What Makes Hillary Run?

There she goes, again. 

Hillary Clinton recently said something that will turn around and bite the Democratic Party, and - thanks to Donald Trump and his endless controversies - it was almost pushed into the dead zone which exists somewhere between pages 11 and 32 of our larger newspapers.

What did she say? Well, she told an audience in India that while she lost lots of states in the middle of the nation, she did win in the biggest states on the East Coast and the West Coast, states which produce two-thirds of our nation’s gross domestic product.

Well, thanks to the Washington Post, her comments didn’t completely vanish. She said the states which voted for her were the states that were economically advanced, more dynamic and more forward-looking.

She didn’t call the other states less progressive and less wealthy, or the home of the Deplorables - although she might well have - but she did say they were filled with people who hated and feared women and minorities.

Just the right thing to say in a year that Democrats are trying to take back Congress.

Well, after I got done wincing - I was only able to regain my balance by watching Sarah Huckabee Sanders for a few minutes -I mused for a whole hour on Hillary and her problem. Why can’t she stop? It’s the same question the Press has been asking, and I think that it is the wrong question. It should be “why should we expect her to?”

I had been viewing Hillary as the flip side of Donald Trump - he dumb and popular (at least at first) and she smart and unable to connect with half the nation. Then the LED flare went off in my head (I’ve upgraded from light bulbs). They aren’t opposites. They are the same.

Clearly, they didn’t start that way. Their backgrounds are as different as they could be. But, something happened. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you see in some movies - the war movie where the kind and innocent young soldier decides the only way to fight the vicious enemy is to become like them, or the honest cop who gets an undercover assignment and ends up being just like the bloodthirsty gang members.

Hillary Clinton as Michael Corleone? Well, even with her long, complex relationship with her husband and our former president, that might be a bit of a push.

Still, neither of them can see the small picture. They can see parts of the Big Picture - where are we going as a nation,  what are we doing right and wrong - but they have long passed the time when they could see individual people and realize what our economy and our government are doing to them.

It’s the same problem the media has when it talks about tax reform and the impact on the average family, forgetting that none of us are average and the still-evolving tax changes (just what, exactly, did that regulation mean, asks the IRS people who must enforce it) will impact all of us differently.

Now, in my life as a reporter, I crossed paths with Hillary Clinton several times. Watched her walk by as she and her husband, the President, flew into Westhampton Beach. Saw her work the crowd at a big-ticket fundraiser. Watched her meeting for an hour or so with farmers from Eastern Long Island (almost all of them Republicans, but her constituents) to discuss their need for seasonal workers and their problems with proposed new pesticide regulations.

She smiled the same smile that all candidates and their spouses smile when they walk past the press. She touched hands and whispered a brief greeting quite properly as she figuratively collected checks. 

And she absolutely glowed as she and the farmers sank deeper and deeper into the technical issues involved in controlling the unwanted and accidental spread of pesticides and the impressive system (integrated pest management, if you must know) that allowed farmers to use less pesticides and get better control for their crops. She knew more than enough to keep up with them.

Yes, she is a wonk. And, she believes so deeply in her graphs and charts and analytics that there is no room to look at the side of the road and see what is happening to the people who are bypassed. Kinda the same thing that happened to her when she was trying to bring health care to the nation.

Trump, meanwhile, believes his own press releases. The ones he writes himself. Deep in his heart, he believes all those Russians got together with him only to discuss Soviet orphans. All the rest was just coincidental.

He listens to Fox News and he has no patience to read long briefing papers or to study the subtleties of building a great wall on the border with Mexico. No, he just sees the big picture of a strong President protecting the nation from a mostly non-existent threat, and leaves the details to others. That has always been his job in the Trump organization, and nothing has really happened to make him change now.

Perhaps that’s why I like local government so much. There is something magical about people making decisions in small villages or towns where the people who make the decisions for the municipality come face to face with the voters every week in the supermarket or library or at the school.

It’s why a lot of people who get elected to county or state office, or who get elected to Congress or go to work for a large government agency start to see the people they work for - you and me and everyone else - as groups, not individuals.

Officials can take polls to find out what the public thinks, and they can go out to meetings where they are treated as visiting royalty - “It is an honor and a privilege to introduce Councilman Jones, who is on the town parks committee...” - but when they stop seeing people as people who have to deal with their big picture on a very personal level, things change.

You really can’t tell some people face-to-face that some other people 10 miles away are getting a new park while they are getting an expanded landfill, no matter what the big picture says about transportation and expansion costs. 

It’s why a lot of elected officials know that the bag of good will they earn when they are first elected just keeps getting emptier and emptier as time goes on. And, sometimes there is nothing left.

So, let’s look again at Hillary and The Donald. She could be comfortable (her net worth was estimated at $47 million last year by Forbes) but she is driven, and driven hard, by a desire to be right. Donald, I think, is driven by an endless maw of revenge, fed by a sense of inadequacy. Run out of enemies, and just keep fighting the old ones, or go out and attack your supporters, until there is no one left on the sled to throw to the wolves.

Maybe they both should go away on a long, long vacation. Or get therapy, or just play golf. 

We could use the rest.