I’m a Sanders supporter, and I’m curious as to the motives for people who support Clinton.
This isn’t meant to be a ‘tell me why you support Clinton so that people can tell you why you are wrong’ thread. As a Sanders supporter, I’ve never really met anyone who tells me why they feel Clinton is the most qualified. I assume going to a pro-Clinton rally would be a good way to do that, but talking to supporters online will accomplish the same thing.
I can see several benefits to Clinton, but I don’t know if these are the reasons people like her in the primary.
Clinton reminds people of the good times in the 90s. Back when the economy was going well and we were at peace. Before 9/11 and the war on terror, before Iraq, Bush, the economic collapse. In fact politics was a bit more civilized back in the 90s and I’d wager things are more dysfunctional now. Maybe Clinton reminds them of the better days.
Clinton has a long track record of working on her beliefs going back for decades. She was pushing for women’s rights, health reform, etc. on a national level for over 20 years.
Clinton is an incrementalist. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and pushing for incremental reform and getting them is better than pushing for more radical reform and ending up empty handed (or pushing for radical reform only to have it backfire and make things worse).
Clinton is a more balanced candidate, while Sanders is more of a single issue candidate. Clinton has more experience and credibility with foreign policy, racial issues, etc. than Sanders.
Clinton would be the first female president (I don’t have a problem with this being a motive, the fact that Obama was the first black president made him more appealing to a lot of people too).
I like many of the things that Bernie stands for, but I think they are unrealistic in today’s political environment. I think Bernie would be a massive failure as a President, and would give the extreme right a window to climb back to relevance.
That’s it for me. I suppose if I ranked them it would be 3, 4 & 2 but those are the main reasons.
#3 I think is important to a lot of people. We want changes, we want a liberal agenda but we’re not looking to watch the world burn or tear down the banks, etc. We have jobs and mortgages and would prefer to not see the economic system thrown into turmoil. People are looking for a solid workhorse president who is going to push the nation leftward but still keep the lights on. Clinton represents that better than Sanders does. There’s also the simple fact that many of Sanders ideas seem unworkable; either because he’d never pass them or because they’d be disastrous in their own way if he did.
She’s tough and pragmatic, and yes, I do believe that incrementalism works. Would I fix everything immediately if I could? Absolutely. But so far I haven’t seen that happen, and I trust her to continue to push the liberal agenda, successfully.
I simply don’t see Sanders as an effective president. He will mean well, and he will try to do the right thing by his lights, but I just don’t think he’ll be able to get anything important done.
For all Hillary is a politician, she is a politician, which means she knows how the game works and how to play it, domestically and internationally. I just don’t get the sense that Sanders does, which to me will severely limit his effectiveness. Hillary probably doesn’t have her sights set like he does, but I think she’ll get a lot more done in the end that the left will like.
If I look at the field, she is by far the most qualified. That is, and it is a big assumption, that anyone can qualify for what is arguably the toughest job on the planet. She’s smart, great education, experience as a practicing lawyer, had a first hand view of what the President does for 8 years, worked on projects for the President, was involved with heads of State, Senator, Secretary of State, etc.
How someone can claim she isn’t at least minimally qualified is beyond me.
That said, I’m not excited by any of the candidates. My north star is fiscal responsibility (not to be confused with the fiscal conservative dog whistle). Personally, while Bernie has some good ideas that I actually like, he’s fiscally incontinent, and don’t get me started on the Republication field still standing…
Everything except #1 + being possibly the most qualified candidate we’ve had for President since the guys who actually invented our government died. She lacks military experience. But other than that she’s the shining example of how a woman can be more qualified than anyone else and get called unqualified.
(I wonder if they’ll pay her less then the men when she is President too.)
Pretty much what others have said. Sanders may promise more but I think Clinton will accomplish more. Some people may complain that Clinton is just another typical politician but politics is how laws get enacted; Clinton knows how to play the game and is willing to play it.
And the OP left out a major factor: electability. I don’t want to see Trump or Cruz getting elected President. And I feel that Clinton has a much better chance of beating them. Sanders may have more favorable numbers now but he hasn’t faced anywhere near the full heat of a presidential campaign yet. There’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t melt under it if he became the nominee. With Clinton, they’ve already taken all their best shots at her.
I like Clinton’s platform more. It’s not that I really prefer Sanders but think Clinton’s more centrist vision is more achievable–it’s that I am more centrist myself. If I though Sanders would be able to be hyper-effective, I’d be even less likely to vote for him.
She also comes across as calm and measured (well, last night notwithstanding). I’m not sure I trust Bernie not to go off at some Rose Garden press conference.
I think she is the best candidate because President is a very, very hard job, and she is the least likely to really fuck things up.
The other thing is that the Presidency is not a one person job. The President gets to choose and manage a giant team of people that he or she appoints, both the immediate White House team and the heads and top tier of the departments and agencies. With Clinton, I have a pretty good idea of the type of people who will staff her administration, and many will have relevant experience from the Obama and Clinton I administrations. I also trust that she will be reasonably good at managing her staff.
