Hillary’s journey has been fuelled by a blind ambition for power. And while efforts were made by her propaganda machine to imbue her campaign with some passion, some humanity, women’s issues, black lives matter, Hillary Clinton herself could not deliver.
During the course of the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton confirmed what people had suspected for a long time, she is all ambition, blind ambition and no passion.
Hillary’s journey has been fuelled by a blind ambition for power. It is impossible to find anything that one can say Hillary is passionate about, except of course her relentless pursuit of power. And while efforts were made by her propaganda machine to imbue her campaign with some passion, some humanity, women’s issues, black lives matter, Hillary Clinton herself could not deliver. Nothing rang true. Her so called passion for women’s issues is under cut by her hostile stance towards the women who accused her husband of improprieties in the 1990’s. Her so called passion for black people is undermined by her support for, campaigning and lobbying for her husband’s crime and social security reform acts in the 1990s. Her promise that she wants to be the president of all of America does not extend to those she has put in a “basket of deplorables”. She did not care for them, she forgot that her husband’s deregulation of the financial markets, contributed to homelessness, joblessness, loss of pension, and the deplorable state in which swaths of American voters now find themselves. They are in deplorable states because the new Democratic Party abdicated its own mission to take care of the poor. She and her husband fashioned a new Democratic Party, which had no conscience, no passion and no loyalty to the poor, the deplorables as she described them. Apologies are not enough to right those wrongs.
Hillary’s problem started a long time ago, her wagon was hitched from start to finish to that of her husband, Bill Clinton. She was not a passive, stay-at-home, bake cookies, host tea party type of first lady. She was one of his biggest supporters, she lent her voice to many of his laws and policies. In return the Clinton connection brought her many rewards too, a Senate seat in New York City, a bid for the presidency in 2008, a Secretary of State slot under the Obama administration and another shot at the presidency in 2016. And not just that, her friends in high places are the ones that benefited from her husband’s largess, the bankers, the big corporations and the media conglomerates who threw their weight behind her campaign and propped her up throughout the whole journey.
In preparation for her second bid for the White House she embarked on a revisionist agenda with the help of her husband who hit the campaign trail apologising for the excesses of his regime and trying to distance her from those excesses. Her email debacle and FBI investigations, her misadventures in Libya and Iraq, made her the most unsafe candidate in the running for the Democratic ticket. These and the fact that she is one of the most disliked candidates in recent times did not deter her from believing that she could win this thing. With the mainstream media behind her, they believed they could make all these go away. They gave her a whole lift up and went about a character assassination of anyone who stood in her way. Her main message in the end was the Trump tapes which were released by her media partners during the Presidential debates. But she could not keep the skeletons in her cupboard jangling louder and louder.
She could not see beyond what she wanted. This is 2016, and the mood has changed. The MSM no longer monopolise the news. The Internet is all pervasive. Wikileaks is still leaking. The poor people also have eyes and ears and they can read too. Poor people are fed up. After many years of recession, robbed of their homes and livelihood, they felt left out, they wanted change. They recall that the Clintons did not do anything for them, and apologies were simply not going to do it this time around.
Hillary was blind to all these, standing opposite Donald Trump, she believed that the presidency was hers to take. She was wrong. In the words of Niccolo Machiavelli, “He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must fall with the greatest loss.” Hillary Clinton came crashing down. She lost to an opponent less qualified than her, who throughout this campaign had been ridiculed by the media as inept, racist, sexist you name it. Hillary Clinton would have done better if she had retired to that glorified place giving succour to the poor and abused women, she would have been a welcome champion. Let’s hope she will accept the message from the American people with grace – they said it once, they have said it again, they just don’t want President Hillary.
Featured image courtesy of: Getty Images
About the Author
Tunde Olupitan is the Managing Editor Europe & Americas for The European Financial Review, The European Business Review and The European Law Review.
