Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago. Her father was mean, her mother was strong, and Hillary learned at a young age that she had to work hard for her money. Her father made her account for every penny he gave her. Some of that hardship is responsible for her grit. Some of those demands may explain why large and well-deserved checks for speeches she later gave represent a big deal in her life — an achievement to be proud of. But the lefties called her a whore for accepting those sums. Because she’s a woman. For a man to command big speaking fees is a sign of success – proof of his status that anyone would pay that much to hear him speak. For Hillary, though, it was cause for suspicion: “Who could possibly want to hear her speak? And for that amount of money? She must be servicing them somehow. Pay for play.” The ugly subtext is this: what woman is paid that much for an hour of her time except for some sort of high-class prostitute.
That look she sometimes has on her face, that “resting bitch face” so many of her enemies hate, probably began as a child, every time her father made her explain the need for each miserable dollar he peeled off his money belt. Why didn’t he simply trust that she was smart enough to know how to spend money? Because he didn’t, and he wouldn’t, no matter how accomplished a kindergartner, middle schooler or high schooler she became. Every dollar would need be accounted for, down to the penny.
Her flinty, tenacious demeanor was there in Beijing when she faced down the world and talked openly about unspeakable human rights abuses, like the horrors of clitorectomies and forced abortions inflicted on young girls. That resolute attitude was there when the press hounded her during her eight years as First Lady, when Barbara Walters and others would callously and repeatedly ask, “Why don’t people like you?” and “Why don’t people trust you?” and “Why are you so ambitious?” And that expression of unflagging resilience is there again now, whenever Donald Trump says things like “She doesn’t have any stamina” and “She walked right in front of me. I wasn’t impressed.”
Her detractors chant “lock her up” because they’re too stupid to know what to do with a force of nature like Hillary Clinton. What else can you do with a woman like her, they must think. You can’t shut her up. You can’t make her hate herself enough to quit. You can’t make her cry. You can’t intimidate her with violence or with insults about her looks. You can’t humiliate her. She knows you, bros, better than you know yourself. After 30 years in the public eye, she’s heard it all. What else is left? The lynch mob mentality seen at Trump rallies — and yes, at Bernie and Jill rallies too — is nauseating in the way it echoes what was done to witches back in 17th century Salem – the verbal abuse those women suffered before being forcing to “confess their sins,” or else be thrown in a lake to see if they would float.
Those of us who watch Hillary without hate in our hearts see how often that notorious bitch face softens to glow with warmth and compassion. By sheer force of will — whether addressing adoring crowds or engaged in more intimate encounters — she can let her guard down, speak with a smile, and do her best to “act feminine” in a world that can’t accept her any other way. But I love that frosty look of hers. That’s the look of a girl who’s always known that someday things would be different, the look of a women who always knew she would stick around to make sure she was there when it happened. This brilliant, unique, fierce and ambitious towering figure in American politics who has defied expectations from the beginning and will exceed expectations to the very end is stronger than you, stronger than me, and so so much stronger than the crybaby men who are actively trying to stop her.
Yes, for this reason and many others, we’re with her.
Hillary, it seems, aspired to be Eleanor Roosevelt, while America wanted her to be Jackie. They wanted a demure Southern belle who clung to the arm of southern Bill. The public didn’t know what to do with this outspoken girl with her sharp Midwestern accent, this Yale law grad whose classmates were already predicting 40 years ago that she would one day become president in her own right. It was at Yale that Hillary met and fell in love with Bill Clinton. Bill wasn’t looking for a trophy wife; he was looking for his equal, and he sure as hell found one. Hillary didn’t need him to boost her political ascendance. That’s a myth. They ascended together by the force of their own individual merit and ambition. If Hillary had not possessed the strength to stand on her own, she would not have been able to steady her husband when he faltered. And falter he did. Yet somehow, the blame fell on her when Bill was unfaithful: why couldn’t she hold her man’s interest? Why was she so mean to his mistresses? Why did she stay with him? What is HER problem? It’s bizarre that so many women have asked these questions when women should be the first to know the answer. The truth is that Hillary loved that man — mind, body and soul. Love. Love is her problem. Love is my problem. It’s impossible to control that dial, as many of us women know. At some point or another, love will be a problem for anyone who has the capacity to love. How each of us chooses to solve that problem is frankly nobody’s business but our own.
