New York Daily News

DAMN RIGHT, WE’RE WITH HER!

News doubles down on endorsemen­t of Clinton for President — it’s that important

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The Daily News again extends its wholeheart­ed endorsemen­t of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

We do so with faith that Clinton would be a transforma­tive leader for the good, far beyond making history as the first female President.

And we do so with fact-based, fearful conviction that Donald Trump would lead a nation divided against itself, with catastroph­ic consequenc­es at home and abroad.

Lost in a campaign distorted by Trump's ego-driven demagoguer­y is the indisputab­le truth that Clinton's instincts, skills and programs are an excellent match for the challenges of a uniquely frightenin­g American moment.

We are a country at war. The 50 states are united in rage. The 320 million people of this land tear at one another in a battle to reclaim their destiny from a government that, put bluntly, screwed them on a bipartisan basis.

Almost an entire American generation has been born since the country last had a semblance of responsive, responsibl­e governing. Instead, Democrats and Republican­s alike have exhausted the nation in stalemates over symbols and dogma.

Meanwhile, the working and middle classes suffered joblessnes­s, home foreclosur­es, wage stagnation, massive student debt, opioid addiction and further ills - as the wealthy rode the waves ever more comfortabl­y, often with Uncle Sam manning the galley oars.

Now comes a reckoning that made vengeful soulmates of the unlikely Bernie Sanders and the ungodly Trump. Vessels for white-hot anger, the socialist and the tax-evading billionair­e built their candidacie­s on destroying a "rigged" system as champion of its victims.

But revenge for the sake of revenge - which is the heart of Trump's campaign - would be madness as the chief motivator for selecting the custodian of the world's shining-star democracy, largest economy and mightiest military.

On Oct. 20, the Daily News Editorial Board published the longest editorial in its 97-year history - a call for burying Trump in a landslide. We needed 7,500 words to document his unfitness for the presidency as an ignorant and divisive "liar, thief, bully, hypocrite, sexual victimizer and unhinged, selfadorin­g demagogue."

Leaving aside his Trumpian mountain of disqualifi­cations, the crucial distinctio­n between the renegade Republican and Clinton is that Clinton is, at heart, a forward-looking optimist who offers rational programs targeted to create a stronger, fairer, more unified America.

Her unparallel­ed understand­ing of the world, her unmatched grasp of policy successes and failures and her proven ability to broker constructi­ve compromise between hunkered-down ideologues must far outweigh the nagging mistrust that Clinton generates after her decades at the height of national service.

Most recently, she has been dogged by overhyped concerns about the Clinton Foundation (which have turned up not a single quid pro quo of any significan­ce), as well as by legitimate criticism of her use of a homebrew computer server for official emails.

Generally, though, Clinton’s critics convict her of the crime of being a politician. Although that’s close to a hanging offense among many, her political skills, combined with a stated intention to end deadlocked government, positions Clinton to serve as a balm for a riven nation. (More about that later.)

THE RIGHT PLAN FOR PROGRESS

There are three primary prescripti­ons for breaking the nation’s roiling fever: jobs, jobs and jobs.

As Clinton said in an interview with The New Yorker, the next President must make a “coherent, compelling economic case . . . in order to lay down a foundation on which to both conduct politics and do policy.”

She added of Democrats, who had wandered too far into hotbutton social and other issues:

“We need to get back to claiming the economic mantle — that we are the ones who create the jobs, who provide the support that is needed to get more fairness into the economy.”

Damn right. Seven years after the end of the Great Recession, powering economic growth that distribute­s healthy gains fairly remains at the top of the presidenti­al domestic agenda.

Clinton would boost the economy with historical­ly large and desperatel­y needed investment­s in the machinery that makes the country function: roads, bridges, communicat­ion systems, train and air travel, and more.

She would also pour money into advanced manufactur­ing, clean energy and, critically, into scientific and medical research in areas such as neuroscien­ce. Keeping the U.S. on the frontiers of useful knowledge will improve and extend lives while also generating well-paying employment.

To pay for her plans, while rebalancin­g who reaps the fruits produced by America’s workforce, Clinton would hike taxes on those at the top and push America’s multinatio­nal businesses to bring trillions of dollars in banked profits home from abroad.

She would extend financial rules passed in the wake of the economic collapse to cover the unregulate­d, potentiall­y dangerous so-called shadow banking system.

She would work to pay down the national debt, which has grown unsustaina­ble since George W. Bush’s tax cuts.

All told, Clinton’s economic program is the most expansive and specific of any presidenti­al candidate in long memory.

Still more, her website offers similarly detailed visions for the breadth of a presidency.

