Here's my line of thinking on where we are with the candidates.
1. Barring a "throw vote" for a candidate I would hope to advance and eventually lose, the only two Republicans who even had a tiny margin of collecting my vote this year are Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani. Rudy's out, and there's no way Ron's going to win. Since the other Republicans are devoting themselves to continuing Bush's policies of wars, torture, and neglecting the poor, I simply cannot find it in myself to vote for them.
2. I like Obama. I really do. I love his commitment to a greater future, advanced human rights, and his vision of seeing conservatives and liberals unite as one. But it's that last point that, to me, is his fatal flaw. He keeps talking about being someone to unite both parties, yet he has yet to put one single proposal forth that might actually do it. Frankly, I find his notion that somehow he is going to get the Far Right to shut up and cooperate with the Big Bad Liberals to be incredibly naive. His saying that doesn't strike me as someone who knows just how cutthroat politics can be (and in fairness, how intensely both sides can play the game). Elect him, and watch the Far Right bite off the very hand reaching out to them. Don't get me wrong, I wish it could be done. But the year 2008 is not the year for that, particularly in light of what the Republicans have done in the last seven years.
3. We haven't seen the White House this ****ed up in decades. We need someone who is going to be willing to roll up her sleeves and get to work right from Inauguration Day. Hillary strikes me as just the right fit here. She's been in Washington for years; she's seen first-hand, particularly from the Senate and as First Lady, the precise channels of how things work. Hillary is a woman who knows not only to talk about how to get things done, but actually get the things done. In the first few debates last summer, while both parties still had multiple candidates, Hillary quickly stood out as being a candidate who conveyed a genuine sense of intelligence. As other candidates have folded, she hasn't slipped from this at all. What a marked contrast she would represent to the current level of stupidity and incompetence that our current administration has shown. Anyway, everytime I've thought to myself during a debate, OK those are nice words, but what about the details? she has followed with a well-reasoned plan of what she intends to do. And I've never heard a bad explanation here once. No macho, "We gotta stand up to the big corporations!" lines or anything like that. Calm but firm, reasoned, plain-English details of what the plan will do.
4. She's a woman. C'mon, fellas, it's not gonna kill us one time to have a woman in charge. Look at the breakdown in politics by gender--the House, the Senate, every president we've ever had, the Supreme Court--you name it, there just haven't been very many women. What's wrong with letting a few more in? That, and honestly, a lot of women convey a level of personal understanding that many men just don't have. Personal understanding, obviously, is yet another asset that Bush has shown a complete lack of. That, and all the flak thrown at her has been due primarily to the fact that she has a pair of boobs. You could easily find any man who's at least as corrupt (hell, welcome to Washington), but sexist diatribes continue to unfairly paint her as this devil figure of sorts.
5. She conveys the proper balance between strength and gentleness. Edwards struck me as too aggressive, and Obama (as explained earlier) seems too passive in some regards. But Hillary seems to have a knack for knowing how to torque it up without overdoing it, whether that be foreign policy (which I LOVED her answer last summer about not tipping her hand too much, btw, even though the crowd wasn't happy), allowing Bush's tax cuts on the rich to expire, giving Americans a choice of whether to keep their private health insurance if they want, etc. She clearly doesn't mind engaging her opponents, but ultimately she seems to view the goal as the task itself and not eliminating or somehow making peace with those in her way. The one exception to this is that she's made it no secret that she's a Washington shark--and while I hate that, unfortunately that's where we are today. About the only way to fend off the sharks yourself is to BE a shark. She'll know how to pull a few strings to get things done. And frankly, as long as she doesn't do anything illegal or unethical in the process, I am willing to accept this as a necessary evil.
So there, the reasons why I sincerely hope Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office next January. Perfect she may not be, but she's the right person at the right time. In a decade where we have had so many wrong people at the wrong time, what a refreshing change Hillary Clinton would be.
