I don't care who you vote for, but you should know why. I just watched the Wisconsin Governor Doyle endorse Obama on Hardball yet when asked what Obama's accomplishments are he stuttered and fell short surprised as if the question wasn't fair. He answered with O's ethics legislation and community org. & said that his kids and wife are for Obama and well he finally decided to join up...
Democratic Party leaders know the substance of the junior Senator and they will, as we all do, enthusiastically welcome all of the new Democrats Obama has personally inspired into the party, and all of the new contributers. Obama is a man of great potential. A few years ago I sat at a Christmas dinner table in the Hamptons with a few men who Obama reported to on one of his first post college jobs. One noted that Barack Obama may run for the presidency and the other, my best friend, spit his expensive red wine across the table into my face. I have a hard time forgetting the discussion that night...Obama had no fans yet but he was a beginner then and like his opponent he has grown over the years.
For those of you who have rejected the heavy-weight worldly Senator Clinton, you should know her accomplishments at least as much as those of us who have rejected Obama. I want to detail just one.
I was more than an admirer of the Legal Services Corporation. I considered it the necessity of a free country that claims all citizens are created equal. It was the 70s and I was an Democratic Party worker, a Socialist, and gay activist. I innocently believed that no matter how bad the President or Congress acted, the Supreme Court would set things right.
Hillary Rodham was on the board of the US Legal Services Corporation and I remember being wowed at the novelty of a woman getting such a position. I was in the first class in 200 years that my college accepted women and Senator Clinton's example made a difference to my defiant nature. In the Carter era:
In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Hillary Rodham to the board of directors of the LSC.[8] Rodham, an attorney with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas and the wife of Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, had a background in children's law and policy and had worked in providing legal services for the poor while at Yale Law School. She had also done 1976 campaign coordination work for Carter in Indiana.[9] In mid-1978, the Carter administration nominated the thirty-year-old Rodham to became chair of the board, the first woman to do so.[4] The position entailed her traveling monthly from Arkansas to Washington, D.C. for two-day meetings.[4]
When asked about Obama's accomplishments, we hear about his singular ethics legislation that piggy-backed on Senator McCain so much the old guy had a temper tantrum. Obama wrote him a series of letters. I found this series of letters a sharp contrast to the energy Hillary Clinton has put into her antagonists.
Also, Obama spent time as a community organizer. Obama is an organizer, a collaborator, and as another collaborator, I admire that. But I haven't seen him fight yet.
I am not a fighter by nature but only when I must, for some other's purpose, I will go out and win a fight. That confidence comes from a body of work that did not exist, neither the body of accomplishments so nor the confidence, in the 70s. It takes time to be able to pick and win fights. So I have respect for Hillary's hard edges, her scars, and want to put them to work for my country in these times of turmoil.
Way back in 1977, Senator Clinton was already in a federal office protecting the poor and fighting for the rights of disadvantaged citizens. Like Obama would be later, she was significantly influenced by Saul Alinsky, the archetype community organizer who wrote in his Rules for Radicals, his strategy in organizing:
"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.."[2]
Senator Clinton wrote her Wellesley thesis on Saul Alinky's philosophy called "There Is Only The Fight". It exposes the philosophical origins of a person who learned from Alinsky that to help you must work within the system to first get power. But she rejected Alinsky's community model as not ideally suited to her style; she sought to work within the system to change the fundamentals of the laws rather than work on the steets. My nature as well, I was not the type to bake cookies and go to PTA meetings, so I chose what was a virtually all-male field and excelled like a jet on full thrusters. So I value this character trait and the degree to which she thinks things through.
During Rodham's Senate confirmation hearings, she subscribed to the philosophy that LSC should seek to reform laws and regulations that it viewed as "unresponsive to the needs of the poor."[10] Rodham was successful in getting increases in Congressional funding for LSC, stressing its usual role in providing low-income people with attorneys to assist them in commonplace legal issues and framed its funding as being neither a liberal nor a conservative cause.[11] By her third year on the LSC board, Rodham had gotten the LSC budget tripled.[12] Opposition to LSC during this time came from both Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, who favored a "judicare" approach of compensating private lawyers for work done for the poor,[12] and Conservative Caucus head Howard Phillips, who objected to LSC representing gays.[12]
Senator Clinton began a career of building cross party bridges then. She developed alliances and most importantly authentic working relationships with Republicans like James Sensenbrenner (cough) back and now understandably outranks the Congressman. This sacrifice - and believe me, working within an alien system with men like Sensenbrenner is a grave sacrifice that requires a clear mission fueled by the fruits given to others - this sacrifice may seem boring and administrivial, but by achieving those funds, more community based lawyers could work and more was done. Not in the spotlight but very much in the arc of progress.
LSC funding was at its highest-ever mark, in inflation adjusted dollars, in fiscal 1980,[13] with a budget of $303 million.[14] Some 6,200 poverty lawyers filed suits using its funds on behalf of 1.5 million eligible poor clients;[15] the lawyers almost won 80 percent of their cases, which mostly involved divorces, evictions, repossessions, and interrupted payments from federal agencies.[15] For fiscal 1981 it was budgeted at $321 million.[16]
As soon as Reagan got elected he began a witch hunt and finally destroyed the LSA with virtually zero funding. It survives today despite a populace that overwhelmingly votes against their own good. It remains a last bastion for those of us without big bucks to seek justice and Reagan, the man of ideas, failed in his effort to thoroughly kill it.
What our country needs right now is a bug hunt of a humongous nature. We need the federal government cleaned up from Bush/Cheney. We need a relentless purge of Bushprints from every filing cabinet, every procedure manual, every hidden new rule, every signing statement. Cheney has infested the government with a new generation of rats and they're nesting in the walls of the WH and Capital now. We need the skills of Senator Clinton now.
If you knew this history then great but if not I hope to have added just a little to the question, "What exactly are Hillary's 35 years of accomplishments."
At this fifth decade of my life, I find myself married and we both retired to adopt 3 siblings from foster care. I did not choose this fate but was virtually plucked blindly from my workaholism as if by angels and will be forever grateful. Our family was formed through a program Senator Clinton has championed to increase the adoption rates for foster children. All 3 beautiful blond blue-eyed girls are high risk from 4 generations of maternal neglect, violence, and drug abuse. They are covered until they're 18 for living expenses and health care thanks to Senator Clinton. They excel in school, soccer, and piano and I am humbled and astonished every day at this unpredictable fate. But that's getting into more of Senator Clinton's accomplishments...beyond the scope of this diary.