I do not “hate” Ms Clinton as a person – I reserve “hate” for people I have actually met, who are actively or passive-aggressvely making trouble for me.
What bothers me about her is two things. She is a dyed-in-the-fleece corporatist – essentially, just like her husband, who was Reagan-lite (and Reagan was whence mordern evil truly got rolling). The other thing is her brutal arrogance, her attitude that she deserved to be President and should not have had to put any particular effort into getting there.
I did vote for her in '16, solely because there is no person in the party of Grift Our People for whom I could ever vote, and the CFEFWSG was horrifying even before everyone else found out he was horrifying (his incompetence being his saving grace).
I am pretty well pissed that our system forces me to vote for useless Democrats because voting for any R (pronounced “arrrrr”) is simply unthinkable and voting for someone else is just voting for the R.
Is there some cite or quotation where that demonstrates she thought she “deserved” the office? I’m really not trying to be snarky, but I’ve seen this claim before. I’ve said I’m not a huge Hillary fan, but this is such an odd claim that I’ve never seen evidence of. I didn’t follow her closely until she ran, though I would have had to live under a rock to not notice the seething hatred and disdain for her. I, however, didn’t notice her feeling like she “deserved” to be there.
Christopher Hitchens was particularly harsh on the Clintons, he speaks to her character here. and I recall him speaking to her particular self-regard on more than one occaision.
Amy Klobuchar has laid the grounds for a presidential run on an image of “Minnesota nice.”
But behind the doors of her Washington, DC, office, the Minnesota Democrat ran a workplace controlled by fear, anger, and shame, according to interviews with eight former staffers, one that many employees found intolerably cruel. She demeaned and berated her staff almost daily, subjecting them to bouts of explosive rage and regular humiliation within the office, according to interviews and dozens of emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
That anger regularly left employees in tears, four former staffers said. She yelled, threw papers, and sometimes even hurled objects; one aide was accidentally hit with a flying binder, according to someone who saw it happen, though the staffer said the senator did not intend to hit anyone with the binder when she threw it.
“I cried. I cried, like, all the time,” said one former staffer.
It seems to me people started saying this as soon as she announced her candidacy. And then any time she made an argument that she would be a better choice than an opponent. And then any time she did something yo the advantage of fee campaign. In other words, ordinary politicking. It had nothing to do with her actually acting or speaking as if she “deserved” it.
“scorn”? The Clintons are traditional wheeler dealer politicians who look for the best compromise. That often puts them at odds with idealists. But I think “scorn” is something that isn’t evident in the public record.
There seem to be a few seach hits that line up with that notion, but I refuse to cite sites like Brookings or Tiger Droppings or NR, because all they re is White-wing invective. It is just my impression from observing her style of campaigning and the shit she thought she could get away with saying.
She undoubtedly would have been preferable to the nightmare we had to put up with, but that is feint praise.
Hitchens was a great polemicist but his opinions about people were based on his own ideas, impressions, and his tendency to lean towards the outrageous. I don’t consider them good evidence to base my own opinions on. Hitchens was also not right about everything.
The cited article did seem to drip with the sort of almost pathological disdain some direct at Hillary. Some stuff in it was sort of uncomfortable, but not any worse than most run of the mill politicians who are male.
I still don’t see any behavior on her part that should engender the sort of blind hate or the dislike that can’t be explained.
Here’s a description, anyday, from earlier in the thread. It would take me way more time than I’ve got today to dig up the news stories about that Senatorial election that I got that information from.
I’m not at all sure this sort of thing is peculiar to Hillary Clinton, however. I think there is, or was, a tendency in both party establishments (not only in the candidate themselves) to think that it’s somebody’s “turn”; this somebody being someone who’s well known to said establishments. Voters often appear to disagree with this – witness 2008 Obama and 2016 Trump, among others.
The blind hate, no. That came from her opponents, over more than twenty years.
The dislike? I think we’ve seen reason enough in the thread for dislike; not reasons everyone will agree with, of course, but reasons that some agree with.
Dislike and blind hate are two very different things; and assuming that everyone who doesn’t think Hillary Clinton is the best possible politician hates her strikes me as entirely unreasonable.
As repellent as the idea of “deserves” might be, and my mild antipathy towards her politics, I sort of got it that she did deserve a nomination, or at least some woman did, in 2008, but I felt that a black American deserved it even more. By 2016, I thought it was ridiculous that the US had never nominated a women for POTUS, so yeah, I bought it, even though I didn’t particularly want her to run.
No-one is right about everything but he was as a perceptive judge of character and motivations regarding the political and powerful that I know of. I’ve never caught him saying something about a person that didn’t, at the very least give a rough indication of the sort of person they were.
I find this thread interesting, but I’ll stay away from offering an opinion about HRC. Neither can I know whether she thought she deserved a nomination and the office.
What I do remember from the early aughts, after Bush II got in office, was that there was a lot of speculation and punditry about her going for '04. Following U.S. politics from Europe, it seemed to me that people on both sides assumed that it was a done deal that she would run, only a question about when.
Even Letterman quipped at one point that this was going to stay within two families: “Bush - Clinton - Bush - Clinton.”
As I said, I don’t consider his personal views of the private characters public figures to be reliable, unless he had some intimate personal relationship with them, which, in most cases he didn’t. He was good at one-liners, that’s really his shtik, but I take them with a grain of salt.