He likes Hillary
I am an independent voter and I am voting for Hillary Clinton for president. Why?
Experience. With the challenges we will be facing over the next four years we need a president who has experience in all aspects of government including domestic and international. She served with distinction in the Senate from 2000 to 2009 and as Secretary of State 2009 to 2013. She has championed laudable social causes over her entire life to try to improve the lot of children, women, and families. She is smart, open to input from others, and skilled in gaining consensus.
Her positions are pragmatic, based on evidence, and seek to benefit Americans of all social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. Read her web site as I have. The positions described there are thorough and make sense given the realities we face. A short list of issues addressed includes: economic development, job creation, healthcare, global climate change, education effectiveness and affordability, our nation’s infrastructure, support of our veterans, campaign finance reform, military defense, protection against terrorism, racial and religious tolerance, housing, and support for rural America, etc.. To me her heart seems to be in the right place.
She has made her most recent federal tax returns public. There is nothing about her finances that are hidden. Her life has been an open book for years.
She has been under attack by the forces of the right forever it seems and admit it - the attacks were due to her likelihood to be a presidential candidate. Yet she has remained attentive to her obligations, effective at her job, and committed to America. Her personal life has certainly not been a bed of roses yet she has remained committed to her marriage and her family.
She admits she erred in co-mingling government and personal e-mails on the server in her home. I don’t know all the reasons she operated this way. Perhaps it was concern over the security of government systems (at least five break-ins of government systems 2006 to 2010 including the Chelsea Manning transfer of highly sensitive information to Wikileaks in 2010). To my knowledge her private server was never hacked. The server was physically located in a house guarded by the Secret Service. Alleged mishandling of classified documents is another issue.
Of 30,000 e-mails examined by the FBI three were found to contain a paragraph in the e-mail string that was partially labeled as classified. A “c” in parenthesis was adjacent to the paragraph. The major required labeling — full text labels at the top and bottom of the page - were missing. Should Hillary Clinton be held responsible for not noting this incomplete label in a paragraph in three of the 30,000 messages in the e-mail streams in question? The Republican Director of the FBI ruled that it did not rise to the level of a crime. I am in no position to judge otherwise. I am aware of no evidence that sensitive national security information was made known to our enemies due to this issue.
In conclusion, I am going to vote for experience, knowledge, wisdom, consensus building, evidence-based decision making and acknowledgment of the true issues challenging us today. In this election that would be Hillary Clinton. My descendants deserve no less.
Charles Davis
Columbia Falls