First Lady. Senator from New York. Secretary of State.
Hillary Clinton has been part of the American political landscape for 25 years. Even longer, if one includes her stint as First Lady in Arkansas before she and her husband, then President-elect Bill Clinton, arrived in Washington in 1992.
After a seven-state win on Super Tuesday, she is well on her way to securing her place as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Senator Bernie Sanders didn’t make it easy. “The Bern” was real, and his supporters remain fiercely loyal. They forced her to highlight her progressive stance on domestic issues.
Democratic presidential candidate, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton in Washington on April 29, 1992. (AP/file)
Many have said Clinton has been her own worst enemy over the years, creating doubt or suspicion unnecessarily, and collecting a lot of baggage along the way.
But the breadth of her career in politics cannot be denied – from bake sales and community fundraisers across America to being on the Watergate impeachment inquiry staff, tackling healthcare in the 1990s and the controversies leftover from her time as Secretary of State — Benghazi and a private email server.
History books already will have a chapter written about Hillary Clinton, even if she doesn’t make it back to the White House.
Clinton’s Actually Pretty Good at This
Jonathan Bernstein – BloombergView
A lot of people underrate her as a politician. I suspect it’s because she isn’t good at delivering speeches. I can’t think of a major-party nominee in the video era (say, from 1952 on) who was significantly worse than she is at it, and most have been better, some by a lot. Her effort on Tuesday night was as pedestrian as usual….
Civil rights icon Rosa Parks sits with Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention in New York, July 14, 1992. (AP/file)
And she has strengths we don’t see on the surface. No one just walks his or her way into a presidential nomination. She has earned it. Partly it was her success in cultivating strong ties with a wide variety of party actors: Some who supported her husband in the 1990s, some who had signed on for her in 2008, and still others who were new to her camp this time.
This Is the Closest Thing We’ve Ever Had to a Hillary Clinton Political Manifesto
Carlos Lozada – The Washington Post
“It takes a village to raise a child,” she writes. “I chose that old African proverb to title this book because it offers a timeless reminder that children will thrive only if their families thrive and if the whole of society cares enough to provide for them.”
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton peers over a podium while addressing an audience during a campaign stop in South Carolina on June 17, 2015. (AP)
The whole of society — that’s where Clinton’s vision quickly expands….
“Let us stop stereotyping government or individuals as absolute villains or absolute saviors, and recognize that each must be part of the solution,” she writes. “Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.”
So what is the proper role for that government? Clinton identifies competing strands in American history — a collective “gratitude” for a government that promotes the common good, alongside a deep skepticism of authority evident in constitutional checks and balances and the Bill of Rights — and then claims the center.
Clinton Celebrates Super Tuesday Wins
‘Bernie or Bust’: Clinton Can’t Count on Sanders’ Supporters in November
Kelly Riddel – The Washington Times
More than 50,000 people already have signed up at the Revolt Against Plutocracy, pledging to vote for the Green Party candidate in the general election or write in Mr. Sanders’ name if Mrs. Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. Other groups, such as Grassroots Action for Bernie, are taking to social media, using Facebook and Twitter to try to get the “Bernieorbust” hashtag trending….
Distrust of establishment politics runs deep among Sanders supporters, and that particularly dents Mrs. Clinton, who has been a first lady for eight years, a senator for eight years and a secretary of state for four years.
Her ties to Wall Street, her use of a secret email server while head of the State Department and her unwillingness to release transcripts of speeches she made to Wall Street executives feed the anxiety.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies on Capitol Hill on Jan. 23, 2013 before a hearing on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP)
Why Democrats Didn’t Feel the Bern
Dana Milbank – The Washington Post
It is an article of faith this year that voters are angry. But this shorthand misleads. Certainly, there is real economic anxiety in the United States, but Americans are, overall, quite content: 87 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans alike said in a Gallup poll in January that they are satisfied in their personal lives.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, right, speaks as Sen. Bernie Sanders listens during the CNN Democratic presidential debate on Oct. 13, 2015, in Las Vegas.(AP)
The anger that’s out there is directed at the malfunctioning government in Washington — and this anger is mostly on the Republican side….
If there were more restlessness among Democrats, the Sanders message of economic injustice might have overridden the traditional identity politics that define the Democratic Party — satisfying diverse factions based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. But the usual constituency politics, at which Clinton excels, prevailed because Democrats weren’t particularly restless, as demonstrated by their low turnout in primaries.