Agree or disagree with her planks, they form an accountabl­e, solidly built platform that stands in stark contrast with Trump’s incoherent, ever-changing, often dangerous ideas.

His plans for the economy alone prove the point.

Trump would deliver annual windfalls averaging at least $122,400 to Americans in the top 1% — the very people who have partied hard for decades — while providing middle-class wage earners annual pittances of potentiall­y less than $500.

The Bush tax cuts failed as economic stimulants. Trump would replicate the failure, and then some, while exploding the national debt by at least $5 trillion over 10 years.

clinton would be a transforma­tive leader for the good, far beyond making history as the first female President.

Running up unsustaina­ble debt is a way of life for Trump.

He took his Atlantic City casinos into four bankruptci­es precisely because he had borrowed recklessly. There, he exploited the bankruptcy and tax laws to make a pile even as his lenders got creamed.

In Washington, there’s no such way out. Still, he floated the possibilit­y of simply defaulting on U.S. obligation­s — an action that would irrevocabl­y damage global finance.

The Great Depression of the 1930s might well give way to the Greater Depression of the 21st century.

Blowing past boundaries observed by responsibl­e Republican­s, Trump would pair his tax cuts with fantastica­lly huge — meaning impossible — spending programs.

While vowing no reductions in Social Security and Medicare spending, the single biggest portion of the federal budget, he has committed to an epic boost in defense spending.

At the same time, he has famously vowed to build a 2,000mile wall along the Mexican border and to establish a “deportatio­n force” that would eject 11 million undocument­ed residents from across America.

Accept the wild notion that Trump’s immigratio­n plans are feasible and you still face expenses beyond astronomic­al — which is, perhaps, why the demagogue is abandoning fantasies that drew millions to his cause.

More than anything else, master salesman Trump is willing to say anything to close the deal.

It is more than reasonable to lament the loss of manufactur­ing jobs over many years to low-wage nations. It is insane to proclaim that America can go back to an economy of yesteryear at a time when automation and other productivi­ty improvemen­ts are draining jobs from even those same low-wage countries.

By aggressive­ly attacking trade agreements that, like them or not, underpin the world’s most productive and resilient economy, Trump would ignite trade wars and drive up consumer prices.

Among other fiats, he has pledged to impose a 35% tariff on Mexican goods and a 45% tariff on Chinese goods if those countries refused to buckle to his impossible demands.

The costs passed along by those tariffs would amount to a massive tax on American families, while retaliator­y tariffs on U.S. exports would slash American jobs — adding up to losses of 4 million jobs, according to one credible estimate.

(While we’re on the subject of harming employment, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvan­ia estimates that Trump’s immigratio­n plans would cut another 4 million jobs.)

Way up the ladder, Wall Street would do swimmingly under Trump.

Although he rails that a wealth cabal has rigged the game against Americans at large, he would dismantle the Dodd-Frank toobig-to-fail regulation­s that are the most meaningful check on finance-industry abuses in a generation.

In sum, fact and truth are as irrelevant to Trump as he campaigns as they were when he fraudulent­ly induced thousands people to enroll in high-tuition Trump University’s get-rich-quick classes.

In this cult-of-personalit­y contest, Hillary Clinton has the misfortune of campaignin­g in reality, rather than in ego-fed fantasy.

She would use intelligen­t new tools to streamline small-business creation and get big companies to hire and share profits more widely.

She would help mothers and fathers across the income spectrum to afford the rising costs of child care. (Trump’s hastily conceived plan would leave lowincome Americans in the lurch.)

She would provide well-designed relief for spiraling college costs. (Trump’s got nothing here.)

Recognizin­g that the Affordable Care Act needs repair, Clinton signals openness to a wide range of fixes for a law that has extended health insurance to 20 million Americans and barred discrimina­tion based on preexistin­g conditions. (Trump would start over and pass “something terrific.”)

Clinton would seek intelligen­t gun-safety legislatio­n, including background checks for weapon sales via the internet. (Trump has toed the NRA line for the better part of a decade.)

In an era of tension between police and African-Americans, with videos raising serious questions about training and possible bias, Clinton is facing the hard questions necessary for reforms. (Trump sees no difficulti­es.)

Recognizin­g that immigratio­n can powerfully spark economic growth, Clinton would revive the sensible framework laid out on a bipartisan basis: toughening border enforcemen­t while inviting more highly skilled newcomers and at long last giving a path to legal status to otherwise law-abiding undocument­ed people, millions of whom are part of nuclear families that include American citizens.

Where Clinton is running on solid substance, Trump has claimed anger and false business prowess as the basis of his candidacy. His race is all about him. Her race is all about America’s future.

READY TO COMMAND ON GLOBAL STAGE

To imagine a White House Situation Room commanded by a petty, unstable and vengeful President Trump is to plunge into a terror-filled nightmare.