The dirty little secret no one likes to talk about is that women in modern culture have a painfully fleeting shelf life. At a certain age, they’re expected to step aside and let the younger ones take over as the designated sex-drive drivers. It happens much more quickly for women than it does for men, but the rules are especially harsh in pop culture. In music, in film, and even, as it turns out, in book publishing. Older women are meant to fade into the background and gradually disappear, because after their physical appeal has peaked what worth do they have?
Very few species of mammal have a midlife menopause — that is to say, soon after females of most species cease being able to produce offspring, decline and death comes rather quickly. For whatever evolutionary reason, humans are different; women pass the childbearing age long before they die. (The flip-side of this cruel joke is that men can father children all their lives — literally on their deathbeds.) But this means women of a certain age must seek another purpose to their lives, to prove their worth and justify their existence beyond their task of giving birth to the next generation. There are only two species whose females face this situation: humans and killer whales. It is said that within community of Orca pods, it’s the older experienced females who guide the herd out of danger, lead them on migration paths, and teach the younger generations how to live, hunt and love.
Probably this is meant to be the case with humans, and in some cultures past and present, this is indeed how things work. In those societies women are not seen to be weak; they are valued for being strong. Sad to say, it’s not like that in many western countries today. At least in America, instead of becoming leaders, older women are too often expected to subvert their strength, deny their essential worth, and surrender to what our culture requires. They step aside.
Not Hillary Clinton. When Hillary decided she would stop being a politician’s wife, and do what she was born to do, she had to break through the limitations that tried to silence her. She wanted to lead, she needed to help people, she aspired to bring the opposing forces in government together to make things happen. Arriving in D.C. barely two decades into the strides being made by the women’s movement of the 1970s, she found it was a tough time to make a power play. But she knew becoming a leader meant leading the way for all women who were refusing to step aside. How she must have annoyed those less capable politicians who came up alongside Bill Clinton, men and women alike, those with less determination whose careers never took off compared to what Hillary would quickly achieve. Formerly seen to be a typical wife of a politician, her abilities were once again underestimated by them — and by most of us. Hillary Clinton made the leap from First Lady to become a great senator, not only in the way she was able to get things done, but in her capacity to listen to what people wanted and thereby shape her own goals to suit the changing needs of the nation.
President Obama was very nearly beaten by Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. By the end of that heated contest, they were separated by a mere 45,000 votes. Following the noble example of Lincoln so vividly described in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, President Obama appointed Hillary his Secretary of State. She served the country in that capacity with honor and distinction — unless you listen to the chattering right wing trolls who have always, and still are, invested and obsessed in wrecking the Clinton legacy. Without getting into the litany of false accusations or trying to refute all the absurd alt-right conspiracy theories, those of us who stand by Hillary are able to proudly do so because we believe history will prove her instincts and decisions in the State Department to be honest, principled and right.
So it’s an easy call for us. We here at Awards Daily — myself, our editors, contributors, and a great many of our readers — are proud to enthusiastically endorse for President of the United States the woman who Barack Obama called, “this mother, this grandmother, this fighter, this patriot,” Hillary Clinton.
We ENDORSE Hillary Clinton because she is smart enough to know that climate change is real. It is not a matter of believing or not believing. It is proven science. It is a matter of regarding the facts with intelligence, accepting the data objectively, and having the resolve to confront the looming catastrophe head-on. We believe Hillary will fight to maintain and expand environmental protections whereas Donald Trump has explicitly promised to eliminate them. We believe Hillary will aggressively lead America towards a far more sustainable, greener future when it comes to meeting our energy demands. We have no time to waste on this. Not even one more second, much less a four year reign of GOP ignorance and greed. How we act (or fail to act) with addressing climate change now will echo for generations to come.
We ENDORSE Hillary Clinton because she wants to expand on the many life-saving advantages of Obamacare, to solve its problems, to make it better and more affordable while we have this tenuous window of opportunity. Trump wants to dump the Affordable Care Act completely with no coherent plan to “replace” it with anything but empty slogans.
