[Clutchpoll 2016] Donald Trump vs. Hillary Rodham Clinton

Brown and Miranda still sticking in your craw? Honestly, this judicial argument is exhausting from either side. We will hit 25 trillion in debt and 20,000 in WOT casualties arguing about confirmation hearings the way we wasted the Cold War peace dividend arguing about abortion and gay marriage.

 

For the WOT US military casualties to hit 20k they would have to more than triple the total number. I'm pretty sure that would take a REALLY long time.

 

There's your problem right there with our entire 21st century society, in a nutshell.

Hyperbole.

It would be really nice if we could actually find our way back to rational, reasoned arguments. Anyone who say Clinton has NO chance of being a decent President is really a simple-minded dolt. And especially the moronic crack about being a decent human being. This is why we can't even have normal, intelligent discussions on here anymore.

 

Question for you - do you believe Hillary did a good job as Secretary of State?

 

His foreign policy includes ordering war crimes, he's shown that he doesn't even understand how treaties, trade agreements, and govt. works. I'm not sure how you think he stands a chance.

 

Did previous d and d polls have that many third party and no voters?

 

Define good job.

Here's 2 points- what will most likely happen is that you will disagree completely with the first one (except the parts where he criticizes Clinton) and agree completely with the 2nd (oh, you'll love that one- it sounds like you wrote it) because everything you stand for politically is filtered through extreme bias.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...daf9c0-e5d4-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html

Was Hillary Clinton a good secretary of state?
By Walter Russell Mead May 30, 2014

Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace professor of foreign affairs at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest. He is the author of “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.”

A forthcoming memoir, speculation about a presidential run, enemies stoking scandal, friends protecting Brand Hillary — it’s business as usual in Clinton World. And with the publication of “Hard Choices,” the fight over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s years as secretary of state is likely to grow more heated and polarizing than State Department post-mortems usually get.

So how does one rate the performance of Madame Secretary? The conventional indicators — landmark treaties, a new doctrine, signature deals — are actually poor guides to assessing the caliber of American diplomats. Just as the best lawyers aren’t the ones with the most famous courthouse victories but those who quietly keep their clients out of trouble and litigation, belt-notching in diplomacy has led presidents and secretaries of state into trouble. When American diplomats restlessly roam land and sea, desperate for that Nobel-worthy moment, the national interest is rarely served.

Remember that secretaries of state don’t control U.S. foreign policy. Clinton wasn’t following her own grand strategy when she reigned in Foggy Bottom; her job was to implement President Obama’s ideas. To make a fair and useful assessment of Clinton’s record in office, one must consider some complicated questions:

How did Clinton understand the interplay of America’s power, its interests, its resources and its values? Was she able to translate that vision into policies that won enough support throughout the government to be carried out? Was she able to gain or keep the president’s confidence, and was the State Department under her leadership able to hold its own in the bureaucratic battles of the day? To the extent that her policy ideas were adopted, how effective were they? How well did she manage on the inevitable occasions when things went horribly wrong?

First, Clinton is what I call a Hamiltonian, believing that America’s interests are best served by an adaptation of traditional British strategies: sea power, commercial expansion and a focus on strategic theaters in world politics. She thinks that Asia is where America’s interests are most vitally engaged for the long term, and she consistently argued for a greater focus on the region in our foreign policy. The pursuit of a balance of power in Asia will naturally focus on China, but Clinton is a realist who believes that the United States and China can reach a genuine accommodation based on economic interests and a common desire to avoid war. (She also believes that technology industries are the engines of economic growth and a chief field of competition among states, as in the battle between the American and Chinese visions of Internet governance.)

Traditional Anglo-American geopolitical thought is not Clinton’s only inheritance from the past. She also shares the optimism about America found in the Methodist religious tradition in which she grew up. The spirit of the 19th-century missionaries who fanned out across the world to promote development, human rights, and social and economic reform lives in her and shapes her basic thoughts about what American power is for. For some realists, “global meliorism” — the belief that U.S. foreign policy can and should try to make a better world — is a dirty word. For Clinton, it is a bedrock conviction. “We are the force for progress, prosperity and peace,” she said during a remarkable speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in early 2013.

This combination makes Clinton an American exceptionalist: She believes that the United States has been called to a unique role in leading the world, and that the American state and the American people, at home and abroad, can be powerful instruments for good.

Of course, as Colin Powell and Cordell Hull learned, a secretary of state without presidential support has trouble getting much done. How successful was Clinton in winning and holding the confidence of her chief and in persuading Obama to accept her ideas as the basis for foreign policy?

