For the upcoming presidential election, good advice came years ago from Lt. General Russel L. Honoré: don’t get “stuck on stupid.”  General Honoré was asking everyone to get ready for an impending storm (Hurricane Rita back then) by concentrating on what is important.  Voters should do the same.  Set aside the daily noise and look for what really matters in a presidential election: evidence of a candidate’s judgment.  Does a candidate have the judgment needed to handle the job?

In the case of candidate Hillary Clinton, the past record demonstrates that she does not.

Does anyone think Mrs. Clinton exercised good judgment in the way she handled health care and health insurance reform in the early years of the presidency of Bill Clinton?  For those too young to remember, President Clinton gave her the job of formulating a reform plan.  She chose to run a closed shop, irritating allies and opponents alike, and ended up with failure.  You will hear the usual drivel about advancing the cause, raising the issues, setting the stage.  Delusional claptrap.  She bungled it.

On war, Mrs. Clinton’s judgment is just scary.  She voted for the war in Iraq, opposed the surge that rescued that disaster, supported the withdrawal of U.S. forces that left a vacuum, and praised the Iraqi government formed under Nouri al-Maliki.  How could anyone be wrong so many times on the same issue?  Mothers and fathers of America, do you want to trust the lives of your sons and daughters to that flawed judgment?

On the September 11, 2012 deaths in Benghazi, her judgment was criminally negligent.  Forget the talking points, the existence or nonexistence of stand down orders, and all the other frenzies of congressional Republicans.  In December of 2009, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office recommended that the “Secretary of State … conduct a strategic review of Diplomatic Security to ensure that its missions and activities address its priority needs.”  They meant the secretary of state, because the can-do folks at Diplomatic Security are too quick to salute and man the barricades, wherever they might be, whether they should be there or not.  After the attack, the GAO testified that the strategic review they had recommended in 2009 had not been done.

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton refused to designate Boko Harm as a terrorist organization.  The group has gone on to kill more than 5,000 civilians, kidnap 276 schoolgirls, and cause hundreds of thousands of others to flee their homes.  John Kerry, who became secretary of state after Mrs. Clinton, designated Boko Haram a terrorist organization (State Dept. release, 11/13/13).

On January 25, 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the Egyptian government is stable (State Dept. transcript).  Seventeen days later, the Egyptian government under Hosni Mubarak collapsed.  Later, Mrs. Clinton claimed that “few observers could have predicted just how fragile it actually was” (Hard Choices, p. 283).  Oh?  What do you think a major Washington think-tank (the Brookings Institution) meant when on January 27, 2011 they wrote: “Indicators of instability in Egypt bear a striking resemblance to the Tunisian model that led to the toppling of that country's regime”?

What about those e-mails?  There is a tendency in politics to focus on tiny details.  The server.  What the rules were then and when they changed.  One device.  Two devices.  How many e-mails.  What was turned over and what was not.  Step back for a moment.  The United States secretary of state is the highest-ranking member of the president’s cabinet and fourth in line to succeed the president.  But Secretary of State Clinton decided it would be a good idea to run government business through a private computer stuck in her home in New York.  What next, the secretary of defense with extra nukes in his garage?  The secretary of treasury with the government’s petty cash in his bedroom safe?  

Of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mail decision, the editorial board of the Washington Post declared: “Poor judgment.”  A pretty good two-word description of this candidate.