Yahoo News What if Clinton Had Been Elected President?
In the midst of a colossal national scandal that may eventually rival Watergate, it’s a painful thought exercise: Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won.
It’s tempting for Clinton voters to imagine a rosy alternate universe where she and her all-woman Cabinet put on their pantsuits and make swift progress on the country’s most pressing issues. In reality though, a Clinton presidency often would have been excruciating - especially for Clinton’s most ardent supporters.
Donald Trump surely would be crowing about voter fraud and a rigged system - the guy won, and even so, this week he ordered an investigation into alleged voter fraud, still apparently smarting from the fact that his opponent won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. His supporters, who show up armed and ready to political events, no doubt would be enraged, and it’s not beyond the imagination to think that violence may have flared up. Clinton’s agenda certainly would be hamstrung by an obstructionist Congress. The right-wing media would continue its attacks on her and the more moderate mainstream media likely would carry forward its worst electoral sins - pushing under-reported non-stories, buying GOP framing of the Clintons as inherently corrupt. The left would be even more fractured than it is, with Hillary-haters taking aim at the president - there would be no #resistance to unify the left in opposition to a common, orange-tinted authoritarian enemy. Her agenda wouldn’t be put into place fast enough or wouldn’t be left-wing enough, and many of her supporters would grow frustrated and disillusioned. Public displays of sexism and unrepentant misogyny targeting the most powerful woman in the country would be the norm. Women would hear that feminism succeeded, so what do we have to complain about?
And yet it would be so, so much better - for liberals, for feminists, and for America as a whole.
First, we would still be moving forward. It’s easy to forget about this now but when Obama was leaving office, there was a list of progressive, feminist causes that many of us thought would be achieved in the near future - affordable child care and paid parental leave chief among them. It wouldn’t have been easy, with this Congress, to push those policies through. But they would have been on the table and they’re issues popular enough with American voters that GOP obstructionism could have hurt them in the midterms. Many of us who report on, write about, and advocate for women’s rights slowly started letting ourselves think about paid leave and affordable child care as issues of when, not if.
Now we’re back to the “if.” Under a Clinton presidency, the list of reasonable progressive and feminist demands might not have been fully checked off, but we’d at least be working on it. Under Trump, his daughter Ivanka pays lip service to the issues of affordable child care and paid family leave, but there’s been no actual movement on either issue, and no one expects care and leave policies will be presidential priorities.
Americans who didn’t support Clinton would have been better off too, in part because of those same progressive policies - conservatives benefit from good health care and paid parental leave also - but mostly because we would have a stable grown-up in the White House, surrounded by a competent, experienced team. The policy landscape President Clinton would have pushed may not have pleased every Republican but she wouldn’t have been a threat to the basic stability of the country.
By contrast, the rank incompetence, blatant corruption, and dizzying ineptitude of the Trump administration have been such pervasive and universal themes of this presidency that, just over 100 days in, it can be hard to remember what a normal White House looks like. It’s not that Trump has been “normalized” but that human beings necessarily adjust. And for anyone with even a passing interest in politics, the new normal is that every day, there are a half-dozen outrageous new things the president has done, said, or tweeted. It’s impossible to keep up with it all; the best most of us can do is latch onto an overarching narrative: This is crazy. And also: This is just another day in Trump’s America.
Thinking about Hillary’s America is a helpful way to put the full scale of that crazy into context. Yes, it would have been aggravating and sometimes heartbreaking for her supporters - watching Clinton compromise, watching the attacks on her scale up. We definitely would not have been living in a feminist utopia with a Planned Parenthood on every corner, doling out kittens and free IUDs for every American woman. A Clinton presidency wouldn’t have been as progressive as the left would have wanted it to be; it surely would have been more progressive than the right would have wanted it to be. But it’s hard to imagine Clinton, a careful and competent politician, so blatantly interfering in an FBI investigation into her own actions, as Trump just did - and admitted to, when he said he fired FBI director James Comey because he didn’t believe the investigation into his campaign’s potential collusion with Russia was worthwhile. It’s nearly impossible to imagine Clinton asking the chief investigator to pledge loyalty to her, then firing him, then publicly threatening him, and following that up with a suggestion that she may cancel all press briefings, impeding the ability of the media to do its job.
This administration promises to be a lesson in just how much damage one unhinged authoritarian can do. Clinton wouldn’t have been everything to everyone but she wouldn’t have been that.
It’s worth it, then, to look at how exactly we got here. There are of course many reasons Trump won, with Comey’s decision to break with FBI protocol and publicly comment about the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails not being the least of them. But part of Trump’s advantage was that he played to the American people’s, and American media’s, lust for excitement. Throughout the campaign, Clinton was criticized as too dull and wonky, not as naturally charismatic as her husband and unable to rile up a crowd like Trump. The coverage of Trump was so wall-to-wall that it began to feel like his every speech was being broadcast live; his face and his words were given ample free airtime on every major TV network. Clinton’s stump speeches and rallies didn’t get covered nearly as much. When she lost, many commentators said it was because she’s uninspiring, she lacks charisma, she’s flat-out boring (despite those 3 million extra votes). She’s broccoli and Trump is sugar cereal.
I don’t know about you but when it comes to presidential politics, I’m absolutely pining for some boring broccoli right now.
And so both the American people and the American media should learn something important from the current exciting but ultimately terrifying current political reality, and the thought experiment of flipping the election results: that sometimes, the boring machinations of government and the uninspiring doings of career public servants are good for us. Clinton would have largely carried forward Obama’s agenda, chugging along with moderate efficiency, trying to fix what’s broken and not screw too much stuff up. As far as campaign slogans go, that’s not the most exciting - but then, the moderating force of balanced powers and a constitutional democracy isn’t meant to be exhilarating. As far as day-to-day operations in the West Wing go, Clinton’s would have been the equivalent of a low-volume screening of The English Patient in contrast to Trump’s shrieking Michael Bay explosion-fest.
And all the sexism, all the obstruction, all the crap Clinton would have surely faced? It would have been worth it to not have a president who compromises human rights, who’s more interested in self-dealing than public service, and whose intemperance and lack of self-control put our national security at risk. The inevitable lefty in-fighting, so visible during the campaign when Hillary was branded a neoliberal sellout and those supporting Clinton over Bernie Sanders were accused of voting with our vaginas? That would have been turned up to 100 under President Clinton. And it still would have been worth it to not have a president who may be compromised by a foreign power and who is so craven that he just fired the man charged with investigating him.
Boring, yeah. A dull but highly competent technocrat is admittedly less exciting than an unpredictable and sociopathic autocrat. Journalists might be yawning through her team’s too-long policy papers. Voters might not find her immediately inspiring. But she wouldn’t be threatening our most sacred institutions, public trust in government, and the existence of the republic itself. Even with the inevitable sexism, the roadblocks, the rage from the right and the fights within the left - doesn’t that sound nice today?
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