Nick Kristof of the New York Times recently described Hillary Clinton’s claim to 35 years of experience as "spurious." Similar skepticism has been expressed by Timothy Noah, Colbert King and countless others, but Hillary’s claim has been especially derided and ridiculed by right-wing bloggers and pundits.
The fact is that Hillary’s detractors on the right want to have it both ways: they want to insist that she is a woman of negligible experience who owes all her influence to her husband’s position, but they also assert that she has an almost four decades long history of radical activism. According to the right-leaning New York Sun, as early as 1971 Clinton was working at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, "one of America’s most radical law firms":
Partners at the firm said it was likely Mrs. Clinton also worked on politically sensitive cases involving a Berkeley student activist denied admission to the California bar over incendiary rhetoric, Stanford physician interns fighting a loyalty oath at the Veterans Administration, and men claiming conscientious objector status to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Mrs. Clinton's only public recollection of her work at the Treuhaft firm is that she handled a child custody matter. Link.
Let us do the math! Okay, that’s 2008 minus 1971, which equals 37! But that was just for one summer. What did she do the next year? In 1972 Hillary worked on Senator George McGovern’s campaign. Last year he endorsed her for President:
"I think that if we can elect her president, she'll be a greater president even than her brilliant husband," McGovern told the crowd gathered in a hot barn at the Johnson County Democrats' annual barbeque.
Organizers estimated 1,800 people showed up for the event, calling it the biggest crowd in the barbeque's history and noting they had to run out twice for more food.
McGovern talked about the challenges Clinton and her then-boyfriend Bill Clinton faced when they helped run his organization in Texas during his 1972 presidential campaign, predicting he would have an easier time selling her in Iowa than she did selling him in Texas.
He praised John Edwards and Barack Obama and said he hoped to live to see America elect a black president, but said," We have an old rule of courtesy in the United States: Ladies first." Link.
Naturally, if we really want to be strict about the 35 years, we must look at 1973. In that year we find the young Hillary going door to door in New Bedford with the Children’s Defense Fund, uncovering the plight of children who were being denied an education because of disability or socioeconomic circumstance:
On the campaign trail, Clinton focuses on the least-edgy aspect of what she did, cataloguing discrimination against children who were disabled. Much of what the fund did, though, was to advocate for victims who were less than picture-perfect: teenage mothers, minority youths who had been expelled for disciplinary infractions, and juvenile delinquents.
In her book, Clinton briefly describes traveling to South Carolina to interview 14- and 15-year-olds who were being housed with adult criminals. Several of her colleagues recalled finding boys who had been raped in jail. The organization took at least one case to court.
The project that brought Clinton to New Bedford eventually became a much-publicized report, "Children Out of School in America." With volunteers as well as its own staff, the fund spoke to 6,500 families across the country, concluding that 2 million school-age children were being excluded from public school because of segregation, special needs, or poverty. Link.
So, why did she give such important work up? She was one of 43 lawyers handpicked to work on the impeachment of Richard Nixon:
During 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum, Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment. The committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974. Link.
What part of the work described above does not count as "experience"?