I know I’m spitting into the Bernie gale force wind around the DKos message board, but I think too many folks are taking things out of context and revising history to vilify Hillary and her record.
I went back to some stories about her from the 1990s and wanted to share them on this board.
Again, I know many have already made up their minds and don’t want to hear anything positive about her. But I think we owe it to ourselves to see the good and the bad in people, and these are some real-time insights into Hillary as she was in the 1990s — seen as a classic liberal wonk who seemed almost obsessed with children’s and families’ issues, who was also forced to fight back against unfair political attacks and overcome a whole lot of bullshit “Clinton scandals,” which we should recall resulted in the shameful impeaching, IMPEACHING, of a duly elected president because he lied about sex.
There’s a lot of good and bad in these accounts, but it’s a rich history with many shades of grey, which is where I think truth really is in all our lives. Hillary is a way more complex figure than any of us are offering, whether you insist on posting that she’s just a total sellout/corrupt or you’re fawning over her as the candidate of your choice.
I’ve supported Hillary in this race after backing Obama in 2008 because I think we’ve made a lot of really important progress over the last eight years and Hillary is not only more likely to win in November but is also more likely to continue our step-by-step progress, which is reality in American politics.
Perhaps these news accounts will help fill in more of that reality when it comes to Hillary and when it comes to how America has evolved over the last quarter century.
www.newsweek.com/…:
The First Lady's social activism is not a pose; she is dead serious. Her code is simple: "We are all here to help someone else," says Melanne Verveer, one of her top aides. "She believes that to the core of her being." If Mrs. Clinton had lived in the 19th century, she might have saved souls in Africa. It is not a coincidence that she relishes traveling through the developing world, proselytizing about children's rights and basking in the adoration of women.
Understanding her sense of mission is critical to resolving the apparent paradoxes of her character and behavior. Hillary's do-good energy can make her warm, open and generous. It can also make her fierce, protective and suspicious to the point of paranoia. Above all, it makes her a fighter--"an advocate," she calls herself--who will let nothing stop her, particularly not D'Amato or vocal critics like the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal.
www.nytimes.com/...:
Speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil, Hillary Rodham Clinton catalogued a devastating litany of abuse that has afflicted women around the world today and criticized China for seeking to limit free and open discussion of women's issues here.
"It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights," Mrs. Clinton told the Fourth World Conference on Women assembled here.
"It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls," Mrs. Clinton said, or "when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.
"It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small" she continued, or "when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war."
www.newyorker.com/… (this one goes much deeper, describing Hillary in many of the various shades of grey — a great read both pro and con):
During the early months of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s activities on behalf of health-care reform, she took Capitol Hill by storm. Describing a meeting she held with the Senate Finance Committee—a group that will be critical to the passage of any health-care legislation—Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., the committee’s chief of staff, told me, “Mrs. Clinton came into that room, and she opened the discussion at about four-twenty-five in the afternoon. We were about eighteen minutes into it when she stopped—I remember, I looked at the clock. And what I had just heard were the most perfectly composed, perfectly punctuated sentences, growing into paragraphs, in the most perfect, fluid presentation about what our problems in this field were and what we could do about them.” He added, “And then she held her position in the face of questioning by these senators around the table, many of whom know a great deal about the subject. And she was more impressive than any Cabinet member who has sat in that chair.”
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When J. J. (Jake) Pickle, a representative from Texas who sits on the House Ways and Means and Joint Taxation Committees, announced that he was going to retire, Hillary was one of the first people in Washington to call him, “thanking him for his service, telling him how much she was looking forward to working with him through ’94,” one person said. Representative John Dingell, of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revered his father, a representative who had introduced health-care legislation in 1943 and then fought to keep it alive for more than a decade; Dingell himself has introduced similar legislation in every Congress since 1955, when he succeeded his father in the House. In early June of 1993, as Dingell was taking call-in questions on a Detroit radio station, he suddenly found Hillary on the line. “She was calling in to say, ‘Happy Anniversary on your dad’s bill—it’s taken fifty years and we are going to try to pass it,’ ” an aide to Dingell recalled. “And after her father died she wrote him a letter—something very personal, about how she thought of him and his father. He was very touched by it.” Then, when she testified before Dingell’s committee during her public congressional début, in September, she began by invoking the memory of Dingell’s father and the legislation he had urged so tenaciously.
www.nytimes.com/… (Idealism of the 1990s is very different from idealism today, but she has long-held idealistic views):
When it is suggested that she sounds as though she's trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, "That's right, that's exactly right!"
She is, it develops in the course of two long conversations, looking for a way of looking at looking at the world that would marry conservatism and liberalism, and capitalism and statism, that would tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of Communism and the beginning of the third millennium, crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teen-age mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, the cynicism of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community.
The point of all this is not abstract or small. What Mrs. Clinton seems -- in all apparent sincerity -- to have in mind is leading the way to something on the order of a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life. A lot of people, contemplating such a task, might fall prey to self doubts. Mrs. Clinton does not blink.
"It's not going to be easy," she says. "But we can't get scared away from it because it is an overwhelming task.'
The difficulty is bound to be increased by the awkward fact that a good deal of what Mrs. Clinton sees as wrong right now with the American way of life can be traced, at least in part, to the last great attempt to find The Answer: the liberal experiments in the reshaping of society that were the work of the intellectual elite of . . . Mrs. Clinton's generation.