While she did not win all the battles she fought — the president resisted her counsel on Syria, and she failed to persuade him to back Richard Holbrooke’s diplomatic efforts in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region — she managed the relationship successfully and won his trust, to the point that the president wanted her to stay on the job well into his second term. This outcome was not a given; Clinton’s association with Obama began in their bitter 2008 Democratic nominating contest, and her success at building a strong relationship with a president not known for embracing new friends or Washington insiders testifies to her formidable interpersonal skills.

Similarly, her strong ties with former defense secretary Robert M. Gates and former CIA chief David H. Petraeus ensured that the State Department was rarely isolated in the policy process. And while other Cabinet departments sometimes resisted her efforts to assert State’s primacy on issues of interest to them, she was more successful than many of her recent predecessors at ensuring that her agency had a voice at the table for key discussions on economic diplomacy and counterterrorism.

Clinton relied on these relationships to magnify her impact on U.S. foreign policy. Although the Obama White House has centralized more power than any of its predecessors, and although Clinton always worked under the eyes of the president’s staff, she made substantial progress toward building American policy around some of her key ideas.

New ideas
Two elements of Clinton’s statecraft are often wrongly dismissed as secondary to true diplomacy: her emphasis on the empowerment of women and her push to move beyond government-to-government engagement to work with civil society. Neither concept was original to Clinton; interest in women’s rights abroad has been a feature of U.S. global engagement since the early 19th century, when American missionaries denounced foot-binding in China and launched literacy programs for women and girls across the Middle East. And Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy” was an early effort to convert the State Department into a more activist organization with a broader social and political mission.

Clinton’s focus on the rights of women and girls, a hallmark of her international profile since her appearance at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, is more than idealism or feminism. It reflects her convictions about the nature of American power and the direction of history. The industrial and information revolutions have created conditions in which more women can overcome limits on their freedom; to the degree that women (and sexual minorities) succeed in asserting themselves, they will support the emergence of the kind of world Americans want to live in.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s emphasis on Internet freedom and connectivity, together with a focus on training civil society actors, came alive in the State Department and USAID’s work with democracy activists and human rights organizers in authoritarian countries such as Tunisia and Egypt. They developed technological work-arounds to curtail the ability of national governments to close down the Internet during times of civil unrest; they trained and promoted female leaders in countries dominated by tradition-minded rulers.

These ambitious new ideas — though not amounting to the Clinton “doctrine” foreign policy junkies hunger for — could come back to haunt us. The U.S. emphasis on human rights and democracy, as well as the active support for civil society organizations, contributed to China’s harsh response to the pivot to Asia and probably deepened Vladi*mir Putin’s view of the West as a danger to Russia. For Moscow and Beijing, Washington’s work to engage and strengthen democracy activists and movements represents an aggressive effort to undermine the Russian and Chinese regimes. And the push for changing gender relations allows Islamists to portray the United States as a threat to religious values. American opponents often fear ideological and cultural “aggression” as much as U.S. military power.

Shaping a legacy

Clinton was an influential secretary of state and a savvy manager with a clear agenda that, at least in part, she translated into policy. So how did it all work out?

The answer: Historians will probably consider Clinton significantly more successful than run-of-the-mill secretaries of state such as James G. Blaine or the long-serving Cordell Hull, but don’t expect to see her on a pedestal with Dean Acheson or John Quincy Adams anytime soon.

She weighed in hard and strong in favor of the president’s risky but ultimately justified decision to attack Osama bin Laden’s last refuge. The focus on Asia — relabeled a “pivot” before it became a “rebalancing” — reinvigorated America’s Pacific alliances but also elicited a more aggressive China, which has taken a harder line with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam since the pivot began. The “reset” with Russia enabled concrete cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program and at the United Nations (notably on the resolution authorizing intervention against Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi), but it would be hard to argue that Washington and Moscow have ended up in a good place. Here again the rhetoric of the “pivot to Asia” may have encouraged Putin to think that the United States was taking its eye off Russia’s revisionist ambitions.

In her new memoir, Clinton highlights her attempt to reorient U.S. foreign policy around “smart power” — the integration of military, political and economic tools with grass-roots outreach and efforts to strengthen civil society — but this approach also yielded mixed results. The outreach to Burma led to political reforms and helped move one of China’s closest regional allies closer to Washington. This was an important success, but continuing problems in Burma, including brutal violence against the country’s Rohingya minority, demonstrated the difficulty of integrating human rights with classic geopolitical strategies.

