Vote For

My baseline reason for voting for Hillary hasn't changed from way back last spring.  That's when I was still insisting I wasn't going to blog on this campaign.  That soon went the way of a lot of campaign promises.

I enunciated the point here in April.  Basically it's the 1972 slogan of a comedy candidate, George Papoon of the Surrealist Light People's Party.  His slogan was: Not Insane.

Hillary Clinton is Not Insane.  This year, that's worth a vote for President.

There is the additional element important to me in continuing the progress made by President Obama, especially on the climate crisis but also the economy, in policy (like not favoring torture, as the Donald does) and so on.  But for me that pretty much follows from Not Insane.

Personally, for all the caveats I might mention, I regard Hillary's boomer past as a plus, unlike the GOPer haters.  I like that she knew "radicals" and that she was and probably still is an idealist.  Maybe I'm projecting because we could easily have met in 1969, and may have passed on the streets of New Haven, when she and Bill were in law school.  He lived in a house just across the sound from where I was for awhile.  
But I'm pretty much over any identification I might have felt in the '90s.  I just have a better feeling about where she came from than the Donald, who was then spending his time keeping people of color out of his father's buildings.  And it is a choice: one or the other.

But what makes me feel better about this vote than I expected is how she conducted herself in this campaign.  She showed courage, persistence and the ability to rise to the occasion.  Her campaign itself was so much better than in 2008.  But then, she had Obama's people with her this time.

It may be true that the positives we're voting for are because they are threatened and need to be reaffirmed.  But they always do.  Maybe not to this extent, but even if hope wasn't a big theme this time, that's part of it.

And as this awful campaign ends, there's a need to reaffirm that we're better than this.

So in some sense the vote against and the vote for are the same.  Don't let the bully win.  Vote for the candidate who is Not Insane.