Wednesday, September 7, 2016

The Conundrum of Hillary Clinton: an ethical analysis

The Conundrum of Hillary Clinton
By Kirsten Rayhawk
An MBA program ethics analysis due July 30, 2016
 
“Many people talk about doing the right thing, but action is the true measure of character” (Maxwell, 2003, p. 44).
Hillary Rodham Clinton, now usually known as Hillary Clinton, has spent the last year-plus campaigning, with hard work and determination, to get the Democratic Party’s nomination to be their candidate for the office of President of the United States of America.  In the eyes of many people in our nation, both inside and outside of the Democratic Party, she had earned and more than earned the right to not only ask but to expect this from her party, and then to ask the general electorate to elect her to.
Clinton has been active in social change efforts since college, graduating in 1969 and kicking off a long career of questioning and acting decisively to change the received political and cultural assumptions, with focus and determination even in the face of reactionism and frequent failure – getting right to it as first student Wellesley College ever invited to speak at commencement and the last student Wellesley ever allowed to speak after the main commencement speaker (Keith, T. (2016).  She spoke of the hopes and efforts of her fellow youth acting out of “integrity and trust and respect” (Wellesley College, n.d.).  Some of her collegiate sisters (who elected her student body President) are still actively friends with her and did a round of radio interviews on her behalf this spring.
Clinton’s campaign has chosen to describe her social activism and political activity around the heart-strings issue of her work to make life better for all children, in America and then around the world, spending one entire day of the just-ended 2016 Democratic National Convention (Tuesday, July 26) on this topic: tracing her work as a lawyer for the Children’s Fund, for children with disabilities, for racial integration, for federal health care for impoverished children, for her current work with a Black Lives Matter group, Mothers of the Movement (Democratic National Convention, July 26, 2016).  This picture was presented by a parade of people who were friends or admirers, whose lives she had touched – usually directly and usually with personal followup – in a trackable, positive manner.
Significantly, this was the entire programme leading up to the official nomination vote Tuesday evening, in which Hillary Clinton was, in fact, after a strongly contended campaign, declared the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.
Clinton has worked as a lawyer and as a research scholar to defend children being discriminated against.  She served as First Lady of Arkansas from 1979-1981 and from 1983-1992, including work as chair of the state’s Rural Health Advisory Committee; she served as First Lady of the United States of America from 1995-2001, including chairing work to pass federal health care expansion and memorably representing the nation at the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995; and she served as Senator from New York from 2001-2009.  In 2008 she barely lost a bid for her party’s presidential nomination; after Illinois freshman Senator Barack Obama won the election, he invited her to serve as his first-term Secretary of State.
Clinton’s bona fides, interpreted through the lens of people who have seen her hands-on work, her dedication to her chosen issues, her determination and reputedly astonishing work ethic, and her face-to-face care and concern for individuals, seem to vastly justify her nomination this week.  Even detractors often will admit she is experientially qualified to become President of our United States; supporters will assert (and reasonably so) that she is uniquely qualified, and perhaps the most prepared Presidential candidate in history.
There is another side to this picture of an amazing public servant, though.
Ever since she entered the national spotlight as the wife of the charismatic 1992 Democratic nominee for President, there has been a broad thread of negative judgement about her – and at first this was nearly purely sexist.  Unfortunately, that thread is still alive and well, as a jaunt through nearly any current news website’s comment-sections can demonstrate.  It is easy to understand why she and her supporters understand criticism of her to be irrational and reactionary, when from the start the loudest and most consistent criticism has been so.
She was active in her husband’s Executive Branch work during his Presidency (1993-2001) in a way that many people were uncomfortable with.  Unfortunately, she came to public prominence during a time when operative Karl Rove was ascendant in the Republican Party, implementing a strategy of winning back power by being incredibly nasty.   And so she came under additional fire for not only how impractical and wrongheaded her ideas were (to them), but also for legitimately questionable ethical/legal decisions in doing federal work with no officially appointed position and therefore no structural accountability (nor any established guidelines for what could in fact be done behind closed doors), for piggybacking on her husband’s career when she fancied herself a feminist, and any other discredits as could be laid at her feet with any rational cause at all.  Depending on one’s point of view, none, some, or all of these charges held water.
