Dear Jeff: Part One

A response in two parts. 

Part One. 

There is a Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton and it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Mitt Romney. 

Most of what shapes your opinion of Clinton isn’t true. Rather, it’s truthy, and the direct result of a 30-year-long smear campaign, very little of which has ever turned out to be true. It’s the way that many Democrats still think George W. Bush went AWOL during Vietnam even though the documents alleging it were almost immediately debunked and the way some liberals think Romney paid $0 in federal taxes because Harry Reid said so. Accusations get a lot of coverage, particularly in partisan media; debunking gets almost none.

This is what I do for a living, so I end up having to read everything. I don’t design jet engines or treat patients or program software or fill cavities five days a week. I do this.* I like to joke that I read more National Review and American Spectator in any given week than most of my Republican friends combined. I’m not sure that’s healthy. But the one nice thing is I get to see the debunking. (And of course some things, like Ted Cruz's truly nasty behavior in Congress, I see firsthand, no journalistic source required.)

I doubt you think Clinton ordered the CIA to kill Chris Stevens to cover up Vince Foster’s murder because he found out the Iranians were invested in a Whitewater scheme to sell fetal tissue. (Though I will bet that all the mud that's been slung still profoundly shapes your gut feelings about her anyway.) But I also don't care all that much if you do think those things. I'm not writing any of this to change your mind. 

But I’ll tell you anyway why Romney is the right parallel:

Both are close to Wall Street, which makes them suspect to their populist wings. Both were passionately supported by only a few niche groups of voters (Mormons, millionaires; movement feminists, African Americans over 50) but slowly won/are likely to win support from the rest of the party because of perceived electability. Unlike Donald Trump, both are weak public speakers, more prone to nuanced answers than pithy ones, more likely to split hairs ad infinitum than to give an easy black-or-white answer. (I tend to like nuance, personally, which is why I’m no fan of Bernie Sanders.) 

Both were ambitious, but not unusually so. By which I mean: Clinton ran for Senate from a state she had no connection to as a launching pad for a presidential run. Romney spent one whole year of his four as governor outside of Massachusetts while he went to fundraisers and laid the groundwork for his presidential run. But neither has a Ted Cruz-esque history of stabbing friends in the back for political gain. Both worked hard to build ties with the other party, for instance. (The dirty little secret for Republican senators is that they actually worked pretty well with her. Trent Lott (the former Republican leader in the Senate) was quoted last year as saying: “I think Hillary, I’m not going to be for her, but I think she would be much better about reaching out and actually trying to work with the Congress.” And he’s not the only one.)

If Clinton wins, it’s not going to be the end of the world as you know it. It’ll be disappointing, in the same way that a Romney win would have been disappointing to me, but it'll be survivable. What progressives hate most about her is her incremental (dare I say, conservative?) approach to change. Donald Trump, as you know, is very different. If we were to rework your chart, it would look more like this:

Donald Trump: isn't the woman I've grown up despising even as her actual policy positions aren't all that dissimilar from what was mainstream Republicanism just a few years ago.

Hillary Clinton:

Isn’t going to start a war because someone insults the size of her "hands." 

Isn't going to buddy up to Putin. 

Isn't going to launch drone attacks on journalists she doesn’t like. 

Isn’t going to ban an entire religious group from entering the US (like, say, banning Christians every time a Christian shoots up a movie theater or a school, even though doing so would make me feel safer). 

Isn't going to egg on her supporters to violently attack protesters at her rallies.

Well, the list goes on like that. 

So I guess the question I have not just for you but for all of my Republican friends who've grown up hating Hillary Clinton, when push comes to shove this November, are you going to vote for the man who isn't sure whether he should disavow white supremacists, who is absolutely sure that an entire religion "hates us" and ought to be banned from entering the country, who brands Mexicans as criminals and rapists?

*UPDATE
A friend teased that I was making her feel lazy for not reading hours of original sources. No, no, I told her, you've got it exactly backwards. Someone gives me a paycheck and benefits package and 50 hours a week to research politics and policy. I'm significantly lazier than the average politically-aware citizen who does this in his or her free time. In six years when I'm a marine biologist or a noir fiction writer or a beekeeper, you'll ask me what I think of the president and I'll say "remind me again, who's the president now?"