If Burma was a success of the Clinton approach, Egypt and Libya were sobering failures. Except in Tunisia, U.S. efforts to promote democracy after the Arab Spring were largely unsuccessful, with Egypt a particularly dramatic case. But the greatest problem for Clinton’s legacy is likely to be the miserable aftermath of the U.S.-backed overthrow of Gaddafi. Here, advocates of the Libya mission failed to take seriously one of the most important lessons of Iraq: When you overthrow a dictator in the Arab world, expect chaos and violence to follow. The mess in Libya — besides leading to the Benghazi attack that has entangled Clinton in congressional investigations and conspiracy theories — strengthened the voices in the administration opposing the more activist Syria policy Clinton promoted. It also deepened public resistance to more use of American military power abroad. This is not the legacy Clinton hoped to leave behind.

Of course, some of the problems U.S. foreign policy encountered during Clinton’s tenure cannot be laid at her door. There was a constant tug of war within Obama between his desire to transform the world and his strong sense of the limits to American power and will in a post-Iraq age. That struggle often made U.S. policy look indecisive and at times, notably on Syria, created a damaging gap between tough American words (“Assad must go”) and flabby American deeds. That led to questions about U.S. resolve as friends and foes struggled to understand Washington’s intentions. Moreover, the economic and social problems of the Arab world are beyond the abilities of any American government to solve, and the jihadist movement is powered by rage and ideology that Washington can, in the short term, do very little about.

Yet, some of the policies Clinton advocated have exacerbated challenges we now face. Her embrace of transformational diplomatic goals probably undermined her realpolitik efforts to reset relations with Russia and work out a modus vivendi with China. And when American advocacy of an open Internet goes hand in hand with revelations of National Security Agency surveillance, U.S. high-tech policy looks less like a philanthropic venture in supporting human freedom and more like an effort by a powerful state to dominate the world’s communication networks.

The verdict? Clinton brought a clear vision of U.S. interests and power to the job, and future presidents and secretaries of state will find many of her ideas essential. Yet she struggled to bring together the different elements of her vision into a coherent set of policies. The tension between America’s role as a revolutionary power and its role as a status quo power predates Clinton; the struggle to reconcile those two opposed but equally indispensable aspects of American foreign policy has survived her tenure at the State Department.

 

http://www.americanthinker.com/arti...linton_americas_worst_secretary_of_state.html

The scene could hardly have been more bizarre: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade was pelted with rotten tomatoes and shoes as she was being driven to the opening of a U.S. Consulate General in the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria. The mob chanted "Monica, Monica" to taunt the former first lady with the name of the woman with whom President Bill Clinton told us "I did not have sexual relations."

Egyptian journalist Mohammed Wahby warned us back then that this affair could have dangerous ramifications in his part of the world. Wahby told PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour that Bill Clinton's scandal would inflame Islamists in his part of the world. Clearly, it has had lasting repercussions.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's ostensible reason for being in Alexandria was to take part in the flag-raising ceremony for our Consulate General. This is a disgrace. Alexandria was once home to a flourishing Jewish community. Jews flourish there no more. Her symbolic presence there embodies everything wrong about this administration's foreign policy.

Until recently, it was hard to say that Hillary Clinton was the worst secretary of state in U.S. history. After all, it was Sec. of State William Jennings Bryan who resigned in 1915 when President Wilson typed a too-one-sided note to Germany following the torpedoing of the Lusitania. Bryan thought Germany was being ill-used by the dithering Woodrow Wilson.

Then there was Sec. of State Cyrus Vance. He quit President Jimmy Carter's Cabinet in the wake of the failed effort to rescue our 52 hostages in Iran. The crash of two helicopters and the deaths of a number of U.S. soldiers dashed the hopes of millions. But Vance quit not because the rescue attempt failed. He quit because it was made.

How can you top, or bottom, such egregious records? Hillary Clinton has managed to do it. She hailed the election of Mohamed Morsi as Egypt's president. This Muslim Brotherhood candidate has pledged to be president of all Egyptians. Tell that to the Copts. And the Evangelicals. He doesn't consider them part of Egypt's polity. Sharia is his program. Jihad is his way. For confirmation, consult the Muslim Brotherhood's own founding documents and its unswerving statements.

Worst of all in the performance of this worst of all secretaries of state is her lashing of Israel. She is complicit in this administration's "counting Jews in Jerusalem." Now, as EMET's Sarah Stern points out, she stands by, mute, as Egypt's new foreign minister radically reinterprets that country's 33-year-old treaty with Israel. Foreign Minister Amr, quoting the new Muslim Brotherhood president, claimed that the treaty should stand only if based on the pre-1967 borders of Israel. In brief, that means Israel shrunken to nine miles at the narrowest point -- a wholly indefensible border.

Madame Secretary is not just a disaster throughout the Mideast. Her Russian policy has been a catastrophe. She sternly warns the Russians (and the Chinese) that they "will pay a price" for their vetoes of U.N. sanctions against Syria's Alawite regime.