Sanders, on the other hand, seems always to have been – and continues to be – a one man show. He hasn’t built an organization or network over the years, and I really have no sense of who he might possibly bring in to staff his administration. His own absence of executive experience aside, I fear that with his anti-establishment ethos, he would bring in people who simply wouldn’t be effective, or worse, unintentionally and with the best intentions, make some disastrous decisions. Although I agree with a large part of his economic agenda, I have no idea where he would go – or who he would bring in – in foreign affairs, defense policy, energy policy and a whole host of issues that don’t fall squarely in his area of focus. I have very similar fears with Cruz, particularly his lone-wolf status, and Trump, with his lack of political organization and policy incoherence.
With Clinton, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m getting, and that we won’t be running off the rails in some unexpected direction or another.
I think she is freakishly smart both in terms of knowledge possessed and the ability to understand the complexity and nuances of real world problems. To me the real world is full of complex issues and slogans get cheers but do not get results.
I believe her honest motivations are as presented, to make actual progress in equal rights and opportunities for all of us and to make the world a bit safer now and for the future than it might otherwise be. That is centrist liberalism. I endorse it.
I believe she has the skill set to deliver on making actual progress, to continue on what I see as the real and substantial progress that the Obama administration has delivered. She knows how to assemble and manage a team of experts.
I believe that she is more likely than her competition to win, and the risk of a GOP president with this GOP congress scares me horribly.
Nostalgia? Her being female? Immaterial. She is simply the best person for the job, hands down, unless we could get Obama for a third term.
I’m actually still a bit on the fence, although leaning toward Clinton. I agree with much of what has been said here already but I would also add that, as Krugman has documented, Sanders does seem to have a tendency to let ideology blind him somewhat to the actual facts and data. For example, apparently his budget numbers rely on the sort of optimistic projections that we are used to seeing from the Right.
The Right has demonstrated how destructive it is when one elevates ideology above facts, data, and science…and I am a little concerned that Sanders may be too willing to do the same.
I do have to admit though that I agree with Sanders on the whole money in politics thing, which is part of the reason why it has not been such an easy choice for me. (I live in NY State…So, I do have to make a decision in a few days!)
Also, I think Clinton is more realistic about health care… I don’t think it is either politically realistic or even good policy (in terms of the short-term disruption it would cause) to go to single-payer health care in one fell-swoop. You saw how much hay was made of the fact that with Obamacare a few people had their health plans canceled (in some cases when their plans were shitty to begin with and in many cases when the final result was they were able to obtain at least as good a plan for less money).
So, I really think the best that we can probably hope to do, if all the stars align just right, is to add a public option and then hope that over time it beats out the private insurance. Even that would be a heck of a challenge to get through Congress.
Come to think of it, GHWB was the last POTUS who had any, and McCain the last frontrunning candidate. It might be a while before we see another – we’ve reached a point where we have all-volunteer Armed Forces, a career-professional force rather limited in raw size, and most Americans do not even have any friends or relations in military service, any more, and most military personnel come from one sector of society and most important pols from quite another.
I don’t think military experience is absolutely essential to anything the Commander in Chief does – he’s supposed to defer to the Joint Chiefs’ expertise on strategic matters anyway, and no POTUS since Washington has, as POTUS, commanded troops in the field (and that was only in the Whiskey Rebellion, a nonwar) – but, at least a POTUS who has done military service is capable of seeing things from an actual soldier’s POV.
In college I once took classes with a conservative Government/PolySci prof who insisted America still needed a draft – for political purposes, not military – so that we should have an Army of people who don’t like it and can’t wait to get out of it, and a civilian citizenry of people who have been there and really know what service is like. He had a point. A conscript Army is a citizens’ army. A professional Army is practically a mercenary army, and a mercenary army is potentially dangerous to any state it serves. The Roman Republic was doomed from the moment Gaius Marius started recruiting from the Head Count and paying salaries to legionaries.
I back Sanders and voted for him in the primary, but everything everyone in this thread is saying about Clinton resonates with me and I won’t have to hold my nose to vote for her in November.
Granted, I do have my reservations about certain things in her record as SoS (and not Benghazi, either). But, apart from her never having been a state governor like Kasich, she has far and away the best resume in either party’s field, and even mistakes – for that matter, even crimes – do at least constitute experience.
I’m more of a disgruntled Republican than a traditional Clinton supporter, but right now, it looks like I’ll be voting for her.
Most important is her foreign policy experience and stances. Sanders likes to brag about voting no on Iraq, but I question the judgment of anyone who would do that. The correct choice was “yes,” with proper follow-through. The fact that we got “yes” and then dropped the ball does not make “no” the correct answer.
I think America (and the world) is at a point right now where foreign policy is more important than domestic policy anyway. We can’t pretend like domestic futures are independent from foreign ones.
I’m not a big fan of either’s domestic policy stances, but at least Clinton might achieve her goals. If America gets the kind of Congress that would back Sanders, that Congress will get Clinton to go along with them. In the real world, I just don’t see Sanders accomplishing anything he has promised. I appreciate someone who sets out realistic goals.
Maybe a very little, but it’s not really on my score-card.
Yes, yes, and yes. Point No. 3 (incrementalist) is most important to me. Slow and steady; evolution, not revolution. Politics is the art of the possible.
(Conservative language!)
Icing on the cake, but not all that much a “reason” I support her. It’s a nice reward for me when she wins.