This past week, I travelled to Dearborn, Michigan where I addressed a Hillary for America campaign event. Held at the Arab American National Museum, the gathering provided me with the opportunity to explain why I was endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I offered my key reasons.
In the first instance, my endorsement was about her. She is, without a doubt, one of the smartest, toughest and most experienced candidates to ever run for president. As important as these qualities are, I am also in awe of her self-control.
As I watched the last presidential debate, I marvelled at Mrs Clinton’s ability to remain composed in the face of her opponent’s hostility and vile provocation. Given what we know of Donald Trump’s disgusting behaviour and his demeaning attitude towards women, I would have found it difficult to even appear on stage with him. And yet she did so with great poise and dignity.
While these personal traits served her well in a debate setting – they are also essential for a president who will be tested by major challenges every minute of every day. When the 90-minute debate ended, I came away more convinced than ever that Mrs Clinton has, to borrow Richard Ben Cramer’s phrase, the “right stuff” to lead our nation.
Another reason behind my wanting Mrs Clinton to win has to do with my community and partners in the coalitions of concern with whom I work most closely. As some of you might know, I was deeply involved with Bernie Sanders’s campaign. I agreed with Mr Sanders on most issues and as a superdelegate I voted for him at the party’s convention. I also served as one of his representatives to the party’s platform drafting committee where we fought with the Clinton team to shape the party’s political agenda.
Mr Sanders has correctly noted that the resultant document was the “most progressive in the party’s history”. We forged consensus on a range of issues such as abolishing the death penalty, raising the minimum wage, expanding social security, creating a public option health insurance, eliminating Super PACs, closing the loopholes in racial profiling and expanding the definition of “racial” to include religion and national origin, increasing support for Lebanon and Jordan, emphasising the need to work more closely with Arab allies and increasing the number of refugees admitted to the US without discrimination based on religion or ethnicity.
We did not get the platform language we fought for on Israel-Palestine, but for the first time in history the party calls for providing “Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity” noting that they “should be free to govern themselves in their own viable state in peace and dignity”. Having scars to show from decades of platform battles, I can testify that this was an important step forward.
We won these battles working with allies – liberals and progressives, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as labour and environmental activists. We supported them and they supported us. That is the essence of working in coalition. We cannot abandon our allies because we didn’t get everything we wanted. If we hope we can count on them to be with us, then they need to know that they can count on us too.
When Mrs Clinton wins, we will all be better positioned to continue our combined effort to insist that the platform we endorsed becomes policy and to continue working together to press for even greater changes in policy.
Finally, my endorsement of Mrs Clinton is about Mr Trump. I not only oppose him, I find him to be the most frightening figure to emerge on the political scene in my lifetime.
On October 14, the Washington Post summed up the case against Mr Trump in one sentence describing him as “bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamoured of America’s enemies”. They concluded by noting that “as president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world”.
What Mr Trump has done in this campaign is prey on the fear and anger of some Americans who feel adrift in today’s changing economy. Instead of providing them with real solutions, he has given them enemies to blame – Mexicans, Muslims, blacks and so on. He has made hate speech acceptable and unleashed a torrent of anger that, I fear, will be difficult to rein in after this election is over. I not only believe that it is imperative that he lose this election, he must lose by a margin so large that it serves as both as a repudiation of his hate and a mandate for Mrs Clinton to govern.
That said, I reject the notion that this election can be reduced to choosing “the lesser of two evils”.
It is, in fact, about supporting the best candidate – the one who, despite whatever differences one might have with some of her positions, has demonstrated that she is tough, smart, experienced and relentless in fighting to make America better. That’s why I am proud to endorse Mrs Clinton.
And, by the way, the fact that in electing Mrs Clinton we will have our first female president is a matter of consequence.
As a son, a brother, a husband, a father of three daughters, and a grandfather of five more, I will be so proud when Mrs Clinton takes the oath of office, because at that moment they will know that there are no limits to which they can aspire.
These are the reasons I will be working to ensure a Clinton victory in November.
Dr James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute
On Twitter: @aaiusa
