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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with Clinton’s contributions to the Humans of New York blog.
Here she is on being perceived as cold:
“I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”
Here she is on being compared to President Obama and the first President Clinton:
“I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not Bill Clinton. Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences. But I’m married to one and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural. It’s not something they just dial in. They work and they practice what they’re going to say. It’s not that they’re trying to be somebody else. But it’s hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens. It’s not bad. It’s just a fact. It’s really quite funny. I’ll go to these events and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message, and screaming about how we need to win the election. And people will love it. And I want to do the same thing. Because I care about this stuff. But I’ve learned that I can’t be quite so passionate in my presentation. I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’ Which is funny, because I’m always convinced that the people in the front row are loving it.”
As always, the best analysis comes from Melissa McEwan, writing for Shareblue:
I’ve now spent more than a decade writing professionally and publicly on progressive feminist issues, which has put me at the blunt end of some brutal abuse—a sliver of what Clinton has endured. And having been subjected to this sort of destructive instinct at such intense levels, I have found myself slowly but surely closing off parts of myself from public view; closing off access. It has happened so incrementally that I don’t really see the scope of it until I remember what it was like, what I was like, when I began.
Clinton has been doing this on an exponentially more visible scale for a much longer time. There are certainly parts of her she does not submit for public consumption any longer; parts of her which are only observable in their full vibrancy to those closest to her. The rest of us get the outlines. Which is maybe all she can personally afford to allow, anymore.
Which should make us very angry indeed—that the cost of being an extraordinary woman who has spent her life in public service is building walls around herself just to survive.
On the campaign trail, Clinton speaks passionately about breaking down barriers “that stand in the way of Americans fulfilling their potential, because I don’t think our country can live up to its potential unless we give a chance to every single American to live up to theirs.”
These are not mere words to Hillary Clinton, because she is a human—a woman—who understands the barriers of oppression. Someone who knows what it means to be obliged by oppression to construct barriers around yourself that may conceal your very humanity.
At least to those who only search for it with the objective of penetrating its vulnerability.
Clinton’s humanity is apparent to me. It looks very much like my own. And I am grateful to her for telling this story, for peeking over her own wall and encouraging us to peek back.
Clinton’s campaign has targeted outreach for every demographic group. It’s being portrayed as political savvy, but I’d argue that the approach should be required for anyone who wants to lead a representative democracy.
Yahoo! News reports:
At Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn, the campaign told Yahoo News there are at least 54 staffers working on communications and outreach efforts tailored to Latinos, African-Americans, women, millennials, labor, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, Muslims, veterans, Jews and “faith communities.” And the campaign also has staff doing specialized outreach in individual states.
Besides the Clinton campaign’s 54 outreach staffers, Helmstetter said, the Democratic National Committee has an 11-member team at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The party’s national community engagement director oversees 10 staffers devoted to specialized outreach for African-Americans, Hispanics, youth, seniors, women, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, people with disabilities, Jews, “veterans and military families” and LBGT voters.
Clinton’s specialized-outreach staff has helped the campaign run multilingual programs. Wicks said that during the California primary the campaign ran phone banks in at least five languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Spanish and Vietnamese.
Moreover, having specialized teams has enabled the Clinton campaign to develop tailored programs and strategies for specific constituencies. In the African-American community, Clinton has stressed policies designed to address “systemic racism” as she campaigned alongside the so-called Mothers of the Movement, whose children were killed by the police. For Hispanics, the campaign has launched Mujeres in Politics, a phone banking and roundtable program developed by Latino staffers based on the idea that women are key forces to generate discussion and activism within that community. Late last month, the Clinton campaign held a call with what it identified as Eastern European community leaders in which they asked the listeners to help them identify “festivals,” “parades” and “conferences” where it would be important to have a visible presence.
Clinton repeats the same themes and policy proposals that she’s been addressing since the beginning of the campaign. Reporter who has been on the trail with her the whole time reports it as news. (She’s been talking about her faith for years, and throughout this campaign.)
CNN reports:
"Humility is not something you hear about much in politics, is it? But you should. None of us is perfect," Clinton said. "I have learned to be grateful not just for my blessings but also for my faults -- and there are plenty."
The push to get to a more positive message began Thursday with the speech in Kansas City. Clinton rarely touches on the issue of her faith and how it motivates her to serve. "It would have been easier to follow many of my law school classmates to a high-powered New York law firm, but the call to service rooted in my faith was just too powerful," she said.
"We are facing a candidate with a long history of racial discrimination in his business, who traffics in toxic conspiracy theories like the lie that President Obama is not a true American," Clinton said. "If he doesn't respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?"
And the speech was not entirely devoid of contentious politics. Clinton addressed gun control, criminal justice reform and economic equality during her remarks.
The campaign continues its important focus on mental health issues.
Tim Kaine writes for Medium:
When it comes to mental health, help should always be immediate — and focused on treatment, not judgment. There should be absolutely no stigma associated with mental health. I believe it’s up to us to educate the public and better support individuals and families with these issues.
But I also know that there’s no quick fix. Eradicating the stigma of mental health and making sure everyone has access to treatment means investing in early diagnosis, so that all children get the best possible start in life. It means bolstering training programs for school and law enforcement officials, so we’re better equipped to de-escalate dangerous situations surrounding mental health. And it means expanding local housing, healthcare, and job opportunities, so those who face mental health challenges have the stability they need to get through difficult times.
We also need a national suicide prevention initiative, aimed at helping young people, as well as veterans and the elderly. And we need all schools to offer mental health services to their students, so that no young person ever has to think twice before going to get help. After all, we want every student to know that there’s hope, especially students of color and LGBTQ students, whose mental health needs are often disproportionately unmet.
In the past, mental health has had a low profile in politics, with policy reports left to sit on shelves untouched. But not with Hillary, who has worked on these issues for decades. Hillary began this campaign with a listening tour, and after hearing over and over again about mental health issues, she decided to focus on bringing this problem center stage. I am proud to be standing with her.
Because as Hillary says, we need to make sure that “the next generation gets quality mental health care — without shame, without stigma, without barriers.”
Here’s our comprehensive plan to address the mental health crisis in America: www.hillaryclinton.com/...
And finally, Clinton on being told to smile. Here’s another edition of “Great Answers Hillary Clinton Gives to Questions That Needn’t Be Asked in the First Place.”
New York Times reports:
“I’m going to let all of you ponder that last question,” she said, holding a news conference in New York with her traveling press corps on an airport tarmac in White Plains. “I think there will be a lot of Ph.D. theses and popular journalism writing on that subject for years to come.”
On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton suggested that her demeanor was owed to the “serious issues” being discussed, adding that she did not make a habit of taking advice from the Republican committee. She was not interested, she said, in “just making political happy talk.”
“I had a very short window of time in that event last night to convey the seriousness with which I would approach the issues that concern our country,” she said, appearing to allude to what critics described as a rushed format.
She noted that Mr. Trump had devoted much of his speaking time to praising President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“Maybe he did it with a smile,” she said, now flashing one of her own. “I guess the R.N.C. would have liked that.”
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.