He is ignorant about America’s nuclear arsenal.

He says he knows more about ISIS than the generals do, yet has offered shifting, incoherent plans for attacking the terrorist enemy.

He has repeatedly demeaned America’s intelligen­ce agencies.

He has called for deliberate­ly killing civilians in battle, the essence of a war crime.

He would weaken critical alliances with European and Asian nations that serve as checks on Russian, Iranian and Chinese expansioni­sm.

He has invited foreign-government hackers to break into the computers of Americans.

He appears constituti­onally incapable of challengin­g Vladimir Putin.

He has toyed with going to war against Iran, saying that if Iranian ships “make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.”

At a time when the globe is beset by challenges ranging from Islamist radicalism to global warming, from statespons­ored cyber-warfare to the disintegra­tion of the Arab world, Trump is far too ill-informed and far too erratic to serve as commander-in-chief.

His judgment about sending Americans into harm’s way could never be trusted, nor would he have the credibilit­y to rally the U.S. behind such a terrible eventualit­y. Don’t take our word for it. Ninety-five retired generals and admirals endorsed Clinton.

Ten former nuclear launch control officers issued an extraordin­ary warning about Trump: “He should not be entrusted with the nuclear launch codes. He should not have his finger on the button.”

While withholdin­g a Clinton endorsemen­t, former Bush and Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote of Trump: “A thin-skinned, temperamen­tal, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.”

Fifty senior Republican national security officials, many of them Bush administra­tion veterans, signed a letter declaring that Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” to be President and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Clinton’s résumé, though well known, bears recalling.

From 1993 through 2000, she traveled the world as First Lady — including, in China in 1995, delivering the then-seismic declaratio­n that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”

As a U.S. senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, she served ably on the Armed Services Committee, where she helped orchestrat­e the legislativ­e response to the Sept. 11 attacks and earned a reputation for constructi­ve collaborat­ion with Republican­s, including Sen. John McCain.

Clinton’s tenure in the Senate included the fateful vote on a resolution that authorized the Iraq War. Based in part on faulty Bush administra­tion intelligen­ce, she was one of 77 senators who cast an approving vote. She has since termed the decision a mistake from which she learned. (For the record, the Daily News supported the vote on the same mistaken grounds.)

As President Obama’s secretary of state, from 2009 to 2013, Clinton stood tall for backing his high-risk decision to deploy Navy SEALs in the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden.

When, in 2012, Hamas rockets battered Israel, her hard-nosed diplomacy brokered a ceasefire that saved both Israeli and Palestinia­n lives. That the two parties resumed hostilitie­s two years later does not detract from the accomplish­ment.

On Syria — where the killing of almost a half-million souls and the displaceme­nt of millions more add up to the biggest blot on the Obama foreign policy — Clinton unsuccessf­ully pressed

no election in our lifetimes has produced a clearer choice: Clinton over trump, urgently and by acclamatio­n.

for the U.S. to funnel arms to rebels during a critical early period before the conflict spiraled out of control.

As Clinton correctly assessed in a 2014 interview, “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originator­s of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularist­s, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled."

In neighborin­g Iraq, Clinton backed the Pentagon’s plan to leave a larger residual American force in country — another measure that might have blocked the rise of ISIS.

An extensive analysis of Clinton’s tenure published this year said that a “fundamenta­l tension” between Clinton and Obama was “a defining feature of her four-year tenure as secretary of state."

Mark Landler wrote in The New York Times: “In the administra­tion’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concession­s to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationsh­ip. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, ‘I’m not giving up anything for nothing.’ ”

This is not to suggest by any means that we find all of Clinton’s record praisewort­hy.

As one noteworthy example, Clinton supports Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

While she did admirable work pressing Russia, China and the European Union to enforce crippling economic sanctions that dragged the mullahs to the negotiatin­g table, the pact completed after she left the State Department leaves Iran on the brink of atomic weapon capability and sets the stage for the rogue regime to go nuclear in the coming years, thus becoming an existentia­l threat to Israel.

Clinton’s record and campaign positions strongly suggest stronger global leadership than exercised by the present commander in chief — tempered by hard-won wisdom about using military power. As she said in 2014, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

All in all, Clinton approaches America’s role in the world more muscularly than the current commander-in-chief. While she looks to diplomacy first, Clinton is fully comfortabl­e with the vigorous exercise of American power to try to make the world a more stable and secure place.

And given her demonstrat­ed toughness, Clinton is ideally positioned to enforce an agreement on which her predecesso­r’s foreign policy legacy — and her own — will hinge.

