I remember Hillary Clinton.

[Sparkly]

I remember her defending against attacks for being the first "career woman" first lady. When she said she could have stayed home having teas and baking cookies but instead chose to continue the work she'd already chosen, the backlash was fierce. (It was all about hating women who didn't work outside the home, and she ended up making a show of serving cookies.)

I remember her defending her support for her husband by saying she's not a mindless idiot, like some "Tammy Wynette 'Stand by Your Man,'" but that she was making a choice with her own mind -- and the backlash she got for that.

I remember her working for health care reform when she didn't have to, coming up with a smart, ambitious plan that would have saved a lot of misery in this country, and the vitriol she got for even trying to solve an urgent problem.

I remember her book "It Takes a Village," making the case (arguably a 'socialist' one) for supporting our children by supporting our communities, and the assaults she got for suggesting such a thing since all we need is a two-parent "real" family.

I remember her speaking out for women's rights AS human rights, and showing her conscience and awareness about what was happening to women and children worldwide, and I remember the backlash she got for daring to go around giving speeches and thinking she should have a voice.

I remember her being criticized for working through whatever marital conflicts occurred after the inquisition of her husband rather than leaving him, as though this were a moral or political calculation and not a personal one (nobody else's business), and I remember the aspersions cast on her character.

I remember her daring to step formally into public service by running for office, the "how dare she" response from opponents as if she had no qualifications except as a wife, and fellow senators saying "she'd better not be expecting any special treatment." I also remember her convincing them that she was a collegial colleague who just wanted to keep her head down and do her work, not seek spotlights, and amazingly, she got their respect.

I remember the flack she had running against Barack Obama, and do not want to relive that, except to say that I supported her and remember the speech she gave at the convention. It was powerful, elegant, and just what the party needed. She is a Democrat.

Along the way, I remember the CONSTANT criticisms of her hair. Her clothes. Her voice. Her ankles, legs and waistline. Her laugh. She's always too soft, too hard; too emotional, too scripted; too conciliatory, too hawkish; too slim on credentials, too driven in her career; too dresses, too pantsuits; too weak, too strong...

She "toned down" her hair, her glasses, her clothes, over and over in response to criticism that she didn't fit the mold of the proper adoring political wife, since Arkansas. Obviously, the superficial doesn't matter to her, and shouldn't matter to anyone else, but she'll go along with it in order to be heard.

I remember the Hillary Clinton of the 1990s as a brash, outspoken, brilliant woman, and I know the lessons she learned about the rightwing's obsession with pouncing on ANY word out of place to paint her as corrupt, fake, evil, crazy, stupid, dishonest, or criminal -- I remember the Rose Law Firm and Whitewater and Vince Foster conspiracies and then some.

(There IS a vast rightwing conspiracy, no doubt about it.)

So here she is now, walking this tightrope, having been burned by her opposition for the slightest tilt in any direction. She's cautious, she's scripted, she's prepared, she's coiffed, she doesn't want to blunder the retail thing.

But it's 2016, and she's "old." She's not cutting edge like she was in 1992, when nobody would possibly take her seriously as a candidate. She's not cool, or hot, or unexpected in the ways people relate to popular music (it's more about defining their own identities than the actual music, as music).

It's cool to be a rebel, because it means you "get" something the "establishment" doesn't -- you're above it. Suddenly this woman who broke so many molds is "the establishment"?! This woman who came to DC bucking every trend and expectation, who fought the rightwing on so many fronts, who did such phenomenal work and showed herself to be an absolutely brilliant intellect?!? This woman on the brink of becoming our first ever WOMAN PRESIDENT is just "the same old?!"?!

Somebody's lying.


I remember Nader... I remember Kucinich... I remember the divisions in the Democratic party over "authentic honest real change" vs. "DLC third-way establishment your old man's party" nonsense. I remember Al Gore called not sufficiently "liberal." I remember John Kerry called not sufficiently "liberal," except that young John Kerry fighting Congress in his uniform. He was cool, but not the old one.

