Van Jones on Hillary Clinton

Former Obama staffer Van Jones discusses the challenges facing a Clinton Presidency on vox.com.

People are acting like this is some science fiction movie where if you blow up the Trump Death Star they all just disappear. Or if the Trump people blow up the Hillary Clinton Star Destroyer, the aliens would all go away. The problem is, Wednesday morning, we’re all still here! The Trump voters, Black Lives Matter, the Sanders voters, the Clinton people are all still here.

The Republicans are trying to digest this Tea Party thing that curdled into this Trump circus. They’re sitting on the toilet and they’re clutching their stomachs because they just can’t figure out how to digest it. But they might wind up healthier by the midterms having gone through it.

Hillary Clinton was able to just take some Pepto-Bismol and keep going. So Democrats might actually be less healthy because we weren’t really forced to come to terms with a lot of these issues. The Republican Party will probably be a little bit healthier because it will be in touch with both the reality of the anger and the reality of the politics.

We still don’t know Hillary Clinton. You’d have to be wily and tough like you couldn’t believe to be able get to where she is. But when she finally sits behind that desk and she looks out at her party and all the different tensions in her party, and she looks out at that other party and how it’s being twisted into knots, and she looks out at the country and sees how much pain there is out there — some greatness could rise up in her.

And if it does, for all her battle scars, she could wind up being one of our greatest presidents. She really, really could. A terrible candidate, but she could wind up being one of our greatest presidents. And frankly she’s going to have to. Or else she’ll be a one-termer.