National
Journal Group
Learn more about our publications and sign up for a free trial.
E-Mail Alerts
Get notified the moment your favorite features are updated.
Need A Reprint?
Click here for details on reprints, permissions and back issues.
Advertise With Us
Details on advertising with National Journal Group -- both online and in print -- can be found in our online media kit.
Go Wireless
Get daily political updates on your handheld computer.
|
Last Updated June 22, 2005
Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, was elected junior senator from New York in November 2000. Clinton grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois; her father owned and ran a drape and curtain factory. She excelled at her studies and was elected to student government at Maine South High School. Park Ridge is a solidly Republican Chicago suburb, near O'Hare Airport, and the young Hillary Rodham was a Goldwater girl in 1964. She went to Wellesley College, where she became a Democrat in the turbulent election year of 1968: she wrote her senior thesis (kept under lock and key by the college since 1993) on applying the theories of radical Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky and argued that antipoverty programs did not give enough power to the poor. She was elected student government president, and pushed successfully for admission of more black students and admission of men to women's dorms. At the 1969 commencement she gave a speech that won notice in Life magazine. She went on to Yale Law School, where she worked with the attorney for Black Panthers accused of murder and clerked for a summer with Communist attorney Robert Treuhaft in Berkeley. At Yale she met Bill Clinton, and they became partners for life. Bill Clinton was anything but reticent about his political ambitions in his native Arkansas. He showed her around the state and together they went to Austin in 1972 to run the McGovern campaign in Texas. After graduation in 1973, Bill Clinton moved to Fayetteville to teach law at the University of Arkansas. In 1974 Hillary Rodham moved to Washington to work for the House Judiciary Committee's special counsel John Doar on the impeachment of Richard Nixon. After Nixon resigned, she returned to Arkansas to teach law, and in October 1975 she and Clinton were married. In 1976 he was elected attorney general of Arkansas; she worked for Jimmy Carter's campaign. After that she worked for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock and in 1977 was appointed part-time chairman of the Legal Services Corporation. Under her leadership, the Legal Services budget increased dramatically, including contributions to local political campaigns and conducting campaigns against ballot propositions. In 1978 Bill Clinton ran for governor, and after he won the Democratic nomination, tantamount to victory that year, Hillary Rodham invested $1,000 in commodities future and with the help of a friend who was general counsel of Tyson Foods, one of the state's biggest businesses, saw that turned into $100,000. In 1980 Bill Clinton was defeated for re-election. He promptly took up a more moderate line and his wife began to call herself Hillary Clinton; in 1982 he beat the incumbent and became governor again. Hillary Clinton continued her law practice and service on the board of the Children's Defense Fund and other organizations. She served on the boards of Wal-Mart, TCBY and in 1988 and 1991 was named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country. It was in these years also that she and her husband invested in the Whitewater real estate project and that she performed legal work for the Morgan Guaranty Savings and Loan, which invested in the project and whose failure cost the federal government $73 million. Whitewater later became the subject of congressional hearings and an independent counsel investigation, both of which were impeded when Rose Law Firm billing records were subpoenaed in July 1994 but were not found until they turned up in the residential quarters of the White House in January 1996. Independent Counsel Robert Ray in September 2000 ended the investigation, saying he could not prove that the Clintons had been involved in criminal activity or that they concealed information from investigators or obstructed justice. In his final report in March 2002 Ray noted that Rose Law Firm records were found in the family quarters of the White House in January 1996 and that three witnesses told investigators they saw her "carrying records that had the appearance of the billing records in July 1995"; but he said that that evidence was insufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. In 1991 Bill Clinton ran for president. It was widely rumored that he had had many extramarital affairs; at a Washington press breakfast the Clintons admitted that their marriage had not been without problems. After the election, Clinton announced that the leader of his task force on health care reform would be the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton--the first time her maiden name was featured. The task force under her direction and that of Ira Magaziner met secretly and without input from members of Congress; a complicated plan was finally produced after a couple of deadlines were not met. Clinton eventually did testify before Congress; there and in other public forums she was crisp, articulate, knowledgeable. But she was unable to persuade Congress