So, alright, I’m going to try to be as neutral and fair-minded as possible about the flaws I see in each candidate.
Donald Trump - Yes, he was sorta successful in business. Note the ‘sorta’. He started out with one of the wealthiest men in America as his patron and a “mere” million dollar loan. A massive part of his wealth is he basically is wealthy for being wealthy, kind of how Paris Hilton is famous for being. He just sells his name, synonymous with “rich” and “exclusive” and gets money for achieving nothing. Articles criticizing his business success also point out that many of those real estate deals that made his fortune depended heavily on his connections.
And he’s a “know nothing” blowhard. He keeps making campaign “promise” after promise that in no possible world could he ever meet. Prevent 9/11? Peace in the middle east? Make ISIS go away like a pimple? Stop the illegals from crossing the border? Dream on, buddy.
Ben Carson, the other possible - this guy is an angry black man. I’m not being racist - he in so many worlds tells people this, to the point of insisting it is true even when the press can’t find the people he claims to have harmed. His second strike is that despite his training as a neurosurgeon, he seems to lack even basic understanding of rational thought or the scientific method. Not everything thought to be true today actually is true, but part of rational thought is you aren’t supposed to spout off “doubting” clearly experimentally proven claims unless you have data. Like his vaccine claim. This casts doubt on the man’s ability to make competent decisions, if he doesn’t even agree with objective reality.
Hillary Clinton - Ok, so what precisely has Hillary actually done herself, personally, to justify awarding her the most powerful position in the United States, if not the world? Maybe Benghazi wasn’t her fault and the email scandals are just hot air. But what has she done on a positive note?
And she has strikes against her, even if you ignore the stuff that hits the press. She’s an old lady. Hillary cheated on her.
Out of 350 million people, is this the best we can actually find? I posit that I could walk up and down my very block and find someone (excluding myself in this search) better than either candidate for president.
Hillary Clinton has several decades of political experience and influence in Washington, as First Lady for 8 years, as Secretary of State for 8 years, and 8 years in the Senate in the intervening time. I’m not sure what you expect her to “do” that she hasn’t done; regardless, she offers probably the most impressive political resume of any of the candidates and a pretty reasonable platform to boot.
…But then again, I suppose actually knowing what you’re doing on the job has become something of a taboo when it comes to running the country…
I wouldn’t consider being first lady a political position or something to burnish Clinton’s resume with. She was a more active first lady than most, but it’s still an almost entirely ceremonial position she got by virtue of her husband’s election, rather than anything she did herself. Clinton was secretary of state for four years; she left office shortly after Obama was re-elected, having earned pretty good marks from her tenure. Her time as senator from New York was unremarkable, with hardly any substantive legislation to her name (which isn’t particularly unusual among senators).
Her political experience seems to me to be…fine. She strikes me as a competent administrator who’s followed the party line without many original ideas or genuinely impressive accomplishments, but without any huge disasters. If anything, she strikes me as a generic, anodyne Democrat, which is odd considering her almost ubiquitous name recognition now and enmity from Republicans when she was first lady. She’s too competent to be a party apparatchik, but I wouldn’t expect anything surprising or innovative from her as President. She has no great charisma or clever new ideas, but she’s smart and reasonably competent.
So she’s been hob-knobbing it with the elite, sitting in fancy offices. Fair enough. But simply “showing up” to college doesn’t make you an A student either. The news never has anything but her failures - what has Hillary done with her power that is better than the actions taken by comparable politicians?
Problem is, none of these comparable politicians are running. Who is actually running on their accomplishments this time around? It seems ideas have more value that works this time around.
Why else do you think those other two are the front runners for the Republican party? They play to ideas, not accomplishments.
What “qualifies” a person to be President? This is not an easy question. I happen to think that supervising one of mankind’s biggest ventures, the 1944 Invasion of Europe with its millions of men, was a supreme qualification, but some Dopers have claimed that Eisenhower wasn’t qualified to be President.
Governor of a State might be the most obvious qualifying experience, though after 2001 it eventually became widely known that the Governorship of at least one state, Texas, is a largely ceremonial figurehead position. Sarah Palin was also a Governor but rumor has it that some thought even she was unqualified.
Hillary was a prominent lawyer, activist, and a high-ranking Federal appointee even before her husband became a Governor (OP, did you even read the Wikipedia article on Hillary?) and furthermore is regarded as the First Lady who served most significantly as a key advisor to her husband on policy matters.
Marco Rubio is now thought to be 2nd-most-likely to win the Oval Office next November. I’d like to hear OP’s thoughts comparing his qualifications with those of Ms. Clinton.
At base, experience qualifying one for being president would involve having to make important decisions affecting many people, surrounding one’s self with capable people, experience balancing multiple important, diverse, and mutually exclusive issues, building consensus to get things done.
I could imagine being successful in a large organization would give many of the necessary skills, as well as insight into how to interact within government. Alternatively, someone might have garnered diverse experience - in business, charitable organizations, educational settings.
At my most cynical, I find myself unable to say any of the candidates are “unqualified” for the job. A diverse populace can have differing opinions as to what makes one qualified, or even what makes a president “good” or successful. A candidate can have the most impressive appearing resume, yet if they lack character, I’d suggest they are poorly qualified to lead my country in the manner I wish it to be led.
