Written by Marianne Mansfield
Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. You make it so hard to love you. And I want to. If not love you, I want to at least enthusiastically support your candidacy. I’m a woman of a certain age. I don’t know how many more presidential elections I’ll see. Four maybe five? At the outside seven, I would guess. So it is important to me to see a woman in the White House. Really important.
Forty-odd years ago I was burning bras, sitting in ROTC buildings, marching in protest demonstrations. Each had its own point, but underneath them all was a searing conviction, a la JFK, that a rising tide lifts all boats. I believed then that betterment in diverse social and political circumstances would bring an improvement in the circumstances of women.
And so, here we are. A different century now, and yet still no female President. As of January 22, 2015 there are twenty-two countries with female leaders, either elected or appointed. The United States of America, the alleged leader of the free world, has yet to make the list.
So why not Hillary? Or perhaps the better question is the reverse. Why Hillary?
Some will say it is her turn, and with that I nearly agree. I would only amend it to say, it is long past the turn of any well-qualified woman to hold the highest office in the land.
Hillary is well qualified, having been a US Senator from the state of New York, the United States Secretary of State, and now a two-time candidate for presidency. All of which, I would argue, makes her eminently more qualified that the Republican candidates who have announced so far.
She has baggage, of course.
There’s Bill. But to view the former President Clinton as simply political baggage is to ignore the wealth of advancement this country experienced during his two terms, as well as to give short shrift to the global good being supported by the Clinton Foundation NGO today. Was he a cad? He had his moments. Has he done enough to atone for his incredible lack of common sense and moral character? You will need to decide that for yourself. I think he has.
There’s Benghazi. I’ll leave that to the Republicans to dredge up over and over again. I believe, however, that Hillary Clinton hated that four people lost their lives in the attacks on US diplomatic compounds in Libya. As much as you did or I did. To imply that she was somehow immediately and personally culpable doesn’t make sense. Should the compounds have had better security? It appears so. Should the requests from Ambassador J Christopher Stevens for better security been granted? Again, it looks like it to me. But I wonder how many such requests are received each day, given that we aren’t chummy with all that many foreign nations. What I will remember, however, is that Secretary Clinton accepted total responsibility for the tragedy. She didn’t shove it off on her staff. She stood up and took it. That, to me, is the mark of a leader.
Finally, there are those darned emails. What was she thinking using a personal account? Was her plan as duplicitous as some make it out to be? It would be, if there exists somewhere, an email or two that would lead the public to believe that Hillary is a thief, a criminal, a traitor or worse. Of course, we will never know, will we? Those of us who care about such judgments will be forced to make them on the reality of her performance rather than conjecture about what might have been deleted.
I’m still left in a quandary, though. Why can’t I love Hillary?
My conclusion is this: it isn’t Hillary I can’t love. It’s the fact that she is the only woman to make it this far. I don’t want to love her because she is a woman. In fact, I find it downright annoying.
I want to love Hillary for her vision for the future of our country, her understanding of foreign policy, her championing of the Middle Class. I want to love her because she knows how to extend employment opportunities to those who need them most. I want to love her because she sees what is wrong with health care and has a plan to fix it. I want to love her because she understands the complexities of the immigration debate and has a handle on how to make it a fair and just system. I want to love her because she knows that there is too much money in politics and not enough attention to ethical and moral behavior. I want to love her because I, a wine drinker, want to sit down and have a beer with her and discuss all of this stuff.
But I can’t get there. I can’t get past that fact that I desperately yearn to see a woman in the White House. And so, I have no choice. I have to love Hillary because we share a similar XY chromosome set-up.
I wish it weren’t so. I wish the field were as full of women as it is and will continue to be full of men. That’s the legacy I started fighting for in 1969. And that’s what I want to pass on my grandchildren, especially my granddaughters. A woman in the White House.
And her name? I wish it didn’t matter, but it does.
Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Marianne Mansfield has lived in Southern Utah since 2010. She and her husband followed their grandchildren to this area fromMichigan. In her former life she was a public school educator. More than half of her career was spent as an elementary principal, which is why her response to most challenges is, “This isn’t my first rodeo.” She grew up in Indiana, and attended Miami of Ohio,Ball State University and Michigan State. She is a loyal MSU Spartan and Detroit Tiger baseball fan. She has been writing fiction and opinion since her retirement in 2004.