Now the self-identity is, "I'm so cool I support the old guy who says stuff that sounds great! Yay me -- I am all for the good and all against the bad! I'm so radical my parents wouldn't understand!!"

If only it were that simple.

I remember life in the 1970s. I remember Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.There is a REASON she has had this much opposition, and it's not because she's "third-way corporate DLC establishment."

It's because she takes on challenges, she works hard at it, she's brilliant and she gets the work DONE.

I can't say I always saw this, but I do now.

I believe in her, because I remember her.

[Lucinda]

1. Beautifully said.

She is going to make an excellent POTUS, and we are damn lucky she ran again.

[NanceGreggs]

2. This is beautiful piece of writing, Sparkly.

I relate to everything you've said - and agree wholeheartedly.

What you've said is important - but the way you have expressed it should not be overlooked.

Well said - well done.

[tblue37]

3. As a 65-year-old Bernie supporter, I disagree with your slam against him and

his supporters.

HOWEVER, I really like the rest of wht you say in your post.

Your post (again, except for the gratuitous slam against Bernie and Bernie supporters) does make a good case by directing readers' attention away from the mudslinging and back at the many reasons to respect and admire HRC. There is a good case to be made for her that doesn't involve slamming Bernie or his supporters, and you make it eloquently.

**Edited to remove part of comment that was unsuited to this group. Sorry--I didn't realize at first that this wasn't a GDP post because I came here from the latest page. I did want to K&R it, though, because it makes such an excellent case for HRC, against the unnecessarily nasty claims against her character.

[Rose Siding]

14. lol Nothing "gratuitous" in that article

Since no one can explain ANY plan to actually bring the "good stuff" he says to fruition, it's just plain truth.

Good to hear you're willing to speak against the mudslinging though. Bet it didn't go over well when you defended Hillary and Dems against being called whores yesterday. I'm assuming you must have, so thanks for that!

[tblue37]

20. I have in the past, and I would have if I had been on DU much yesterday

and not racing to get papers graded and having student conferences. In fact, in 12 years on DU I have only TWICE alerted on a post, and one of those times was when the "W-word" was used against Hillary. (The other time was against a racist post by a troll who got tombstoned.)

I popped in a couple of times yesterday to read a few posts and to make a couple of very quick responses, but I didn't read much at all until very late (I think it was around 5:00 a.m. when I posted my reply in this thread), and then I was super tired and ready to collapse into bed. But when I saw this OP, I was so touched I had to respond, even though I was really exhausted.

I hate to see nastiness from either side. Since I support Bernie in the primaries, I do tend to notice more when Bernie supporters are slammed as being Bernie Bros or misogynists, since I am obviously not either, and I hate broad brush insults. But I also notice when Bernie supporters go ugly, and I hate that, too.

I don't think most people on either side are involved in the ugliness, but just a few intemperate people who post a lot. I think most people on both sides are proud that we have two great candidates and will eagerly support whichever one wins--and I would have felt the same way about Martin O'Malley if he had remained viable. (Since he is still young, I hope to see him on a future ticket someday.) I am saddened to see the posts that pretend Bernie is a bad guy and a fraud, because he is not. I have followed his career for years, always with admiration.

And I truly hate to see posts that pretend that Hillary is evil incarnate. I think that as an experienced politician she is all too aware that you don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Every politician makes missteps, and I think the missteps Hillary has made in her career (like the Iraq vote) have all been because of her awareness of how the game is played--and her awareness that she especially--as a target of RW hatred and as a woman--has to, as the OP says, walk a tightrope.

Even the "damned emails" problem occurred only because after 25 years of being gratuitously attacked and smeared over everything, no matter how innocent it might be, she does perhaps go a bit overboard sometimes to create a safe zone of privacy around herself. That, I believe, is what led to the white noise machine at her last donor event speech. She knows perfectly well that anything she says to a group of wealthy donors will be pored over, taken out of context, and used to attack her.