A corollary debate would be to identify candidates whom we feel WOULD be well qualified. I’m not sure who I would put on my short list. And it is hard to predict how someone will perform, based on their resume.
You know, I can never understand why Americans don’t consider holding a major Cabinet post, like Secretary of Defense or State, as qualifying candidates for president. IMHO, that’s the best job experience available, far more valuable and relevant than governor or senator.
What about someone with a mixed political career of 34 years that includes mayor, US House of Representatite, US Senator and has the stamina for an 8 1/2 hour filibuster?
Probably because you do not climb an electoral ladder winning national campaigns leading specifically to Cabinet rank, unlike a parliamentary system – it’s a straight appointment, serving at the pleasure of the President and because of that, it’s seen as not being “your own (wo)man” but rather an extension of the POTUS’ platform and you become entangled with it. It’s true that very often Cabinet secretaries are named from among sitting Senators/Governors/Mayors (Clinton, Kerry, Ridge, Sabelius, Castro) but the door seldom swings the other way (or at least seems so).
You answer to the President. So either your successes result from doing what he told you to do (in which case we routinely give the President the credit) or from doing what he told you not to do (in which case, what, you’d be fired and maybe face criminal charges, which is why we don’t hear that story).
But being a Senator or a Governor is like being the President: you decide what should be done, you make the call; you don’t play obedient middle manager to the guy who says ‘aye’ or ‘nay’; you say ‘aye’ or ‘nay’.
Senator Clinton voted on – well, foreign policy, sure; but also on who should be the next Supreme Court Justice, and how much money to give farmers, and patents and trademarks and student loans and the Small Business Association and, honestly, a whole alphabet soup of agencies from the FBI to the EPA to NASA to the USMC; her portfolio was everything.
As Secretary of State, her portfolio was – foreign policy? We already knew that; she was a Senator. If she’d only ever been Secretary of State, we’d wonder about the rest; if she’d only ever been a Senator, we wouldn’t.
Hillary’s reactions to her scandals have consistently displayed bad judgement. Benghazi, the e-mail controversy, you name the scandal, her response has been to stick her head in the sand and hope it goes away. And when she’s finally forced to confront the issue, she typically makes some kind of snide, snobby remark that just pisses people off. “What difference does it make?” Excuse me, but one of our ambassadors was killed in a terrorist attack. What kind of stupid-ass response is it to ask why we should care? And we don’t believe for a second that you don’t know what “wiping the server” means. Also, she’s been caught in so many lies by now, it would probably be easier to list the things she’s said that were actually true.
Bernie Sanders is the token primary opponent for Hillary. Nobody is giving him any chance; I doubt he even gives himself one.
Trump, for his part, seems to be trying to see how many demographics he can piss off before people finally start to ignore him. He’s said so many offensive things, I think it must be deliberate on his part. I’m still not sure that he’s really taking this seriously. Maybe this is what billionaires do when they’re bored and it’s an election year.
Carson, he’s a nice guy with an inspiring story. I like him, but I’ve come to accept that he really has no business running for president. He could be a good surgeon general for someone like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.
Jeb(!) Bush is basically a male version of Hillary Clinton, running on pure name recognition. But as far as I know, he hasn’t been caught in nearly as many lies as her
I’d complain about the overall poor quality of the candidates, but really I suspect this is just us getting the leaders we deserve.
Context is not a four-letter word. The way this quote was played by the right-wing media (and by you in this post) implies that Clinton didn’t care about the death of the ambassador and doesn’t think you should care. The full quote makes it clear that those dead is what she cares about, and the exact motivations of the people who killed them is secondary to bringing the murderers to justice.
Snide, snobby response my tushie. Dishonest quote mine, more like.
And it has, every time - because every time, the “scandal” has been exposed even to relative low-information voters as being nothing political creations of the GOP and Fox, not a real thing.
Some voters are still too low-information, of course.
Well, being qualified and positioning one’s self to be electable are two different things.
I suggest that anyone who is qualified will have been in situations which engender disagreement. Tends to be the case with main actors regarding significant matters. To the extent disagreement is about policy rather than personality, that at least suggests the individual has been in the arena at a high level.
No one gets elected to high public office simply by being qualified. My personal opinion is that many of Hillary’s worst attributes appear when she is pandering to position herself - not uncommon among politicians.
Even if cabinet experience by itself isn’t qualification for the Presidency, it makes a nice complement for Senate experience (which is a qualification). There’s nothing unreasonable about running with 8 years in the Senate and 4 as Secretary of State.
The surgeon general should probably believe in vaccines and also have a working knowledge of the scientific method.
I believe this to be very true.
Trump is not actually running for president. This is an elaborate advertising campaign for his brand. He is saying outrageous things hoping that one of them will knock him out of the polls at which point he blames the Republican establishment, the liberal media and whoever else for blocking his campaign.
The problem with his plan is that the Republican party has become so angry over everything and nothing that there is apparently no horrid thing he can say that they won’t cheer him for. He is going to have to urinate on a picture of Ronald Reagan while burning Atlas Shrugged before they’ve had enough.
