Dick Morris: 9 reasons to reject Hillary

Here are nine reasons why electing Hillary Clinton as president would be a mistake.

1. She is a hawk who will get us into another war. Clinton is instinctively a hawk and is always very quick to urge the use of force. She backed involvement in Iraq, Syria and Libya. By temperament, she has a bias toward sharp, decisive action, is impatient with delay and terrified of appearing weak. She likes to be the tough guy.

2. She tends to follow certain advisers slavishly, almost to the exclusion of her own views. She has always had a guru to lead her. Bill Clinton is the standby. But, at various times in her life, Hillary Clinton has followed Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster, Mandy Grunwald, Ira Magaziner, Sandy Berger, Sidney Blumenthal, Mark Penn and others.

{mosads}She doesn’t just take their advice, she adopts their method of thinking and becomes completely dependent on them. They become her brain. She will follow that person to the ends of the earth and only “wake up” when she is shocked by an event like the loss of Congress in 1994 or her defeat in 2008 to reconsider her devotion to the guru.

3. She has no knowledge of economics, nor much interest in it. Economics has always been Bill Clinton’s turf. The former first lady neither knows much about it nor cares much. She has avoided studying it and has no clear ideas or theories concerning it. She tends to feel that it is a technocratic function best left to the experts, a view common to those reared in the arrogance of the Keynesians of the ’60s and ’70s.

4. She has no deep sense of who she is. Hillary Clinton is endlessly adaptable. She can be anyone she has to be. Many politicians adopt protective coloration as a survival strategy. But Clinton does not just wear a disguise. She has no anchor, no real sense of who she really is. 

5. Her worldview is shaped by her grudges. Nobody has a longer enemies list than Clinton, nor one kept so closely at hand. Slights are never forgotten and usually trigger a childish silent treatment as punishment. One can, for example, see her repeating President Obama’s behavior toward Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — foreign policy by grudge.

6. Her fundraising has totally compromised her freedom of action. Nobody is as bound to the status quo as Clinton, tied down by millions of special-interest donations. Like Gulliver, these strings come from almost every industry in every country in the world. 

Many candidates take office owing a lot to their donors. But this is different.

Bill and Hillary Clinton personally raised almost all the donations. They were in on the deal, gave the appropriate speeches, made the needed policy decisions and charmed the right people to get the money. So their involvement with donors is greater than if they had worked only through bundlers.

And much of the money went to them personally, not their foundation or committees, making them that much more indebted.

7. She is paranoid and suspicious. Presidential historian James David Barber defined presidents based, in part, on whether they enjoyed serving. Bill Clinton did. Hillary Clinton will not. Her sense of enemies closing in on her will overwhelm her. She will feel under siege, like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover, making her dark, sullen, secretive and surly.

8. She approved NSA wiretapping of foreign leaders. As secretary of State, she had to be aware that the U.S. was wiretapping the cellphones of foreign leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel. It is very hard to suppose that we would tap the phone of one of our key allies without the approval of the secretary of State.

9. Her contempt for the press is legendary and will lead to more and more secrets. Can anyone disagree with this?

Electing Hillary Clinton would be a big mistake — more reasons to follow.

Morris, who served as adviser to former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former President Clinton, is the author of 17 books, including his latest, Power Grab: Obama’s Dangerous Plan for a One Party Nation and Here Come the Black Helicopters. To get all of his and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to dickmorris.com.