It’s good to be Hillary Clinton. She has a long roster of Hollywood endorsements, a media that lets her campaign edit its own coverage, State Department personnel that still do her bidding to get her out of a pinch, and what a slogan: “Stronger Together.”
In a populace as divided as ours is today, those two words offer a sense of comfort. They imply that, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you will be listened to and represented by a Hillary Clinton White House. If only it were true.
We saw the first cracks in Clinton’s unity message right out of the gate. When asked to name the enemy she was “most proud of” at the first Democratic primary debate in October of 2015, Clinton went through a laundry list of predictable targets before adding, with a smirk, “the Republicans” – as in, the entire party; more than 59 million American citizens according to 2012 vote totals. How’s that for “stronger together”?
Then, in September, the bottom fell out. At a glitzy fundraiser in New York City, Clinton made the mistake of proclaiming how she truly feels about broad swaths of American voters. “You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she told the crowd, all while standing at a podium emblazoned with her famous logo. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.”
Clinton’s divisiveness doesn’t end there. Newly uncovered emails show her campaign’s contempt for what it describes as “needy Latinos” and “backwards”
Clinton has used her slogan in an attempt to draw a contrast with Donald Trump, noting at the second debate that “A lot of people are worried that maybe they wouldn't have a place in Donald Trump's America.” The truth is, however, there are baskets upon baskets of Americans that Clinton thinks she is stronger without.
For Clinton, “stronger together” leaves out the most vulnerable and innocent members of society: the unborn. Clinton’s alliance with the big abortion industry runs even deeper than President Barack Obama’s, as evidenced by her callous and unprecedented call to repeal a bipartisan, forty year-old law that prohibits federal tax dollars from funding elective abortion.
“Stronger together” ignores the strength we derive from our law enforcement personnel, whose support she snubbed and whose motivations she has impugned with ominous talk of “implicit bias” in police practices.
“Stronger together” dismisses the potential and value of women who may disagree with Clinton’s worldview, as made clear by her earlier claim that conservative women like me are “not enough” and by her embrace of an organization that would dare to call combat veteran and United States Senator Joni Ernst “window dressing.”
And “stronger together” ignores our sisters a world away languishing under brutal, anti-woman regimes like those in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which Hillary Clinton shakes a fist at with one hand while cashing their checks to the Clinton Foundation with the other.
For Clinton, “stronger together” could mean many things. It could describe her cozy relationship with the Democratic National Committee, which broke its own rules to prop up Clinton’s campaign during her contentious primary race.
It could allude to the logic behind the alleged pay-to-play practices at the Clinton Foundation.
Or perhaps it is an ode to her friends at the FBI who are willing to compromise the agency’s integrity to help her escape penalty for the mishandling of classified information – but a commitment to bipartisanship and inclusivity it is not.
Like so much of what Clinton says, “stronger together” sounds alluring, but the record doesn’t match the rhetoric.
Americans are stronger together without four more years of the Clinton’s scandals and secrets. That is why – to borrow another favorite Clinton phrase – this woman voter is not “with her.”
Congressman Diane Black represents Tennessee’s 6th District, serving on the House Ways and Means Committee and Budget Committee. She was named among the 25 most influential women in Congress by Roll Call and leads women’s engagement efforts for the National Republican Congressional Committee.