McClatchy Washington Bureau
Sun, Feb. 03, 2008
Clinton’s ’35 years of change’ omits most of her career
Matt Stearns | McClatchy Newspapers
February 03, 2008 11:09:08 PM
WASHINGTON — To hear Hillary Clinton talk, she’s spent her entire career putting her Yale Law School degree to work for the common good.
She routinely tells voters that she’s “been working to bring positive change to people’s lives for 35 years.” She told a voter in New Hampshire: “I’ve spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector.” Speaking in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said his wife “could have taken a job with a firm … Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund.”
The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder. The whole story is more complicated — and less flattering.
Clinton worked at the Children’s Defense Fund for less than a year, and that’s the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she’s ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.
Clinton spent the bulk of her career — 15 of those 35 years — at one of Arkansas’ most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.
Neither she nor her surrogates, however, ever mention that on the campaign trail. Her campaign Web site biography devotes six paragraphs to her pro bono legal work for the poor but sums up the bulk of her experience in one sentence: “She also continued her legal career as a partner in a law firm.”
The full truth doesn’t fit into the carefully crafted narrative the campaign has developed about Clinton, said Sally Bedell Smith, the author of “For Love of Politics,” a study of the Clintons’ partnership.
“She wants to be seen as someone who has devoted her life to public service,” Smith said. “I suppose if you say it enough, maybe you can get people to believe it.”
Spokesman Phil Singer said the campaign highlights Clinton’s side work because it discovered early on that voters didn’t know about it.
Clinton did a great deal of public service work during her time at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. She served on the board of the Legal Services Corp. during the Carter administration and for a time was its chair. She helped found a child advocacy system in Arkansas and took on several tasks as the state’s first lady, such as revisions of the state’s education system and rural health care delivery. She also served on the board of directors of the Children’s Defense Fund, and on the board of a children’s hospital.
“It’s important for voters to know that she worked to improve rural health care, to improve education,” Singer said. “Yes, she worked at a law firm. Are voters interested in hearing about some accounting case she worked on, or things people care about in the real world? … That’s the point, that’s the rationale. It’s nothing more complicated than that.”
Clinton did receive a smaller salary than most other Rose partners, topping out at about $200,000, in part because of her outside activities, according to several biographies.
But “these were all activities on the margins of her professional life, working as a corporate lawyer, representing corporations,” biographer Smith said.
In her autobiography, “Living History,” Clinton mentions two cases. In one, she represented a canning company against a man who found part of a dead rat in his pork and beans. In another, she represented a logging company accused of wrongdoing after an accident injured several workers. While Clinton used both anecdotes for comic effect, in both cases she was working for corporate interests.
She also served on corporate boards, including that of retail giant Wal-Mart from 1986-1992, frozen yogurt purveyor TCBY from 1985-1992 and cement manufacturer LaFarge from 1990-1992. She earned tens of thousands of dollars in fees from each.
Clinton’s firm represented Wal-Mart and TCBY while she sat on their boards, a cozy practice that corporate governance experts frown upon because of the potential for conflicts of interest.
Politicians naturally want to stick to their chosen narratives, but other aspects of Clinton’s relationship with the Rose Law Firm could remind voters of the more controversial side of the Clinton legacy.
There was her work on behalf of Madison Guaranty, a failed savings and loan at the heart of the Whitewater investigation — the billing records of which were mysteriously found in a White House storage room years after investigators first asked for them. And there’s Webster Hubbell, a Rose partner, Clinton pal and high-ranking Justice Department official who was convicted of fraud charges related to his work at the firm.
Clinton isn’t the only candidate downplaying less high-minded work. Rival Barack Obama cultivates a squeaky-clean image and referred to his work as a “civil rights attorney” at Thursday’s Los Angeles debate. He didn’t mention other work he did during his decade at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, a small Chicago law firm, helping craft housing deals involving millions of dollars in public subsidies.
Among those involved in some of the deals: Obama patron Tony Rezko. He donated thousands to Obama’s campaigns, raised thousands more and was even involved in the purchase of the Obama family home in Chicago.
These days, Rezko is awaiting trial in federal court on fraud charges.
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/v-print/story/26377.html
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: “Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics. “
HR CLINTON: LEAVE NO CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND REFERENCE BEHIND
NBC – During the question and answer session, when Clinton was asked
about helping the Latino community, she cited her work for the
Children’s Defense Fund.
“During the course of my work on behalf of the Children’s Defense Fund
and many of the other positions and jobs that I’ve had, I have worked
closely with practically every community in America. I don’t know any
that I haven’t worked with. Obviously, I have deep roots and very strong
relationships in the African-American community and in the Latino
community, because I think it’s important that we see ourselves as the
United States of America, that we see ourselves that we are all part of
the American community. But different communities have different needs.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/24/605658.aspx
From an interview with Marion Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s
Defense Fund, July 2007
AMY GOODMAN, DEMOCRACY NOW: [Hillary Rodham Clinton] used to be the head of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, of the organization that you founded. But you were extremely critical of the Clintons.
I mean,when President Clinton signed off on the, well, so-called welfare reform bill, you said, “His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery
of his pledge not to hurt children.” So what are your hopes right now
for these Democrats? And what are your thoughts about Hillary Rodham
Clinton?
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend,
but they are not friends in politics. We have to build a constituency,
and you don’t – and we profoundly disagreed with the forms of the
welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am
for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work
incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we
need healthcare, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively
in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.