During this time, possible financial malfeasance regarding real estate and cattle futures during the Clintons’ time in Alabama was dragged up by opposition research, casting early doubts on her ethics as both a lawyer and as a person.  And when, in his first term, her husband was caught in a sexual relationship with a young female White House intern, and rumors of his broader philandering gained credence, their marital relationship was called into question.  Her choices in reacting to the crisis were kept under the media microscope – interestingly, the “feminist” organizations praised her for sticking with her husband (who was politically convenient for them) and conservatives seemed disgusted that she didn’t leave.  She slut-shamed the women implicated in Bill Clinton’s reputed affairs, stretching her feminist credibility.
While Bill was in office, Hillary shilled for non-gay-friendly measures: a “traditional” definition of marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military.  She shilled for race-specific law enforcement efforts and for loosening the legal controls that had been put on the banking sector as a result of the market crash of 1929.  All of these things “won,” and the latter two deeply and negatively affect many segments of our citizenry still today.
As her husband’s second term was ending, Clinton ran for a Senate seat from New York State, where the family had expediently established residency for that purpose; she was heavily financially and practically supported by both the political establishment and large financial concerns, and won the election to represent the people of a state in which she had never before lived.  She served from 2001-2009.  While in this elected office, she worked for many efforts consistent with her current campaign’s preferred storyline, including creating an acute focus on assisting with recovery from the 9-11 attacks.  But she also supported now-problematic national security items like entry into the Iraq War and the “Patriot Act.”  She supported bailouts for various American industries – particularly the banking sector – that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and from which we still have not recovered.  On the 2016 campaign trail, she verbally justified the banking bailout and a variety of pro-bank, pro-lending, pro-speculator legislative work by asserting that Wall Street was part of her constituency (some assessments of her success with that constituency can be found at Haberman, M,. & White, B., April 28, 2014).
In 2008, during her last year as a Senator, she ran a determined and occasionally vituperative campaign (sometimes accused of racist implication) for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, increasing her reputation as a negative political actor who would, as Obama himself said in that campaign, “say anything” to get elected.  This reputation was reinforced by years of flip-flops and determined de-emphasis of her problematic votes.
Obama asked her to be his Secretary of State, and trusted her and other established Democrats to help him select Cabinet members and agency appointees.  During this time many pro-corporate leaders were invited into the Administration, including lawyers and business leaders with ties to various Wall Street firms (Kiely, E., March 1, 2012, is a balanced look at this charge) and agro-giant Monsanto (Sager, J., October 1, 2012).  Most of these were known as at least friendly acquaintances of the Clintons and many had donated to various Clinton campaigns, or to the Clinton Foundation they established after Bill left office.
During this service, Clinton ignored the advice of White House security experts and used Blackberry communication devices; it was also established later that she had a dedicated server built in her house in New York, which was vulnerable to foreign.  A 2016 investigation by the FBI concluded that “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” (Comey, J. B., July 5, 2016); a State Department investigation is currently in progress.  Also during this service, American military operations in the Middle East had been expected to wind down; instead they are still continuing as Obama ends his second term, and insider articles have frequently included portrayal of Clinton as a hawkish force during her time in the Administration.  As a final offense to the general ideals of her party and the potential good she could have been doing in office, Clinton spent significant time in office advocating for increased fracking both here in America and during deliberate propaganda trips to other nations around the world, even as evidence for vast geological and environmental damage was becoming apparent.
She left office in January of 2013 and embarked upon speaking and fundraising junkets for the Clinton Foundation, often speaking to her traditional donors from Wall Street or other business interests for amounts around $200,000.  None of those transcripts has been released, despite heavy pressure during this Democratic primary season.
She stepped off the board of the Clinton Foundation when she took up her primary campaign and proceeded to rapidly and repeatedly falsify her voting record, her federal-level advocacy record, and the permanence of her Fall-2015 “stances” on many social issues and environmental issues.  And many problematic Foundation donors became major donors to her campaign (Rubin, J., February 18, 2015).
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) set up a technically legal but deeply misleading and unethical money-laundering scheme called the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) late in 2015 that allowed Clinton’s major donors to donate the federally allowed amount several times over by donating to certain state Democratic committees which had agreed to send the money to the HVF for the primary, with the expectation that the DNC would help them out with money from national donors (which has not materialized).  It was revealed by a recent Wikileaks release that the Democratic National Committee unethically considered sabotaging her rival, Bernie Sanders’, campaign, which there had been on-the-ground evidence of since at least February.  And although there is not yet a paper trail found, the statistical anomalies between the exit polls and the voting results – only for the Democrats and nearly exclusively benefitting Clinton in the final vote count – are at levels statistically unsupportable; in past elections in other nations, America, the UN, and other concerned parties have called out nations for dirty elections in this situation.  (The Republican Party polls aligned cleanly with their results this year.)