We ENDORSE Hillary Clinton because she has a comprehensive and feasible plan to combat terrorism and especially to defeat ISIS. She knows where they come from, she sees the weakness of their bastardized theology, and she understands how best to thwart the insidious tentacles of their global outreach. She is educated with a level of diplomatic sophistication that makes Trump sound like a petulant child. Trump’s simple-minded answer is to ban all Muslims and cut off ties with our important Middle Eastern allies — to alienate the very people we need to communicate and cooperate with to understand and counteract the atrocities happening over there. Trump wants to antagonize our friends around the world and turn them into enemies, to build useless walls to create an illusion of safety, to pretend that an isolated America can survive by hiding under a blanket of exclusion on our interdependent planet. Hillary wants to build bridges of beneficial exchange with other countries, to compete aggressively but compassionately on the global stage, so that American culture can shine like a beacon to citizens of quickly-evolving populations worldwide.
We ENDORSE Hillary Clinton because she is wise enough and educated enough to appoint competent Supreme Court justices who can be trusted to carry out their sacred duties with dignity as caretakers of our democracy. Because we fully comprehend the urgency in these hateful turbulent times of filling the high court with sensible legal minds who can ensure that all the social progress we’ve made will not be dismantled piece by piece over the next thirty or forty years. We want Hillary there to fill these vacancies on the court; not a con man like Trump who can’t even fill the vacancy between his ears.
We ENDORSE Hillary Clinton because she has a proven record of figuring out how best to orchestrate bipartisan compromise so that our government isn’t deadlocked for the next four years.
We ENDORSE Hillary Clinton because she will continue the advancements made in America as proposed, defined, and initiated by our first black president.
Finally, we happily, enthusiastically and without reservation ENDORSE the first woman President of the United States. It’s about time we took advantage of the wisdom, the intelligence, the experience of the only person in this election who could have run this revolting gauntlet and remained standing with poise and decency.
She is made of steel. She has a mighty beating heart. She believes in forgiveness. Her compassion is magnificently apparent in the choices she’s made throughout her life.
We’re seeing this election through to its conclusion without the help of so many icons I have long admired — people like Harry Shearer, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Gavin Polone, Susan Sarandon, Rosario Dawson, Dana Brunetti have either been absent, muted, or shockingly antagonistic. We’re doing it without them because we have to. For whatever reasons they tell themselves and their adherents, they have chosen not to join us in our efforts to defeat Trump. With their unwillingness to embrace Hillary, they have done nothing but surrender to Trump. To them, it’s all about the hard feelings they harbor for her. It’s not about the dire threat to America’s future. It’s not about our country’s struggling and disrespected minorities. It’s not about you. It’s certainly not about the precious array of living creatures from coast to coast and all around the world that are being wiped out at an accelerated rate, nor about the warming planet careening toward uninhabitable eons choked by a toxic atmosphere not seen for millions of years.
We’re fighting down to the wire in one of the most alarming and most important elections in my lifetime. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Supreme Court for generations to come, the protection of women’s rights, the rights of LGBTQ families, affordable healthcare, affordable college, the environment of our planet, and a stormy America that needs a steady hand on the rudder to see us through tumultuous times, so the American dream can once again be a dream attainable by everyone.
All this would seem a daunting task, until we remind ourselves that we’ve been privileged to live through an era in this country that has carried us through the historic two-term milestone of the first black president, who has chosen as his successor the next American milestone: our first female president, Hillary Clinton.
We’re fighting this fight and taking this stand because it’s the right thing to do, because when dark forces threaten ethnic cleansing, when we’re so close to another Hitler – the only sane thing to do is to rise up. We do not stand idly by. We must do everything we can. We unite, we fight, and we do not stop until the monster kicking the door of the Oval Office is stopped. We do not stop until the message is loud and clear: not here. It will never happen here.
We’re doing this for our kids, for our neighbors, for our mothers, for our grandmothers, for our teachers, our nurses, our gardeners, our nannies, our dishwashers, our social workers, our grocery clerks. We’re doing it because it takes a village. There is only one person who can lead us there. She’s been preparing her entire life for the job. It’s an easy call. God speed, Hillary Clinton. May the Force be with you.
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