The old schoolyard taunt applies here. "You and what army?" This administration is headed toward sequestration of our defense budget. The cuts envisioned will take America's army back to pre-Pearl Harbor strength. The Navy will see more ships lost than at Pearl Harbor.

Clinton's toothless threats to make Russia pay a price must evoke laughter in the Kremlin. This is the same Russia to which she gave a pass with her infamous red "Reset" button in 2009. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was not amused at her adolescent gesture. He pointed out that she hadn't found the right Russian word for "reset" (it translated to "overcharge"), and the button was not even in Cyrillic characters.

Madame Secretary was only too happy to send ten Russian spies home in first class. She didn't want to let anything disturb President Obama's "Hamburger Summit" with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. What an act of weakness! And the Soviets -- er, excuse me, Russians -- would not be slow to feel the slack in our foreign policy line.

Under Hillary Clinton, we no longer have a "special relationship" with Great Britain. She has echoed Barack Obama's use of the Argentinian name for the Falkland Islands. Britain had to go to war with the military junta that ruled Argentina in 1982 to protect the right of Falkland Islanders to self-determination. President Ronald Reagan staunchly backed Britain and his stalwart ally, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But no more. Madame Secretary refers to the Falklands as "Las Malvinas." (At least she didn't compound the gaffe by calling them the Maldives, as Mr. Obama did!)

We recognize that our fellow Americans give Hillary Clinton high marks. But that is doubtless attributable to buyers' remorse. If only Hillary had been elected president, many feel, we might at least have Bill Clinton-era prosperity.

In her chosen field of foreign policy, however, Hillary Clinton has racked up a terrible record. And it should not go without mention that she has pushed an agenda of abortion and homosexuality worldwide. None of this makes Americans safer or more esteemed in the world.

 

Keeping this election simple. I'm voting for the candidate that will benefit our O&G sector. I like my job and don't see myself moving away from it. I don't know what position Hillary is in regarding O&G since it flip flops most of the time and I don't want to take my chances on that. So, therefore, I'm voting for Trump.

Can't believe I just said that. But like others said, it's choosing the best of the worst. What a predicament we just put our country in...

 

Interesting issue to bring up, because I wonder who really is the better candidate for oil & gas. On the one hand, Trump is anti-environment and already in Big Oil's pocket, so he'll probably do everything he can to keep production free and clear from regulation. Whereas Clinton will probably at least hold the line on regulation, if not advance it, which will make production incrementally more expensive. On the other hand, Trump is anti-trade and is the more likely of the two to throw up barriers to international commerce. That could impact oil in 2 ways: (a) it can make foreign markets more expensive for American oil to access or encourage hostile market activity like Saudi Arabia's current overproduction, and (b) it can slow economic growth at home and abroad, reducing demand and depressing prices. Though I'll give him some credit in this regard, that the uncertainty he'd create would increase volatility and fatten the risk adders the market will bear. To my mind, it's an unknown which president will be more profitable for American oil and gas companies. I'm sure the oil companies have taken a view on it, and done so with more information than I have. But, it's not clear to me which one is truly the more profitable choice.

 

An implied threat of an Islamic radical-like beheading is precisely why so many people are afraid of the Democrats drift to the extreme left, i.e., democratic socialism.

 

The vote for Trump is not necessarily a vote FOR Trump. It is a vote AGAINST Hillary.

 

But it's still a vote for Trump. I'm sure it's a very hard decision, but own up to it.

 

Do you realize Hillary is a billionaire (the Clinton Foundation is her personal piggy bank) who games the system in ways far worse than Trump?

We tea party Republicans are not afraid to look at our candidates' warts, but Democrats avoid addressing their candidates' warts. Hillary learned out to scam people starting with Whitewater and took her "gaming" to new levels by taking Arab, Russian and Wall Street millions from "Bill or Hillary speeches" and "contributions" to her foundation.

I started to list all her other warts, but I just got sick of it. They make Trump's deficiencies pale in comparison.

 

I thought I just did.

 

You said it's "not necessary a vote for Trump". I guess you meant it's not only a vote for Trump.

 

I really don't understand your point. I AM voting for Trump but the rationale for doing so is fear of a Hillary presidency. Therefore, my vote for Trump is not a vote FOR Trump. It is a vote AGAINST Hillary.

 

I'm just wondering if all the people who voted for Trump in this poll would still actually vote for him in the election? rocketsjudoka? Invisible Fan? g1184?

 

I don't recall voting for Trump in this poll but there it is. I must've voted on my phone and hit the wrong button. Or else my account was hacked. Haven't noticed any post in my name that I hadn't made.

Anyway am on record here is as a Clinton supporter.