Wednesday, October 25

I've been reading the book 'What Happened' which Hilary Clinton has been touting around the world.  I won't finish it because it is the shallowest explanation of a political campaign I have ever encountered.  We hear lots about the appalling creature who became president but, in my eyes, the alternative candidate seems to have little more to offer.

Many commentators have said that Hilary Clinton tends to be whiny.  That certainly comes through in the book; she whinges, about how she was treated and how her speeches were interpreted, and how the Head of the FBI was unfair to her.  I was looking for evidence that Ms Clinton would have been a competent president, but I was disappointed.  She showed that she is motivated by pride, and the desire to prove that a woman can do anything a man can do - all very laudable but hardly the basis for throwing your hat in the ring for the top job in the US.  I soon got fed-up with her pithy inspirational slogans, and her heart-warming anecdotes about people she met on the campaign trail.  There was a whole chapter on the food they ate between rallies and how they fought over a jar of jalapeños with a yellow label.  When she was loading her masses of luggage into her car on the way to another rally, husband Bill cleverly asked 'Are you leaving home?'  I'm sure that little bon mot could have been left out.

Her whole outlook appears to be banal.  She claims to be intelligent but she wallows in sentimentality and trite statements made by folk-philosophers and populist poets.

  But, it's what the book reveals about the US political system which is the most damning.  Her campaign had 3 million donors with an average donation of $100.  $300 million spent on the losing campaign and, no doubt, a similar amount spent to put Trump in the White House.  Money well-spent? I don't think so.

Hilary underlined she was pro-choice, pro-faith and pro-something else I have forgotten.  It's sad that a political philosophy can be boiled down to a handful of binary choices.  And the greatest of these is pro-faith.  It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a non-believer to be president of the US.  Although, you only have to say you have faith; you don't have to prove it.

There must be others out there who have the capacity to be another Lincoln of Roosevelt.  If only the US system will allow them to rise to the top.  Somehow, I don't think so.