But in my view, if a man with her qualifications were running in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders would have been done before he even started. And if a man with her qualifications had been running for the Republicans, they’d be anointing him the next Ronald Reagan while trying to sneak his face onto Mount Rushmore.

Most of the people who hate Hillary when she’s running for office end up liking her just fine once she has won. And I have every confidence that history will repeat itself this November. As for me, I have been watching presidential elections since Richard Nixon’s. And never in my life has there been an easier or more obvious choice than now. Trump is not merely a bad choice, he is (as many leading Republicans have admitted) a catastrophic choice, unfit in every possible way for the office of the presidency.

As such, I happily voted for Hillary in my primary. And I will proudly vote for her in November. Yes, she will disappoint us all on occasion. Who doesn’t? But I think she also is going to surprise a lot of people. She will fear neither consensus when possible nor ass-kicking when necessary. She will safeguard us from the damage a right-wing Supreme Court would inflict on the nation. She will stand for the rights of women, LGBT Americans and minorities. She will maintain critical global relationships, and she will react to dangerous situations with the temperament of a seasoned professional. And in a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until 1920, she will make history by shattering the very highest glass ceiling, and in doing so forever change the way a generation of young women views its place in our republic.

She’s going to be a fine president.

I’m with her.