I don’t think America should have a female president. There, I’ve said it. Don’t get me wrong: I think women are perfectly capable of wielding power with the best of tyrants, if only given the chance. It’s just that I don’t think they should be given the chance. Not now, anyway. Another time, but not now.
Not when the only woman vying for the White House is an opportunist like Hillary Clinton, seeking power for its own sake, seeking power because that is what Clintons do. You see, this is not a sexist objection to the notion of a “Madame president”, but to the soulless political maneuvering that will have Hillary spend the next year (two, if Democrats make the horrific mistake of giving her the nomination) saying and doing anything it takes to get back to the White House. I have a hunch that there is an intern she’s had her eye on, and is looking for a little action of her own in the Oval Office. I wish I could say something more specific about why I have this reaction to her. I liked Bill Clinton, mostly, so this is not the visceral reaction so many rightwingers have at the mere utterance of that name. It’s just that I have this great sense of disingenuousness, and I get it every time I hear her speak.
Aside from my gut reaction to Ms. Clinton’s motives, I have another issue with sending another Clinton to the White House. America already has enough problems with class issues, without further fueling the sense of political entitlement that develops when dynasties like the Kennedys, the Bushes and now the Clintons are allowed to flourish. Does anybody for a moment believe that an inarticulate dumbass, draft dodging ex-cokehead whose most striking accomplishement was to actually lose money in the oil business could become President without the political tradition and muscle of the Bush family behind him? Not likely, I’d wager. I’m sure there are some die-hard Bush supporters out there who swear they’d support him no matter what his lineage was (as long as he was in no way connected to the Clintons, of course), and maybe they would because he speaks to them in fluent inarticulate dumbass, but they would never even have heard of the man if it weren’t for his influential predecessors. Dynasties are dangerous, because it doesn’t take very long before the family wielding power forgets that they are supposed to be doing so at the behest and the pleasure of the voters. They treat power as they would any of their property – their cars, their art and their money. Although they did nothing to earn it, it is theirs by rightful inheritance, and they will spend it where they will and do with it what they like. And tell you to fuck right off if you call them on it.
The U.S. doesn’t need another dynasty – it only emboldens the political upper class. In a democracy like the United States, where power is supposedly ‘by the people’, it is bad enough that two parties are allowed a perpetual stranglehold on power – to further reduce the stranglehold on power within those parties to just a few families (and a few companies, it must be acknowledged) is an act of democracide, if I can just invent a word. In other countries, at other times, such a concentration of power would be seen as a just cause for revolution.
