Mrs. Clinton
If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for President in 2008, she’ll have my strong support.
I say this though…Mrs. Clinton is not my first choice for 2008. I support John Edwards because of his focus on economic issues as they impact the middle class and the poor. I’m also interested in the candidacy of Barack Obama.
In my view, Mrs. Clinton’s soft center-left focus and the Clinton legacy of moving the Democratic Party to the middle are not great recommendations for her White House bid.
So why will I support Mrs. Clinton if she wins the nomination?
It is because our problems today are so great that we must give a Democratic President serving with, hopefully, a Democratic Congress, a chance to find solutions to these challenges.
In these times, I can’t sit on my hands because the Democratic nominee is not the person I wanted.
In a normal campaign, the issues of the War in Iraq and how to get health insurance to all Americans would be dramatic enough concerns.
Yet in 2008 , there are even greater problems before the American people.
The issues of climate change and the effects of the global economy on how Americans will live are matters as pressing as the dilemmas that faced America between the Stock Crash of 1929 and the end of World War II.
To this point, neither party has taken leadership on these questions.
I don’t know that either party knows how to respond. There must be policy analysts and thinkers within the political structure who see the perils we face. I don’t think they have any answers. Or at least I don’t think they have any answers that they believe the American people will accept before things get even worse.
Many Americans saw the Civil War coming years before it occurred. Nobody had a solution. At least, nobody had a solution that could pass political muster.
I’m not going to pretend I’m overly hopeful that Mrs. Clinton and a Democratic Congress will strongly take on climate change and the impact of the global economy.
Still, I feel we must give out traditional political structure a chance to work before reaching the point of saying our system is as broken and hopeless today as it was in the final years leading up to the Civil War.