Wisely, she calls for strengthen­ing, not abandoning allies — including those in NATO who have good reason to wonder whether Trump would treat the indispensa­ble global alliance as an annoyance.

She has committed to vigorous enforcemen­t of every letter of the Iranian nuclear deal, would be ideally equipped to rebuild a relationsh­ip with Israel that Obama has left in tatters, has pledged to get tougher on China and offers extensive, intelligen­t anti-ISIS plans.

Of paramount importance, Clinton would bring both courage and judgment to the White House. Trump has shown neither.

SHE’LL TAKE ACTION TO HEAL THE NATION

While running for the presidency in 1999, George W. Bush promised America, “I am a uniter, not a divider.” Making his debut on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, Obama inspiringl­y told the country that “there is not a liberal America and a conservati­ve America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

Today, as his two terms come to a close, Obama leads a country afflicted with alarmingly bitter fissures — many of them worsened by Trump’s demagoguer­y. Of the two candidates, Clinton possesses by far the better temperamen­t and experience for serving as that desperatel­y needed balm.

Admittedly, Clinton the healer is a dubious propositio­n for many Americans. Remember, though, that she has been therapeuti­cally humbled by tough fights against both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, as well as by the continuing self-inflicted wounds produced by her email server.

To her marrow, Clinton surely understand­s that her only hope of winning broader public confidence would be to deliver in the White House.

This is said to be a “change” election — with everyone seeming to want his or her own version of the word.

We would be happy with a presidency that elevates results over histrionic partisan warfare — and we suspect that much of country would feel pretty good about such a government.

Like her or loathe her, Clinton buys into the job descriptio­n. Who knows what Trump buys into, beyond the mirror?

Throughout the campaign, Clinton has indicated that she would generally stay the course set by President Obama, who, in a cynical era, basks in the glow of remarkable 55% approval ratings.

In crucial ways, however, she would represent a welcome break from Obama, whose innate aversion to political dealmaking and poor choice of battles helped paralyze Washington.

Throughout her career, and to the consternat­ion of many in her party, Clinton has been a savvy tactician. Enemies on the right caricature her as a secret socialist while she has been hammered on the left for supposed coziness with Wall Street. On both sides, some view her as a poll-tested triangulat­or.

In fact, Clinton has always been guided by mainstream Democratic principles, while being appropriat­ely flexible about how she can nudge Washington from point A to point Z — which necessaril­y means bipartisan­ship in a divided country.

Having been First Lady in a White House where consensus trumped ideologica­l purity, having exhibited as senator a willingnes­s to work with Republican­s, having served four years in a administra­tion hobbled by partisan paralysis, Clinton has the potential to usher in constructi­ve consensus-building.

No illusions: Expecting to hold the House, Republican­s have telegraphe­d plans to launch multiple anti-Clinton investigat­ions. Still more, Senate GOP leaders have pledged to block all Clinton Supreme Court nomination­s.

Even so, victory — the more solid the better — would position Clinton to win action on behalf of the working and middle classes by addressing the interests both of her ideologica­l foes and of all the Americans who are furious that Washington catered to a corrupt, elite establishm­ent while condescend­ingly dismissing their needs and beliefs.

Donald Trump is all about selling a single repulsivel­y flawed product: himself.

Hillary Clinton is no saleswoman. Instead, she is a doer who has a historic chance to prove that the U.S. government can actually work to the benefit of its citizen bosses.

No election in our lifetimes has produced a clearer choice: Clinton over Trump, urgently and by acclamatio­n.

where Clinton is running on solid substance, trump has claimed anger and false business prowess as the basis of his candidacy. his race is all about him. her race is all about america’s future.

 ??  ?? In her first year as senator from New York, Hillary Clinton tours Ground Zero in September 2001. She helped craft legislativ­e response to 9/11 attacks but also made much-criticized vote to OK war in Iraq.
In her first year as senator from New York, Hillary Clinton tours Ground Zero in September 2001. She helped craft legislativ­e response to 9/11 attacks but also made much-criticized vote to OK war in Iraq.
 ??  ?? As First Lady in 1995, Hillary Clinton made bold defense of women’s rights in China speech – and she has been a champion on social issues to this day.
As First Lady in 1995, Hillary Clinton made bold defense of women’s rights in China speech – and she has been a champion on social issues to this day.
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 ??  ?? Secretary of State Clinton’s presence in tense White House Situation Room with President Obama as Osama Bin Laden was being killed in 2011 made for an iconic photo – and gives her the obvious edge in foreign policy credential­s.
Secretary of State Clinton’s presence in tense White House Situation Room with President Obama as Osama Bin Laden was being killed in 2011 made for an iconic photo – and gives her the obvious edge in foreign policy credential­s.

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