HATCHET RUN, NEW YORK — In his quiet town in upstate New York, Bob Filmore watched the first Democratic Party debate of the 2016 presidential primary season, and he was “really impressed” with Hillary Clinton’s “slick mastery of politics.”
Filmore, a Democrat since the early 1990’s, told our reporter that the one character trait he’s desperate for in a president is “the ability to say all the right things, no matter what they plan to do about them later.” The 62-year-old retired union plumber said that Clinton showed a real talent for “looking and sounding like a politician” and that she impressed him with her “ability to smile and say things with a smile” which he says “help to make you forget what exactly it is she’s saying.”
“A lot of people will tell you that Bernie won that debate because he was so passionate,” Fillmore said, “but I think Hillary won because she essentially agreed with all of Bernie’s major points, but did it in a way that just looked and sounded more polished, more political,” and so he gives the victory to Clinton. He admits that “Sanders said some really important things,” but that “Hillary echoed most of those same things but in a way that I found more pleasing than Sanders.”
Filmore says that Clinton changing her stance on subjects like her Iraq War vote and the Keystone Pipeline don’t concern him much. “Sure,” he said, “you could vote for the guy whose principles are so ingrained that he has been literally saying the same things about our economy and foreign policy for decades, and has been proven to be right for decades, but why not vote for the candidate that says all the right things when it matters most — during elections and debates when the cameras are on them — and then maybe gives you a half-hearted stab at some of those issues when they’re elected?”
“At the end of the day, I would vote for a cat in a burlap sack before I voted for a Republican,” Filmore said, “so if it’s Sanders, O’Malley, Clinton, or a box full of used dildos, I will vote for the Democrat.” He went on to say that because his disdain and distrust of the GOP is so strong he wasn’t “too concerned” about the possibility of a candidate promising to do things about issues that are important to him now, but then once elected pivoting away from those issues and blaming it on a stalwart congress. “Let’s face it,” Filmore said as he was ending he interview, “chances are that thanks to gerrymandering the best we can hope for is a Democrat in the White House and maybe a Democrat majority in the Senate, which means we’ll have the same damn gridlock bogging down the next president as bogged down the current one, so I just keep coming back to the fact that I want to vote for the person with the most polished talking points, because honestly, why the shit does it even matter anymore?”
Clinton currently leads Sanders by varying margins in several polls, though that lead has shrunk considerably in most, and has disappeared in others.