to adopt her plan. It never came to the floor in either house, and was abandoned in September 1994. In the meantime, the first lady had problems with scandals. In May 1993 the members of the White House Travel Office were fired, and director Billy Ray Dale was later prosecuted--and acquitted by a jury within minutes. Clinton denied that she had any role in the firings, or in apparent plans to replace the charter service with one owned by Clinton friends and Hollywood producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. In June 2000 Independent Counsel Robert Ray concluded that Clinton had given "factually false" testimony in a sworn deposition, but declined to prosecute her. Clinton persevered through the humiliations of the health care fiasco and the scandals with an aplomb that showed great discipline and determination. She wrote It Takes a Village and donated the proceeds to children's hospitals. In January 1998, when Bill Clinton denied the charge that he had had an affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Rodham Clinton flew to New York to appear on the Today show and charge that the allegations were the product of "a vast right-wing conspiracy." She continued to support him, though with obvious frostiness, when he was forced to admit in August 1998 that the charges were true. Meanwhile, she campaigned gamely for Democratic candidates in the 1998 elections, and was particularly moved by the warm applause she received in her four appearances in New York for Senate candidate Charles Schumer. Three days after the 1998 election, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he would not run for re-election in New York in 2000. Moynihan, the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson, a man whose public career extended back into the 1950s and included many prescient warnings and original insights, who had served four terms in the Senate after serving in the cabinet or sub-cabinets of four successive presidents, obviously was not going to be replaced by a politician of similar magnitude; there aren't any. But there also weren't any obvious Democratic successors in New York. Moynihan, who passed away in March 2003, himself suggested state comptroller Carl McCall; Congresswoman Nita Lowey of Westchester County was interested in the race, though it was not clear that either had the stature to beat the likely Republican nominee, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In early 1999 Bob Torricelli, the aggressive head of the Senate Democrats' campaign committee, called for Clinton to run. She said she was giving "careful thought" to it. She started making more trips to New York, and Lowey said she would be glad to step aside if Clinton ran. In July 1999 she appeared at Moynihans' Upstate farm and then began a "listening tour" across Upstate New York. Giuliani responded with an appearance in Arkansas. Clinton's early campaign was not without troubles. There was widespread ridicule of the idea of someone with no previous connection with the state running for senator from New York. In August 1999 Bill Clinton granted clemency to four Puerto Rican terrorists who never expressed remorse for their violent crimes--an obvious pitch for the Puerto Rican vote. Embarrassed, she came out against the move, without giving a heads-up to Puerto Rican leaders. That same month the Clintons left their favorite vacation spot, fashionable Martha's Vineyard, for a sojourn in Skaneateles, a pleasant town in the Finger Lakes they would never have visited otherwise. In October the Clintons bought a house in woodsy Chappaqua in Westchester County and were then embarrassed because they borrowed most of the purchase price from Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe; later they got more conventional financing. In November 1999 on a trip to Israel, Clinton embraced and kissed the wife of Yasir Arafat after a speech in which she lambasted the Israelis; Clinton explained later that she was acting in a diplomatic capacity, but her act brought back memories of her endorsement of an independent Palestinian state when that was not yet U.S. policy. In February 2000 she formally announced her candidacy, with her husband standing silently by, from a venue in Westchester. By that point her poll ratings had slipped, and she was running no better than even with Giuliani. Carpetbagging is not necessarily a political crime in New York. Voters there in 1964 elected Robert Kennedy, though he lived in Virginia and had a technical residence in Massachusetts. Robert Kennedy won in 1964 not just because of Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but because he ran virtually even in usually Republican Upstate New York; national celebrities may be commonplace in New York City, but when they show up in Upstate towns and cities it is noted and appreciated. Hillary Rodham Clinton's strategy was similar. With her usual hard work, perseverance and intensity, she criss-crossed Upstate New York, listened to its voters' many complaints, learned about local issues and adopted appealing positions on them: the same slogging persistence she had shown in the dreary days in Arkansas and the tumultuous days after the failed health care initiative and scandal charges in Washington. In April Giuliani announced that he had prostate cancer; in May he announced that he was seeking a separation from his wife. Days later, in a dramatic press conference, he announced he was