And yet when the DNC emails were released two days before the Democratic convention, and party leaders forced DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to step down, Clinton reached out almost immediately (and even more insulting the convention, the day before the convention officially convened) and invited Wasserman-Schultz, implicated beyond doubt in pressuring the primary process, to be the honorary Chair of her Presidential campaign!
During the primary season Clinton spent significant time obfuscating or lying outright about what she had and hadn’t said in her past public life, in service to the current electoral cycle, but activists consistently dug up countering footage and posted it on the internet.  Clinton’s speech accepting the official nomination of her party reflected many beautiful ideas, many of which were part of Sanders’ stump speech but not hers mere weeks before – renewable energy development, a focus on jobs creation, making sure “Wall Street” never again tanks “Main Street,” funding for public college education, a further push for universal health care.  She celebrated Black Lives Matter and the real service law enforcement officers do for the nation, and she celebrated LGBTQ gains, not acknowledging a checkered political past in those areas.
I have never liked Hillary Clinton.  She flip-flopped and said whatever was convenient from day one on the national stage, and the only two things she has remained consistent on at the national level are abortion and increased government health care.  She was hawkish, favored banks and chemical agriculture, and cultivated financial and arguably quid-pro-quo relationships with Wall Street and banking concerns and perhaps foreign governments.
She is smart and strong and amazing – and that only, in my mind, made her all the more dangerous to leave near the reins of power (as long as she remains so deeply compromised).
What Tuesday night finally communicated to me was why and how she, her family, her support teams, many of the people she’s had a direct interaction with, and her citizen fans around the nation (some of whom are my good friends) could see her in a positive light.  I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to understand this until I ‘got’ it.
The problem now, though, which will continue to vastly handicap her success as a leader and her legacy as a human being, is that it is not clear that she nor any of her supporters ‘get’ that the other side of the story, the side they are so fond of claiming the Right Wing invented to smear Clinton, the side that is the only side I and many other people watching the national dramas unfold could see all these years, is actually also true and valid.
She really has lied.  Flip-flopped.  Pushed militarism. Supported policies that wore away at our rights (Patriot Act), our economy (bank bailouts), our security (Iraq War, favors granted to some foreign powers, insecure email server), and our global environment (fracking, chemical-focus agriculture).  She shows a capacity for denial and an avoidance of taking responsibility that many Americans can’t imagine, since she is clearly so intelligent, isn’t purposeful dissembling.
I hypothesize that she and the people around her know and understand the real good that she has worked for and achieved.  I hypothesize this is the work of her heart, and how she understands her “success” and her effectiveness and goodness as a political actor.
I hypothesize that she does not understand how her high-end political actions actively injure and long-term doom the heart-work she achieves on the ground.  I hypothesize that she sees the high-end policy work and the (probable) collusion as merely ways to fund, and fund generously, her “real” work.
I finally understand why people can love her, why she can be confident in herself.  And I am willing to believe, in fact I find I do believe despite 20 years of seeing only the opposite, that she really does have a good heart.
If she and her people could take a step back and, first, see, and, second, admit to themselves, the big picture, I think she is very capable of aligning future big-picture decisions with her heart vision of what is good and true.  She needs to align all of her actions to her heart-instincts.  In order to be believed for what looks like yet another adoption of convenient things to say only in order to get elected, she probably needs to come clean about the real and significant errors she has made her service to our country, and she probably needs to overtly apologize.
Coming clean about the damages she has done – to America, to America’s poor, to the world, to the world’s poor, to herself, and to America’s ability to trust our most powerful politicians – would take enormous courage in the buzzsaw world of politics.  However, doing so would give millions of Americans who currently consider her someone who cannot be trusted a reason to view her in a new light.  This would increase her chances of being elected and being supported by the nation.
I think she could save her historical legacy, become a morally integrated person of honor and integrity, and, with her smarts and determination and savvy, possibly become one of our legendary Presidents, if she can see and face the whole picture.
If she and her people choose the easier-feeling, more comfortable path, and refuse to consider that all those millions of people who see Clinton primarily as a liar might actually be thinking humans basing their negative reaction on historical facts, Clinton will, if elected in November, be at best a deeply compromised President and at worst a very efficient destructive force for our nation.
“Action is the true measure of character.”
References
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