I believe HRC is far more liberal than Bill, and far more principled. In an interview I read when George Stephanopoulos left the Clinton administration, he made a few critical comments about Bill, but when asked about Hillary, he said he would walk over hot coals for her. That is the sort of loyalty and admiration she inspires in the people who know her best and work closely with her. I take such things very seriously. If she were the monster people want to paint her as, she would not make people who work for and with her feel that way.

[font color = "red"]From this point on, I get into the details, and it is a long read, but i hope you will read it anyway. You might even find some things in it to use when arguing with Bernie supporters on Hillary's behalf. [/font]

I think the whole wealthy donor thing is purely because of Citizen United. Hillary has for years been laying the financial groundwork (and network) necessary to run for office in the Citizen United era, and if Bernie had not come along and devised a way to fund a campaign with a decent war chest without going where the big money is for funding, Hillary's ability to raise so much money from wealthy individuals, banks, and corporations would have been the only thing that would have given us a chance in hell against the money on the Republican side.

But as much as I admire and respect HRC, I do have a few concerns about the steps she has had to take to remain viable. In my posts I have often referenced the movie The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979). The following excerpt is what I said in another thread some time ago, and it is relevant to both Hillary and Obama and the compromises they have been forced to make to even get elected, much less to accomplish anything in this corrupt political system, which has been twisted by the plutocrats to be so completely unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the 99%. I am bolding and italicizing a couple of points in the post that I think apply strongly to Hillary as well as Obama. I am also underlining the part of a sentence that I think pertains very much to the appearance (not necessarily the reality!) that Hillary is really on the side of the 1%:

Alan Alda and Meryl Streep starred in a powerful film, "The Seduction of Joe Tynan," about a genuinely decent and well-meaning man who went into politics to truly represent the interests of the people, including the middle class and the downtrodden and disadvantaged.

But by the time he was able to get into a position powerful enough to do some good, he found himself trapped, not just by the intractable system itself (though that was certainly part of it), but also by the innumerable small, usually "insignificant," compromises he'd had to make along the way, which were not really major missteps in themselves, but which when taken together added up to a kind of political prison that made it impossible for him to do most of the noble things he had entered politics to accomplish.

I believe this happens to the good guys that go into politics. If they aim for enough power to accomplish anything, they are compromised. If they resist those compromises, they end up as voices in the wilderness, like Kucinich and Sanders, who are marginalized to the point where they have no real power, or like Wellstone, if it looks as though they might actually influence public discourse to the point that there might be some movement in the right direction.

Back at DU2 I posted a thread suggesting that Obama might be a "stealth progressive," trying to get a reasonably progressive agenda off the ground while presenting himself to the real powers that be in a way that led them to believe him to be on their side.

Unfortunately, though, as Vonnegut shows in "Mother Night" and "Cat's Cradle," you have to be careful about such masks, because what you pretend to be--even if for the best, purest motives--can all too easily become what you actually are. [font color = "red"](NOTE: I don't think that either Hillary or Obama has sold out to the dark side, but I do think many stiff-necked liberals believe they have sold out because purists refuse to understand that such compromises cannot be avoided in a system as corrupt as ours.)[/font]

I believe Obama is trying to walk that narrow line, and that he has accomplished a lot of progressive changes along the way. But I also believe that he sometimes seems to slip a bit to the dark side of the line, not because he necessarily wants to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, but because he has a tiger by the tail, and he is not really in control of it, though he can sometimes force it to swerve slightly in a direction of his choosing if he manages to throw himself hard enough and strategically enough in one direction or another.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3496695

I think that when Obama pushes something like the TPP that we so strongly oppose, or when he appoints a Republican or a Republican favored person to an important position, he is doing so not because he is not on our side, but because he has to sometimes seem to be on their side to have any chance of getting anything done for us. And in fact he might be right about that, and the unbending way that Sanders (and Kucinich, and Wellstone) stand on principle can render them less effective than someone willing to at least seem to go along to get along, because it usually prevents such people as Sanders/Kucinich/Wellstone from gaining real power.

