Endorsements, Opinion

Gazette endorses Hillary Clinton for president

A Gazette editorial from the Charleston Gazette-Mail 

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — It would be easy to make the case for voting for Hillary Clinton for president simply by pointing out that her Republican opponent is demonstrably unfit for the job.

But we are not just holding our nose and saying, “Anyone but Donald Trump.” We think Hillary Clinton is the right person for the job this time around. She will make a better president today than she would have when she ran eight years ago, or even eight months ago. She is the best person for the nation, and that includes places like West Virginia. In fact, part of her improvement is because of places like West Virginia.

By now, her accomplishments are well-known. Most recently she served as secretary of state, where she negotiated a treaty with Iran that delays that nation’s nuclear development and buys the West access. She was a senator from New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and championed the needs of that city, including its first responders. Her Senate tenure earns her praise from both Democrats and Republicans. Going further back and perhaps closer to home, Hillary Clinton helped to establish the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides insurance coverage to children of low-income working parents. She started out as a lawyer with the Children’s Defense Fund, where she worked to uncover and end discrimination against children. Of course, Americans first got to know her as first lady during her husband’s presidency.

Leave out being first lady if you think that doesn’t count. It does, especially the way Hillary did it, more in the style of Eleanor Roosevelt than most presidential spouses of her time. But set it aside and look at the rest of her experience. By any measure, she is qualified to be president, certainly the most qualified of any candidate in this election. More qualified, Bill Clinton said, than either he or Barack Obama when they asked Americans for their votes.

Yet, there is something else. Hillary has blue-collar roots, from growing up as the daughter of a drapery maker in small-town Illinois, to representing not only urban but also rural New York state. She has spent time in communities like the ones all over West Virginia. That’s not a requirement to be a good president, but it is a comfort when it happens. We liked Obama when he ran, even though we knew his appreciation of places like our hometowns was distant.

Hillary’s connection is more direct, more first-hand and more up-to-date. That is one of the things that is so appealing about her now, and for that, we may have Sen. Bernie Sanders partly to thank.

When Hillary Clinton decided not to concede West Virginia to Sen. Sanders without a fight in the Democratic primary, she visited, and she didn’t just go to easy places. She took the criticism (and praise) and the honest frustration that people unloaded on her. She absorbed it all with grace and agreed, something must be done. She had already offered a proposal to help distressed communities and displaced workers to reinvent themselves, an investment of infrastructure and entrepreneurship projects similar to President Obama’s Power PLUS Initiative, long overdue.

Of course, her enemies have bombarded West Virginians with a clip from an event in Ohio earlier this year, where Clinton, in response to a question about why poor whites who vote Republican should vote for her and her economic policies. At one point in her answer, referring to conditions in the coal industry, Clinton said, “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Her enemies, funded or befriended by the very extraction industries that want to pollute, profit and duck out on pension and environmental liabilities, never include in their ads Clinton’s words that came in the next breath:

 “And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

“Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

Hillary Clinton promised West Virginians, whether they vote for her or not, to do what she can to get more people off drugs and into jobs. She did not lie and promise to bring back a rose-tinted past, as so many vote seekers do.

Thanks to her time spent in West Virginia, we believe she is more keenly aware that it is wrong to let some communities bear all the pain and costs of the changing economy, whether from the downturn of coal or globalization. If the nation must move away from fossil fuels and prevent pollution — and it must —then the nation can help regions where those changes for the common good wreak local harm. Clinton’s actions demonstrate that belief.

Clinton sat at an event at the University of Charleston, hugged a recovering addict named Chelsea, and spoke knowledgeably of the need for an array of treatment options and access for addicts in the moment they are ready to accept help.

This is the kind of mundane work West Virginians need to have done on their behalf. That, on top of all kinds of larger reasons, including foreign policy experience, temperament and ability to respect and work with all kinds of people, is why Hillary Clinton is not only the best candidate for the nation and the world, but also the best candidate for West Virginia.

We were not always a big fan. She is more hawkish than we like. We’ve criticized her for voting for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, though we don’t think she is likely to go out and start elective wars of her own.

Now, we look forward to a time, with Hillary Clinton in the White House, when the problems of places like West Virginia will be more than just ignored or exploited. We look forward to having a president that puts the needs of places like West Virginia high on the priority list.

Finally, this election is an opportunity to vote for a woman for the highest office in the land. That is not reason enough to choose her, but it is one more reason to feel good about a vote for Hillary Clinton for president of the United States of America.

See more from the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

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