Clinton plans Tuesday meetings with all Hill Democrats

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83. But let's not forget the effort she put in to lead a health care task force when Bill was

President. He assigned her to dig down into the health care crisis in this country by the 1990s and come up with a solution. She took SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT for that!!!!!!!!! Oh God did they beat up on her from all sides. I was amazed at her poise back then. She never once lost her cool, she never once was snarky, she never once badmouthed her enemies - or even those who weren't really enemies but they just didn't agree with or have any confidence in what she was doing. She was thorough and graceful throughout. And she was hammered for it from all sides - "Who the hell does she think she is?" "Who voted for HER?" plus all the "too-big-a-problem", "can't-be-solved", "it's-no-use" types.

The intellect thing was kind of a thing back then, too. In an alarming trend, noticeable numbers of Americans seem to view being smart as something bad. Maybe it's because - if the guy next to you is smart, it'll make you look dumb (and we can't have thaaaaat!). It's not a matter of - if the next guy is smart, then maybe that'll help add points to the game on our side. And we'll ALL benefit from it. Because it isn't really ABOUT "sides." We're all in this together.

Fucking reagan - there was one thing I have to give him. ONE thing he said that really made sense and would prove out if it ever happened. He once observed that the one thing that would unite the entire world on the same side - would be if there was a UFO invasion. MAN was he laughed at for that one. But I found it rather mind-blowing that he would have this moment of keen sense of the human condition. The whole common enemy thing. A whole nation full of strange bedfellows. Hell, a whole globeful. ALL nations full of strange bedfellows. I always regarded reagan as a dim bulb but he had some street smarts. And he knew how to manipulate people. MAN did he know that one. That was the only thing I ever heard to come out of his mouth to which I could honestly and sincerely respond - "he's absolutely spot-on!" It'd be a hard way to learn the lesson about us all being on the same team, but maybe we're doomed to learn the big things that way.

Hey, at least she tried. She went all over. She talked to everybody and had her panel talk to everybody. She came up short, of course. Similarly to the ACA - do any of us remember that it, too, is imperfect? But shit, people. At least we have SOMETHING. We have a START. You don't build a complete house overnight. You have to lay a foundation and build from the bottom up. And we have a foundation now. Hillary at least tried to get something done, and she wasn't afraid to tackle a project that everybody considered 1) impossible and 2) miserable and boring and unglamorous. You spend your whole project down in the weeds. It's about as un-sexy a project as there is. And you get no glory and no bounce from it. No matter what you do. It was a national sport - finding fault with all things Clinton and also with a First Lady like she was. She had an office not far from the Oval Office. She wasn't just overseeing seating arrangements and menu items for state dinners, or hosting the DAR in the Rose Garden. She was an active participant in the policy arena. It was a brave and thankless thing to do and she willingly took it on.

As you might surmise - I give Hillary Clinton boatloads of points for all of the above. And she wasn't even getting paid for it. She didn't even have a formal government job title. "First Lady" was more of a ceremonial nature. But then again, she told everybody from the beginning, to "60 Minutes" during his first campaign, that she wasn't the kind of politician's wife who just stayed home baking cookies "and standin' by mah man like Tammy Wynette". Lord Have Mercy she took heat from that, with Tammy Wynette herself leading the stampede. She was an uppity woman very much UNLIKE what America had been accustomed to for a generation - with ol' bar bush and nancy reagan before her. And she took all this punishment and hunkered down and did her job and came up with the best that circumstances allowed at that time. Wasn't good enough. Got torpedoed. But at least she'd started the conversation and made some of us start looking at the problem a little deeper and/or more seriously. And remember what they say in addiction recovery: "First you have to admit you have a problem."

It was hard carving a niche in decades past! It was hard! I say this from an EXTREMELY microscopic version of Hillary Clinton's experience. My version, wee as it was, involved being the first woman hired in various radio station news departments. It came at approximately the moment in the mid'70s when the FCC started letting radio and TV stations know in effect that it was time to add a woman or two. It was a time when you started seeing female co-anchors on the local news. It was a time when you noticed, all of a sudden, that up and down the radio dial, music stations had a token female jock on staff. Most of the time, at least for starters, she worked overnights. Or later, middays. It was news, locally and within the industry, when a woman was chosen for a drive-time shift. I remember when this little sprite, Ellie Dylan (I think that's how she spelled her name) was #1 on this huge-ass rock station in New York City. It was BIG news. I remember the photo in the trades when her first ratings came out - and there she sat, in front of the control board and mic, with her index finger up in the air "Number ONE!" Hell, I remember reading profiles of the rare women deejays in major markets back when I was still in college radio. Allison Steele, the "Night Bird." At KNAC when I started, doing afternoon news breaks, there was a lady jock overnight going by the name Sunshine. There was a whole lot of that. Women on the air where it had only been men - that was a big deal.

And it was hard. You had no template if you were the first one. YOU were setting the standard, whether you wanted to or not. You were breaking ground. Most people at the station - mainly men - didn't really know how to deal with you or react to you. I had this really instructive experience going to one big radio industry convention in town. I was the news director at my station. I tried to dress like a management person would. The ol' Credibility Costume, that followed the "Dress for Success" how-to book guidelines for all you women just starting to make it in a man's world. I was one of the few women there - well, I don't remember seeing anybody else, frankly - in a nice blazer and trousers. Everybody else was in jeans and t-shirts. Except for some of the - um - "decorative" women who turned up more toward evening. It was clear that more of the male contingent felt comfortable with the decorative women than with a woman who turned up in a blazer and nice pants. There was shit like that ALL THROUGH the 70s that women had to go through. So I relate to Hillary in my own microscopic way - in pretty strong terms.

As for single-payer, yeah, I want that, too. But it's an end goal, not the first step. Obama couldn't get it either. And with the opposition we have in this country because of the masses of people who willingly vote against their own best interests, sometimes we're lucky even to get past the first step.

OH CRAP, sorry it's so long...