This is the third installment of our series “Better Know a Hillary” brought to you by her latest speech in Nevada. Our previous chapters found here and here tell the tale of her co-optation of Bernie Sander’s progressive message. Remember, she’s not a progressive, she only plays one on TV.
Below is a portion of the transcript of Hillary Clinton's remarks after defeating Bernie Sanders in the Nevada caucuses.
SPEAKER: FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
Clinton: We also have to do more to make it easier for parents to balance work and family, and to break down barriers that keep so many people on the sidelines of the economy, especially women. Don't you think we've waited long enough? It's time for equal pay for equal work.
You see, Hillary, being a member of the uterati, as am I, really, really loves women, especially downtrodden, third-world women, who she likes to give microloans that they can’t pay back.
She, also, really, really likes rich, richie, rich women like Melinda Gates and Sheryl Sandberg who tell us if we lean in real hard we’ll get rich. Okay. That sounds kind of painful, though.
And us boring, workaday gals — ehhh — not so much. I’ll let Thomas Frank tell us about it.
One of the motifs of that Clinton Foundation event I attended in 2015 was the phrase not there, a reference to the women who aren’t present in the councils of state or the senior management of powerful corporations. The foundation raised awareness of this problem by producing visuals in which fashion models disappeared from the covers of popular magazines like Vogue, Glamour, SELF, and Allure. According to a New York Times story on the subject, the Clinton people had gone to a hip advertising agency to develop this concept, so that we would all understand that women were missing from the high-ranking places where they deserved to be.
There was also another act of erasure going on here, but no clever adman will ever be hired to play it up. International Women’s Day, I discovered, began as a socialist holiday, a sort of second Labor Day, on which you were supposed to commemorate the efforts of female workers and the sacrifices of female strikers. It is a vestige of an old form of feminism that didn’t especially focus on the problems experienced by women trying to be corporate officers or the views of some megabillionaire’s wife.
What we were there in New York to consider, among other things, was how unjust it was that women were underrepresented in the C-suites of the Fortune 500—and, by implication, how lamentable it was that the United States had not yet elected a woman president. There was no consideration—I mean, zero—of the situation of women who work on the shop floors of the Fortune 500—for Walmart or Amazon or any of the countless low-wage employers who make that list sparkle. Working-class American women were simply … not there. In this festival of inclusiveness and affirmation, their problems were not considered, their voices were not heard.
But that old scoundrel Bernie has made her have to pay attention to us ordinary women:
Hillary Clinton is not a callous or haughty woman. She has much to recommend her for the nation’s highest office: for one thing, her knowledge of Washington; for another, the Republican vendetta against her, which is so vindictive and so unfair that I myself might vote for her in November just to show what I think of it. And she has, after all, made a great effort in the course of the past year to impress voters with her feelings for working people.
But it’s hard, given her record, not to feel that this was only under perceived pressure from her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. Absent such political force, Hillary tends to gravitate back to a version of feminism that is mainly concerned with the struggle of professional women to rise as high as their talents will take them. No ceilings.
Yeah, gravitate, that sounds about right.
On the train to New York that morning I had been reading a book by Peter Edelman, one of the country’s leading experts on welfare and a longtime friend of the Clintons. Edelman’s aim was to document the effect that the Clintons’ welfare-reform measure had on poor people—specifically on poor women, because that’s who used to receive welfare payments in the days before the program was reformed and turned over to stingy state governments.
Edelman was not a fan of the old, pre-1996 welfare system, because it did nothing to prepare women for employment or to solve the problem of day care. But under the old system, at least our society had a legal obligation to do something for these people, the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Today, thanks to Hillary and her husband, that obligation has been canceled, and we do very little.2 The result, Edelman maintains, has been exactly what you’d expect: extreme poverty has increased dramatically in this country since Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996.
For poor and working-class American women, the floor was pulled up and hauled off to the landfill some twenty years ago. There is no State Department somewhere to pay for their cell phones or to pick up their day-care expenses. And one of the people who helped to work this deed was the very woman I watched present herself as the champion of the world’s downtrodden femininity.
Oh, Hillary, you just keep being you — unless you’re being Bernie.
More installments on the way.
And, remember, kids, why vote for a Hillary who has recently decided to be just like Bernie when you can have a Bernie who has always been Bernie.