leaving the Senate race. Within 24 hours the Republicans had another candidate, Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio. He had talked of running in summer 1999, until Governor George Pataki announced suddenly in August that he was backing his longtime rival Giuliani. Lazio had a moderate voting record in the House; like Giuliani he backed abortion rights. He raised plenty of money: Hillary haters from all over the country sent in contributions large and small, and he ended up spending $40 million. But his campaign was less than perfect. Lazio was vulnerable to attacks, made often by Clinton, that he had supported Newt Gingrich, a bete noire to most New York voters. And there were unforced errors. In the first debate on September 13, Lazio walked over to Clinton and presented her a paper with a pledge to eschew soft money ads. In a time when voters were eager for consensus, Lazio was providing them with confrontation, and this in-your-face behavior was especially repugnant to women. Nine days later they both agreed to not run ads financed by soft money, that is, contributions to parties; but this was unenforceable, since parties and others can spend what they want to, and the assumption that campaign finance was a vote-moving issue proved ill-founded. In the second debate, Lazio declined to say that he would vote for any Supreme Court nominee who opposed the key abortion rights decision of Roe v. Wade, a defensible position intellectually, but one difficult to sustain politically in New York; Clinton pounded him on it. For a race that was close almost all the way in the polls, this Senate election--surpassing the 1998 New York Senate race as the most expensive in history not involving a self-financing candidate--was decided by a surprisingly wide margin. Clinton won 55%-43%, almost the same as Schumer's 55%-44% two years earlier. "Sixty-two counties, 16 months, three debates, two opponents and six black pantsuits later--here we are!" exulted Clinton on election night. She was helped, of course, by the fact that Al Gore was carrying New York 60%-35%. But she ran well on her own. She carried New York City by 74%-25%, the same margin as Schumer's in 1998. She trailed in the suburbs by only 53%-45%, despite Lazio's suburban provenance; he carried his Long Island base, but she carried her now native Westchester. And Lazio won Upstate by only 50%-47%; Clinton carried most of the large counties there, and her percentages in county after county, not usually 50% but seldom under 40%, are impressive evidence of her hard work in campaigning and mastering Upstate issues. Clinton carried the Jewish vote, according to the VNS exit poll, by only 53%-45%, which would usually mean disaster for a Democrat in New York, and she did far less well than Schumer and other Democrats among those with graduate degrees, a large percentage of whom are Jewish. But she carried Upstate women by 55%-43%, an excellent showing for a Democrat: the work paid off. A few days after the election, Clinton took a victory lap around Upstate New York and had a harmonious meeting in Albany with Pataki. But her standing fell in the months after the election. In December 2000 she signed a book contract with Simon & Schuster for $8 million--$4.5 million more than the book contract for which Newt Gingrich was so roundly attacked in 1995. In departing the White House, the Clintons took $190,000 in gifts--far above the Senate's $50 limit--and many had to be returned when it was revealed that they included items donated to the White House, not the Clintons. Among the gifts were $7,375 worth of coffee tables and chairs donated by Denise Rich, former wife and advocate of Marc Rich, the fugitive financier pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, despite the opposition of New York U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she had no opinion on the pardon. Nor, she said, did she have any role in the pardon of four Hasidic Jews from the Rockland County community of New Square who were convicted of fleecing the federal government of millions of dollars--a pardon White also opposed. But Clinton had visited New Square in August 2000, had won the community's vote by a margin of 1,400 to 12 and had been present at a White House Map Room meeting between their leaders and Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000, where they asked for the pardons. She said she had no knowledge as well that her brother Hugh Rodham had, while living at the White House, pushed for and obtained the pardon of two other felons for which he had been paid $400,000. Many expected that Clinton would be greeted grudgingly and suspiciously by other senators because of her obvious presidential ambitions. In fact she has worked hard at the often tedious business of being a senator. She continued to travel around New York, especially Upstate: by June 2002 she had made 130 trips to Upstate New York. She worked on federal loans for the Mohawk Valley, a theater restoration in Gloversville, the arcana of dairy price supports. She turned down many opportunities for national appearances; only after September 11 did she appear again on Meet the Press, in December 2001. She worked hard in the Senate, attending just about every committee and subcommittee hearing, spending time on the floor, approaching Republican colleagues to ask if she could co-sponsor their bills. At Democratic caucus meetings, she would get coffee for