A Hillary Presidency

As things stand now, I would judge it more likely than not that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. I suppose we might have a Brexit-like surprise, or Wikileaks might release an “October surprise” – something so damming from all the hacked Clinton files and emails that even yellow-dog Democrats would have to rethink their support.  But that seems unlikely. Trump’s campaign seems to stumble from one error to the next, and Hillary seems finally to have learned Napoleon’s maxim: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake”. Every time there is another damaging revelation about Hillary – which is almost daily – Trump manages to upstage the news cycle with another dumb statement so that the Hillary revelation loses its punch.

So what might we expect from a Clinton presidency? She certainly won’t have a mandate from the voters, most of whom voted against her crazy opponent rather than for her. She also is highly unlikely to have a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and perhaps not even a veto-proof majority in the Senate. So she will face the same Republican obstructionism that Obama has been facing the past six years, except that many Republicans in Congress hate her more than they hated Obama.

Nor will the bad news about her questionable ethics stop coming just because the election is over.  In fact, once there isn’t Trump to distract everyone, her questionable past dealings, especially with the pay-for-access issues with the Clinton Foundation, will probably continue to fester.

On foreign policy she will no doubt remain a hawk, meaning she will likely get us even more involved in the Middle East wars.  The Saudi Arabian royal family are heavy supporters of her campaign and the Clinton Foundation slush fund, and she is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds her so generously, so presumably she will tailor her policies in that area to support them.  That actually may be a bit difficult for her, because as Secretary of State she supported the Iran deal, which the Saudis vehemently opposed, and which they blame for Iran’s new aggressiveness.

On domestic policy she espouses the standard economically-unsustainable Democratic progressive ideas that have been failing so miserably for years.  Consider that almost all the big cities in the US have been governed by Democrats for decades – and almost all of them are in terrible financial straits, with bankrupt public pension funds, endemic corruption, miserable school systems controlled by powerful teacher’s unions, dangerous racial tensions, and crumbling infrastructures.  I never fault progressives for trying new ideas to improve things, but I do fault them for never paying attention to whether those new ideas are working or not.

Needless to say, I don't expect her to propose any legislation that would seriously inconveniences the Wall Street firms who paid her so handsomely for her speeches.

She will face several very serious problems early in her tenure. Obamacare, despite the repeated, almost hysterical denials by the administration and its supporters, is crumbling fast. Obamacare insurance rates for next year will rise 30-40% or more in a number of states. Aetna, United Healthcare, Humana, and Blue Cross are all withdrawing from most of the markets next year because they are losing so much money. 12 of the 23 original federally-financed Obamacare state insurance co-ops have already gone bankrupt (costing the taxpayers $2.5 billion), and 8 more of those remaining 11 are expected to fail this year. It’s getting pretty hard to ignore the collapse, even for those who are determined to keep their heads in the sand.

The job market will continue to be weak, due mostly to automation but also a bit due to the trade agreements that she supported so strongly as Secretary of State (but now says she opposes). So the anger that fueled the Bernie Sanders movement will continue to dog her.  She has made lots of vague promises, but in fact the president has relatively little control over these events, so she will get blamed – whether fairly or not - by a large and angry portion of the population when those promises come to nothing.

Internationally, besides the long-standing Middle East mess and the increasing unhelpful influence of Iran and Russia in that part of the world, she will have to contend with the increasingly aggressive Chinese in the South China Sea, continuing Russian provocations along its borders, and especially in the Ukraine, the weakness of NATO, the weakness and upheavals in the European Union, and continuing terrorist activities across the world.

Finally, she will have to deal with her health problems. Her campaign continues to insist that she is fine, but clearly she isn’t fine. She looks wildly different from day to day, so something about her medication and/or her metabolism is swinging wildly from day to day.  A few insiders have admitted privately that she suffers from serious mood swings, and is even at times incoherent.  She manages to hide this in public, but the stresses of the job will take their toll, so whatever it is she is suffering from will probably get worse during her term as president.  She isn’t the first presidential candidate, by the way, to lie about her condition. We now know President Kennedy, when he was a candidate, paid four physicians to give him a clean bill of health when they knew he suffered from colitis, prostatitis, and Addison's disease, among other conditions, and took painkillers, antianxiety agents, stimulants and sleeping pills, as well as hormones, in order to function.

Of course, she may not really care. She will have achieved her goal - to become the first female president of the United States.  And no doubt she and Bill will  enrich themselves handsomely during her time in office, and even after, from the access the two of them can sell.