It Will All Begin In Tears
A make-or-break primary date looms within hours, and once again the focus falls on whether Hillary Clinton can blunt the momentum of the political neophyte Barack Obama. What can she do? She can fall back on the strategy that helped her to a surprise win New Hampshire by getting misty (via The Anchoress):
Sen. Hillary Clinton teared up this morning at an event at the Yale Child Study Center, where she worked while in law school in the early 1970s.Penn Rhodeen, who was introducing Clinton, began to choke up, leading Clinton's eyes to fill with tears, which she wiped out of her left eye. At the time, Rhodeen was saying how proud he was that sheepskin-coat, bell-bottom-wearing young woman he met in 1972 was now running for president.
"Well, I said I would not tear up; already we're not exactly on the path," Clinton said with emotion after the introduction.
Well, it worked once, didn't it? And once again, the subject that brought tears to her eyes wasn't poverty, health care, or even national defense but Hillary herself. Just as it was in New Hampshire, she teared up after hearing what a great person she is and isn't it just wonderful to see her succeed!
Meanwhile, Matt Stearns takes a look at her biography and sees much less compassion in it than the Hillary campaign claims:
She routinely tells voters that she's "been working to bring positive change to people's lives for 35 years." She told a voter in New Hampshire: "I've spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector." Speaking in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said his wife "could have taken a job with a firm ... Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund."The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder. The whole story is more complicated — and less flattering.
Clinton worked at the Children's Defense Fund for less than a year, and that's the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she's ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.
Clinton spent the bulk of her career — 15 of those 35 years — at one of Arkansas' most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.
Neither she nor her surrogates, however, ever mention that on the campaign trail. Her campaign Web site biography devotes six paragraphs to her pro bono legal work for the poor but sums up the bulk of her experience in one sentence: "She also continued her legal career as a partner in a law firm."
There is nothing wrong with being a corporate lawyer. They need good and talented legal counsel for many reasons, not least among them predatory trial attorneys who exploit the legal system at the expense of producers and consumers. Hillary seems more interested in distorting her supposed years of experience in public service, however, and that gives voters a reason to question her credibility.
So do the timely waterworks. Just as with her claims to extensive public service rather than private sector work, the record of her emotional outbursts suggest contrivance far more than spontaneity. Hillary is building a reputation for disingenuity that has begun to rival her husband.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 4, 2008 11:06 AM | Comments () | TrackBacks (3)
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