Letters to the Editor
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to the anonymous who's "bored and confused"
"Conclusion: Hillary married very, very well. I'll give her credit for that...."
You've been reading those mass, spammy emails, haven't you.... To tell the truth, and there's a lot I admire about Bill Clinton, it was probably sort of the other way around.
Hillary Clinton didn't marry Bill Clinton president or governor or even attorney general. When Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton, he wasn't anybody of note. He knew that, she knew that, and apparently, much to their distress, her friends and family knew that.
Before Hillary Rodham moved to Arkansas, before she married Bill Clinton, she had just finished working as part of the team of lawyers who drafted the Nixon articles of impeachment and was considered an up and coming young lawyer. The University of Arkansas hired her because she had credentials, not because of Bill Clinton who was only a first year law professor.
Apparently when she moved to Arkansas (before they married, before Bill Clinton was Bill Clinton), nearly everybody who knew her feared she was throwing her life and her career away, and I suspect she might have had quite a few misgivings herself (I know I would have).
At the time (and even today I suspect it suffers from the same sorts 0f biases), nobody moved to Arkansas willingly unless they were retiring or dead, and for the most part people who grew up there couldn't wait to grow up to get the heck out (I was one).
When Bill Clinton ran for congress a year after they'd both been teaching at the UofA, he was defeated. Hillary had her own substantial connections before she moved to Arkansas, and she worked for Jimmy Carter's campaign *before* Bill Clinton was elected attorney general (which at the time anyway -- and perhaps even today -- was a position with very little political cachet in Arkansas and paid so little the lucky winner had to either have a second job or a wife to support it).
I know Clinton detractors love to spread spammy emails about Hillary Clinton being nothing but a political hanger-on who only got where she is because she married the very powerful Bill Clinton. As much as I admire Bill Clinton, I suspect Hillary Clinton is more responsible for the success of Bill Clinton that the other way around.
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flip flopping
I confess I'm a flip-flopper. First I was for Obama, and then I was against him.
Honestly, when I heard him speak at the Democratic Convention, I thought, "Thank God! He needs to run for president." And then he kept talking, and the more he talked, the more I turned off.
Why? Well, for a number of reasons. I began to wonder when he was going to actually say something substantive rather than sounding like he was channelling both a revivalist preacher *and* Martin Luther King, Jr.
King is one of my heroes. But seriously, I began to get irked by the rip-off job Obama kept repeating. When he kept reiterating his now constant refrain, "I shouldn't be here," when he kept reiterating that with his nominatione he'd be making history the likes of which we'd never seen, when he kept reiterating the "dream" theme while at the same time protesting other people were injecting race into the campaign, well now.... Who exactly was injecting race?
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton never injected gender. Yes, her supporters have, but she hasn't. And when she finally started responding to Obama's "making history of monumenal proportions" schtick, it was a response, a sort of exasperated, "Yes, we're *both* making history here." And in the beginning, it was clear she studiously avoided the issue of gender. She had to. To inject gender would have been suicidal. She'd have been too much of a girl to make that mistake, and it would have been a mistake. She knew that. We all knew that. Everybody said it would be absolutely the wrong tack, and she avoided it like the plague.
But Obama? Obama has very studiously cultivated the race angle while denying it and criticizing people for talking about it. He's seriously guilty of eating his cake and having it too.
And of course his constant refrain that he was against the war and Hillary was for it. It would be nice if people would read the resolution, if they'd read Hillary Clinton's speech before the vote, if they'd read Obama's speech about preemptive missile strikes against Iran a couple of years later that imitate nearly word for word Hillary Clinton's speech prefacing the Iraq resolution. It's shockingly dishonest that he'd continue to paint himself in terms that are so diametrically opposite to her.
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@Cdevlin,
You're right. I spoke imprecisely. By "married well," I meant "married lucky." Also, it's really precious that you think that the fact that Bill Clinton was already on the faculty didn't help Hillary get hired at the University of Arkansas Law School. Have you been to law school? Because I have, and let me tell you, it is extremely common for husband-and-wife teams to work at the same law school. It's a "two for one" deal. Seems the Clintons have been marketing themselves that way for a long, long time.
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have I worked at a law school?
Well, I've been a faculty member at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas. Does that count?
No, it's not THAT common for universities to hire the spouse of a new hire. In fact, a lot of universities tend to avoid it because it seems too gratuitously like patronage jobs.
But again, you get an essential thing wrong:
"it is extremely common for husband-and-wife teams to work at the same law school."
They weren't married when Hillary Rodham moved to Arkansas. They weren't married when she took the position.
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@Cdevlin,
Clintons not injecting gender?
Surely you jest.
"I especially want to thank my mother, who was born before women could vote, and who is watching her daughter on this stage tonight." -- Speech of Hillary Clinton, Feb. 5, 2008.
"I think it would be a good thing for us to have the first woman president!" -- Speech of Bill Clinton, Feb. 14, 2008.
Oh, and while I was looking for these, I found an interesting quote from Bill Clinton's speech on Jan. 26, the night of the South Carolina primary:
"Median family incomes, the ones in the middle, are $1,000 lower today after inflation than they were the day I left office, and we can do better than that. Why is that? Because our economy has only produced about five million jobs as opposed to 22.7 million in the previous administration, you might remember."
No, Hillary isn't running on Bill's record. Not at all. I can't imagine why anyone would say such a thing.