After seven long and disastrous years, Hillary is not the change we have been waiting for

I have always admired Republicans and Democrats who were willing to stand up and speak out against candidates or elected officials of their own party when they believed those candidates or officials were acting unethically, immorally, or unadvisedly. To put country in front of party strikes me as the most patriotic thing you can do, especially when the person or persons speaking up are highly vested in their party.

Republicans who oppose George W. Bush and his war in Iraq have shown courage, as did Robert Byrd and others who condemned Bill Clinton for his behavior in the oval office.

I wasn't sure I could do the same. Even though I have no power or status within the Democratic Party, and therefore my view matters very little, I always thought I would support Democrats because the alternative to me was unthinkable. However, with the recent behavior of the Clintons that has changed. Just as I have been unable to bear listening to or looking at George W. Bush these last seven years, I have found myself becoming nauseous each time I see Hillary or Bill on the TV screen.

I can't believe how far I have come.

When this campaign began, I liked a lot of the candidates, including Hillary. I always thought it a bit unseemly that she was running, being a former First Lady and the wife of a president. And I had no illusions. I saw her as a calculating politician who planned her run for the presidency while her husband was still in office by running for a Senate seat in New York, even though she had never lived there, knowing it would be a great launching pad for her eventual campaign. However, I thought she was smart and capable. I always thought the attacks on her and her husband were unfair and I was willing to overlook her raw ambition. I even kind of liked the idea of finally having a female president.

But now I cannot even stand to look at her. She promotes ideas I tend to agree with, but she acts no different from George W. Bush when it comes to political machinations and attacks on opponents, even opponents of her own party. And her husband's behavior has been outrageous, and unseemly for a former president.

Hillary has shown that she is willing to do whatever it takes to win, including changing the rules laid down by the Democratic Party regarding Michigan and Florida, rules she agreed to, using superdelegates to overturn the will of the people, and now trying to peal off delegates won by Obama in caucuses and primaries.

What Hillary seems not to grasp, and what Obama gets, is that the people who despise George W. Bush and who have been in despair over the direction of our country for the past seven years, have not had those feelings solely because of Bush policies they disagree with. In fact, they have felt both despair for the country and contempt for the president because the president cannot be trusted, because he violates rules and laws, because he is more interested in himself and his own power than the well being of the people.

I don't care how brilliant Hillary is, nor how enlightened her policy positions, if her ethics and her political maneuvering serve only to enhance her bank account and her power, while they overrule the will of the people, she is no better than George W. Bush.

The country has waited seven years to put someone in the White House they can trust, admire, and look up to. And it isn't Hillary. If she becomes president, and we have to wait another four years, or even eight to renew our country and rescue our democracy from deceitful, calculating and narcissistic politicians who care nothing for the people, I fear we might never recover.

The best possible thing that could happen to our country in the next few weeks is for the people to send a message loud and clear to Hillary Clinton:

Your time has passed.

It is time for you to exit gracefully and let the next generation repair the damage that you, your husband and George W. Bush have done to this country.

I may not support Hillary Clinton

With the Democratic race tightening, and Obama taking over the lead in pledged delegates, Hillary Clinton is seeing her dream of inevitability slip away.

However, she is working hard on two possible strategies to help her win the nomination, even if Barack has more pledged delegates by the end of the primary season.

One strategy is to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, which were punished by the Democratic Party for moving their primary date up. Simply put, the Democratic Party warned Florida and Michigan not to move up their primaries as everyone had agreed to let Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina (each representing a different part of the country and a different demographic) go first, with all the other states allowed to choose any date after that. These states violated that agreement and so their delegates will not count. All the candidates were on board with this and all agreed not to campaign in these states. All the candidates but Hillary took their names off of the Michigan ballot, while all the names remained on the Florida ballot. Hillary "won" both contests.

Now Hillary's campaign is working hard to seat these delegates anyway although, had Obama won in those states, her campaign would be doing just the opposite: demanding the delegations not be seated. Hillary and her surrogates are saying things like "we need Florida and Michigan to win in November so we can't dismiss them now" and "unless we seat these delegates we will be disenfranchising African Americans." Never mind that they didn't say this before Florida and Michigan held their primaries. Never mind that they agreed with the rules ahead of time. Now that Hillary Clinton has "won," but more importantly now that she is losing in overall delegate votes, she wants to change the rules.

This is about as unfair as it gets. First you take one side in a controversy, than when it is to your advantage, you switch sides. (Kind of like Hillary's Iraq War vote.)

As my mother always says: two wrongs don't make a right. Maybe it was wrong for the DNC to punish Michigan and Florida with this rule, but it is even more wrong to change the rule after the voting. It's like agreeing to play only seven innings of a pick-up baseball game and then when you are losing, to insist that seven innings are unfair and everyone knows baseball games must be nine innnings.

Hillary may have "won" in Michigan and Florida, but only because there was no campaigning in either state (Obama always wins over voters when he can speak to them directly) and when only Hillary's name was on the ballot in Michigan. When the voters in Michigan couldn't even vote for Obama, and when voters in both states knew their votes wouldn't count anyway, many of them may have stayed home. The dynamic could have been completely different if the voters: a) got to see and hear the candidates; b) saw all the candidates' names on the ballot; and c) knew their vote counted.

There are suggestions in the party that Michigan and Florida should have another primary or at least a caucus, but this may not be feasible. If there is money to pay for such a scenario, it should be done. If not, the rules that everyone agreed upon should stand and Hillary should stop trying to game the system.

Her second option is to get more superdelegates than Obama and thus steal the nomination from him even if he wins the most elected delegates, the most states, and the popular vote. If she does this, and accepts the nomination, it would be unconscionable. It would also lead to a John McCain victory in November, as I predict millions of Democrats will refuse to vote for her. At first, I thought such a refusal would be self-destructive and that Democrats should all agree to vote for their nominee, whomever it was. However, if Hillary wins the nomination by cheating, she deserves to lose to John McCain. Of course, I don't want a Republican in the White House, and I hate the idea of radically conservative Supreme Court nominees, but a Democratic Senate with a spine (and with Obama taking a leadership role it just might get a spine) could prevent that, and after four more years of quagmire in Iraq and an economy that isn't what it could be, Obama can defeat McCain in his run for a second term.

If Hillary wins fair and square, I will support her. If she wins by cheating, I will not. She won't deserve it, and her willingness to break the rules to win does not portend well for her presidency. I simply will not trust her to be my president.