other senators. Republicans found themselves sheepishly admitting they like her. At the same time, by all accounts she has taken a hard partisan line behind closed doors. She advised Tom Daschle that Senate Democrats should have a war room, as the Clinton campaign and White House did. She supported George W. Bush in the war on terrorism and voted for the Iraq war resolution, and told him in their meeting on September 13, 2001, that she was one of the few who understood the loneliness of the White House, but she advised down-the-line opposition to his domestic policies. Occasionally in public she sounded a partisan note. In May 2001 she cast the single vote against the Justice Department confirmation of Michael Chertoff, who had worked on the Whitewater independent counsel investigation. HILLPAC, her leadership PAC, raised $3.2 million in the 2002 cycle and contributed more than $1 million to Democrats across the country, including $21,000 in Iowa and $15,000 in New Hampshire; she put on fundraisers for fellow Democrats in her Washington house. Clinton's propensity for bipartisanship and her partisanship were both on display at the opening of the 108th Congress in January 2003. In December she had gotten agreement with Don Nickles on a compromise proposal to extend unemployment benefits. It was the first item of business in the new Congress. But unexpectedly Clinton rose and offered an amendment to extend coverage to 1 million people whose benefits had expired. This triggered several hours of debate on parliamentary motions--a tough initiation for the new Majority Leader Bill Frist. Eventually Clinton's amendment was rejected and a compromise was passed. In the new Congress, Clinton was elected head of the Democrats' Steering and Coordination Committee, a job that has never generated much publicity for its incumbent; but this gives her an institutional base for her behind-the-scenes partisan strategizing. She got a seat on the Armed Services Committee, on which no New York senator had served for years, and worked methodically on defense issues, seeking better pay and benefits for service members, visiting troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, arguing against base closings, as she did at Stewart Air National Guard Base. Lindsey Graham, who co-sponsored benefit increases with her, said, "People may think she has an antimilitary bias or is not strong on defense. But I find her to be very reasonable. I think she has been responsible in making sure the men and women in the military are well taken care of." Committee Chairman John Warner praised her as well: "She comports herself in a way consistent with the bipartisan reputation of the committee. I've not seen her try to grandstand." With Jim Talent, she passed a bill in 2004 providing a tracking system and regular health screening for military personnel, with a view toward preventing service-related illness like Gulf war syndrome. She pressed for hearings on insurance sales on military bases. She introduced a bill for federal aid for localities that lose first responders to National Guard and Reserve call-ups. Clinton voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002 and did not flinch from supporting it later; she voted for the $87 billion supplemental in November 2003. "The fact is we're in Iraq and we're in Afghanistan, and we have no choice but to be successful," she said in December 2003. In spring 2004, when other Democratic senators were flocking to the premiere of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," she said Saddam Hussein was "a potential threat" who "was seeking weapons of mass destruction, whether or not he actually had them." She was critical of the conduct of operations, however. After a trip to Iraq in December 2003, she said, "Everybody told me we don't have enough intelligence, civil affairs, MPs, engineers." She said that the Bush administration wasn't "leveling with the American people about what it is we're up against, how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost." On domestic policy she described the administration as "radical," bent on dismantling the "central pillars of progress in our country during the 20th century" and seeking "to undo the New Deal." It was "making America less free, less fair, less strong and smart than it deserves to be in a dangerous world." But her specific proposals were more incremental and less confrontational. Worried about manufacturing job losses in Upstate New York, she called for a Manufacturing Research Agency in the Commerce Department. In April 2004 she sponsored a bill to spend $2.5 billion on making education universal, for girls as well as boys, around the world. In September 2004, with Nita Lowey, she sponsored a bill, backed by teachers unions, to increase spending on the 2002 education act. She spoke out forcefully against illegal immigration and said that George W. Bush has not "protected our borders." On homeland security, Clinton got passed in September 2004 amendments providing $50 million for nonprofits and community organizations vulnerable to terrorist threats and $570 million to safeguard New York's trains and tunnels. Clinton had cast lone votes against Michael Chertoff, the onetime Whitewater investigator, for a Justice Department position and a judgeship, but when he was nominated for Homeland Security secretary in January 2005 she said coolly, "I look forward to meetings with Judge Chertoff