Before Bill was even the nominee. And I was a fervent Tom Harkin supporter, with NO time for the DLC.
She and Ira Magaziner made a "policy tour," swinging through the Midwest and meeting with both Party and non-Party affiliated advocacy groups working on the specific issues of un/employment, welfare reform policy, and health care reform.
I attended one of the non-Party meetings as representative of Jobs Now Coalition. There were 3-4 of us from the Coalition board, and (IIRC) about 30-50 other advocacy/activist group representatives. It was a very mixed audience in terms of receptivity- the welfare rights people were seriously looking to ambush the whole DLC platform, for one thing. But I sat next to the state director for the Children's Defense Fund, whom I knew pretty well at the time, and I was surprised at how excited and receptive she was- she told me "Just listen. Bill may be in the DLC pocket, but Hillary is her own woman. You might be surprised."
I wasn't terribly surprised with the presentation- it was mostly Magaziner, and you could see that although it wasn't a one-to-one correspondence with the DLC playbook, it was definitely positioned to bridge between that and an actual progressive agenda. Hillary spoke specifically to the health care reform portion, and the child poverty portion.
When the presentation was done, though, there was a "moderated discussion," where attendees were allowed to ask specific questions, and here's what DID surprise me:
The discussion very quickly morphed from attendees asking questions of Magaziner and Clinton, to Clinton in particular asking LOTS of follow-up questions of the attendees, and listening and taking notes on the answers. And asking for clarification. And asking her aide to note particular resources, and peoples' names and contact information, to provide more information, either from her (in response to questions she admitted she couldn't respond in much detail to in that setting), or from them, FOR her.
Minnesota, at the time, had a lot of State-based pilot programs for children's health via Medicaid supplemental assistance, and a lot of HMO and PPO models that were fairly new at the time. She had chapter and verse on several of those programs and wanted a lot of information on how they were working for the people whose representatives were attending that meeting- the welfare rights people and healthcare reform folks in particular.
The meeting ran over time, of course.
And when one of my fellow Board members from the Jobs Now Coalition described the pilot wage-subsidy program we'd gotten funded through the state to transition laid-off and unemployed workers back into various small-employer newly-created jobs, she and Magaziner both asked for more information on that. So we stayed after the meeting, and I had a chance to shake her hand.
She thanked US for the work we were doing for unemployed people in Minnesota.
I didn't hear a single campaign pitch for Bill- and I was expecting to. But... nada. They said it was a policy tour, not a campaign stop, and that's how they ran it.
I was impressed as hell with her.
So, I'm not surprised by this campaign. Not a bit.
I'm THRILLED she's going to be my President.
appreciatively,
Bright
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