But something new has happened to the voters this cycle, something that makes it possible for someone like Sanders to inspire a movement that might actually help weaken the stranglehold the 1% have on our system. If Sanders can win, and if he can do so while not kissing the butts of the 1%, then we might have a chance to make more than merely incremental changes--we might have a chance at a new New Deal. THAT is the main reason why I am for Bernie this primary rather than Clinton.

Furthermore, I think (hope) that by inspiring new voters and young people, and by drawing independents to our side, he could do a lot to help our downticket and our state candidates get elected, too. I also think that by inspiring new voters and independents, this primary contest has helped our cause. If Hillary wins the nomination, Bernie will throw his support behind Hillary, and I hope that will encourage all the voters who flocked to him to support her enthusiastically, too.

If, as certainly seems probable, Hillary does become our GE nominee, I will avidly support her in any way that I can. I am absolutely appalled at the people on DU, supposedly liberals, who insist they will not support Hillary in the GE. They would give some RW jerk the power to appoint as many as 3 USSC justices and to do even more damage to our economy and our society than even the CheneyBush administration did!

[tblue37]

4. Oh, and a big K&R! nt

[madamesilverspurs]

5. Nicely done.

And I'll be sharing it.

[SunSeeker]

6. K & R

[radical noodle]

7. You put my feelings into words

Wonderfully written OP. Thank you!

[Basic LA]

8. So nicely expressed.

You speak for many of us.

[FrenchieCat]

9. Bravo!

Good memory!

[DemonGoddess]

10. K&R!

Wonderful post!

[sheshe2]

11. Awesome post.

I thank you Sparkly.

[Stand and Fight]

12. Excellent. I am happy to kick and recommend this for the early morning crew. n/t

[pnwmom]

13. Thank you, Sparkly, for putting into words what so many of us remember and love about Hillary. n/t

[yallerdawg]

15. That about sums it up! Brilliant!

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

16. Well said

[LAS14]

17. k & r!!!!

[Lisa D]

18. K&R!

LOVE this post!

[BlueMTexpat]

19. Thank you, Sparkly!

This is beautifully written and expresses many of my own reasons for supporting HRC.

She is a woman who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. A couple of other highlights:

- As a teenager: Babysitting for free the children of immigrant mothers

- As a new Young Democrat in 1972: Registering Latino voters in TX

- As First Lady in 1995: Giving "Women's Rights are Human Rights" speech in Beijing, China (think about that in context) against the advice of the Secret Service who thought she would be in grave danger

That speech 20 years later: http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/09/05/20-years-later-hillary-clintons-beijing-speech-on-women-resonates/

The speech itself:

Why that speech was so important and why it was so dangerous at the time: http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a30328/hillary-clinton-beijing-speech/

"It was tenuous," admits Melanne Verveer, who then served as Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton in the White House. "A lot of people did not think she should go." That summer, Chinese-American dissident Harry Wu had been arrested, and relations between the Chinese and United States governments had soured.

"It made people nervous," muses Ginger Lew, who has advised the Obama administration on economics and attended the conference in Beijing. "There was a lot of pressure on her not to go. ... But I don't think there was any question in her mind. She was very clear. She was going." Clinton, Verveer says, "knew that this could make a difference. She wanted to push the envelope on behalf of women and girls around the world, and, throughout that up and down, she just focused on the speech."

Given the fracas, it was, Verveer explains, "a very closely held set of remarks."

"It wasn't a speech by committee—put it that way," former Clinton speechwriter Lissa Muscatine says. Together with just a few staff members, including Verveer and Muscatine, and her husband, Clinton toiled over the speech. The president, Verveer asserts,"was totally behind her going." But while President Clinton was supportive, Verveer says it was Hillary who insisted on the specifics of the platform. She did not want to "water it down," Muscatine adds.

There are those who say that they really are not biased against women, just not THIS woman. And I ask WHY NOT THIS WOMAN?

There is simply no other woman on earth who can hold a candle to her. Period.