in the very near future to discuss many important issues, including the specific homeland security needs of New York as well as the many homeland security challenges confronting our nation." She voted for his confirmation: working for homeland security for New York and the nation was evidently more important than any personal grudge. She returned to the White House for the unveiling of her and her husband's portraits in June 2004, just before Bill Clinton's My Life was released; gracious statements were made all round. At the July 2004 Democratic National Convention she spoke briefly but heartily in favor of John Kerry's candidacy, and stood aside gracefully to let him and John Edwards get most of the attention. Cynics opined that she wanted Kerry to lose, so she could run in 2008. But she campaigned in more than a dozen states for him. But she made it plain after the November 2004 election that she took a different approach. When Kerry's defeat was blamed on values issues, she commented, "I don't think you can win an election or even run a successful campaign if you don't acknowledge what is important to people. We don't have to agree with them. But being ignored is a sign of such disrespect. And therefore I think we should talk about these issues." In January 2005, speaking to abortion rights supporters in Albany, she surprised many in the audience by saying, "Yes, we do have deeply held differences of opinion about the issue of abortion, and I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available. There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate. We should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved. We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." She continued to support a partial-birth abortion ban only with an exception for the health of the mother and parental notification only with a judicial bypass. While many Democrats were skeptical of government aid to faith-based service providers, Clinton said, "There is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles." Clinton comes up for reelection in New York in 2006, and no one doubts that she can win; her poll ratings in 2004 were very high, and in every region of the state. Congressmen Vito Fossella and Peter King in late 2004 urged Colin Powell to return to the state and run against her, but he showed no sign of interest. The indictment in January 2005 of one of her 2000 campaign fundraisers for underreporting in-kind contributions to Hollywood fundraisers did not seem to have a major impact. In early 2005 there was word that her Republican opponent might be Manhattan lawyer Edward Cox, Richard Nixon's son-in-law, who seemed likely to be able to raise serious money and wage a serious campaign; another possible candidate was Jeanine Pirro, district attorney of Westchester County. Former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer said in June 2005 that he would run. But since the institution of popular election of senators, no Democratic senator from New York has been defeated for reelection. In June 2003 her book Living History was released; she promoted it assiduously and it became a runaway bestseller. In early 2005 Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed to be the favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. During her first four years in the Senate she eschewed presidential ambitions and said she was only interested in serving out her term. During the 2006 campaign she will undoubtedly be asked whether she will run in 2008, and undoubtedly she will have a stock response not ruling it out; New Yorkers have never shown much resentment when their officeholders run for president. Will Americans accept a woman, and a former First Lady, as president? Nations as diverse as Britain, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Nicaragua have elected women as heads of government--in three cases women who were the daughters of former heads of government. In November 2004 she noted humorously that a woman was running for president in Afghanistan, "a feat that puts Afghanistan women ahead of American women." Clinton's firm stand on Iraq and her familiarity with military and defense issues from her seat on Armed Services could assure many that she is qualified to be commander-in-chief; she has gone some distance toward inoculating herself against the charge often made against Democrats, that she is soft on defense. Her statements on abortion and other values issues show her to be one Democrat determined not to repel cultural conservatives by condescension or contempt. She does tend to polarize the electorate and has a large core of detractors, but she also had a large core of those with strong positive feelings: the same that could be said of George W. Bush, and he won. The electorate was closely divided in 2004, and it would be unwise at this distance to write off the chances of any Democratic nominee in 2008, especially one this hard-working and determined.
Committees
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NEW FEATURE
[ Site Index | Staff | Privacy Policy | E-Mail Alerts ]
[ Reprints And Back Issues | Content Licensing ]
[ Make NationalJournal.com Your Homepage ]
[ About National Journal Group Inc. ]
[ Employment Opportunities ]
Copyright 2013 by National Journal Group Inc.
The Watergate · 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 · fax 202-833-8069
NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.