And yet, you know, many years after that, when many people are
pronouncing welfare reform a great success, you know, we’ve got growing
child poverty, we have more children in poverty and in extreme poverty
over the last six years than we had earlier in the year. When an economy
is down, and the real test of welfare reform is what happens to the poor
when the economy is not booming. Well, the poor are suffering, the gap
between rich and poor widening. We have what I consider one of – a
growing national catastrophe of what we call the cradle-to-prison
pipeline. A black boy today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison
in his lifetime, a black girl a one-in-seventeen chance. A Latino boy
who’s born in 2001 has a one-in-six chance of going to prison. We are
seeing more and more children go into our child welfare systems, go
dropping out of school, going into juvenile justice detention
facilities. Many children are sitting up – 15,000, according to a
recent congressional GAO study – are sitting up in juvenile
institutions solely because their parents could not get mental health
and healthcare in their community. This is an abomination.
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/7/24/childrens_defense_funds_marian_wright_edelman
The Re-imagining of Hillary Clinton
by Randy Shaw, 2008-01-14
“She has spent the majority of her life working for poor families, poor children, fighting for the principles that Martin Luther King stood for.” –Minyon Moore, Clinton Campaign Advisor, as quoted in the January 11th New York Times
Rather than attempt to sway votes, I want to discuss what it means when people who have put personal ambitions ahead of principles suddenly reimagine their life histories to achieve immediate goals. Hillary Clinton not only has not spent the majority of her life “working for poor families,” but she used her sizable clout as First Lady to defeat, suppress and ultimately disempower those dedicating their lives to this cause. Her supposed mentor, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, was among those pleading with Ms. Clinton to oppose welfare “reform” in 1996 — to no avail. The historical record shows that Clinton has not spent her life working for poor families, poor children, or fighting for King’s principles; rather, she chose to lend her considerable talents to a six-year stint on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors, and as an attorney represented banks, Wal-Mart and other corporate interests with the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas. Granting Senator Clinton this fictional and reimagined personal history as a poor person’s advocate demeans those who actually have spent their lives working for the poor. It is particularly outrageous when federally funded legal service programs — upon whom the poor depend — were slashed to the bone during the Clinton presidency.
One can debate Hillary Clinton’s commitment to “change”or her actual level of political experience, but her personal history is a matter of public record. And this history finds her pursuing a career representing and embracing corporate America, not “fighting for the principles that Martin Luther King stood for.”
King died while in Memphis seeking economic justice for garbage workers. Clinton could have lent her talents to working for low-income workers, but instead chose to use her intelligence and legal skills to benefit Wal-Mart, likely the nation’s leading exploiter of low-income families.
Clinton earned $18,000 a year on the Wal-Mart Board, plus $1500 per meeting. That’s nearly as much as the fulltime salary of legal services attorneys in Arkansas in those days — and this was on top of Clinton’s salary with the Rose Law Firm, for whom she performed legal work for Wal-Mart.
As recently as 2004, Hillary Clinton described <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0312-01.htm> her years on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors as “a great experience in every respect.” Lending one’s talents to Wal-Mart is a strange route toward a goal of helping working families or poor children.
In fact, Clinton’s career biography does not reflect someone primarily dedicated to using her talent to help low-income families and children. The fact that her campaign wants voters to believe otherwise, and has reimagined an entire fictional career history for Clinton, does not make it so.
While First Lady of Arkansas, Clinton served on the Board of both the Children Defense Fund and Legal Services in Arkansas. She no doubt helped both organizations. But such Board service hardly qualifies her as someone who has spent the majority of her life “working” for poor families and children.
Is Senator Clinton’s reimagined past mere campaign puffery? Don’t politicians always put the best light on their life histories, and isn’t Clinton simply following this tradition?
Yes and no. There is a difference between a frequent and questionable Clinton statement like — “I’ve been fighting for change for 35 years” — and the more easily refutable claim that she has been working for the poor.
Because that is flatly untrue. And worse, it conflicts with Clinton’s performance as First Lady, in which she had an opportunity to stop attacks on the poor but — based on who you believe — she either did nothing or encouraged her husband’s worst instincts.
The first fact about Clinton that I recall learning was that President Carter had appointed her to the Board of the federal Legal Service Corporation. The legal services community felt that her husband’s election meant that we finally had a legal services ally in the White House.
We sure were wrong. After withstanding the attacks on legal services during Reagan-Bush, federal funding for legal aid to the poor was not only decimated under President Clinton, but so many limitations were placed on who could be served and how that the Clinton years destroyed the effectiveness of federally funded legal services.
Where was Hillary Clinton when poor families and children lost their access to legal representation? She was missing from the fight. And given her husband was President, her failure to intervene to save legal services speaks volumes as to willingness to “work” on behalf of the poor.
Clinton’s role in the abolition of the federal welfare entitlement puts her personal history even more at odds with the legacy of Dr. King.
Depending on who you believe, Clinton either ignored the pleadings of Marian Wright Edelman and others urging President Clinton to veto the so-called welfare “reform” bill — or she actively encouraged her husband to sign it.
Peter Edelman, Marian’s husband, resigned from the Clinton Administration in disgust at the President’s enactment of a welfare measure that would subsequently increase hunger, homelessness, and poverty among low-income families and children.
Clinton may truly believe she has dedicated her life to working for poor families and children, but her actions speak for themselves:
She freely chose to work for Wal-Mart at a time when that company was profiting by denying health insurance to its low-wage, employees. She freely chose to put her intellect and legal skills at the service of banks and major corporations at the Rose Law Firm. She freely chose to remain silent, if not complicit, when her husband’s administration was making life worse for poor families and children.
Unlike thousands in her generation who sought to organize among the poor to fulfill Dr. King’s legacy, or who joined Cesar Chavez working for economic justice for farm workers, or who worked to unionize low-income women, or who worked for legal services or in civil rights law firms, Hillary Clinton pursued a corporate path.
That was certainly her right. But having taken that path, Senator Clinton has no right to sell an imaginary version of herself as having dedicated her life toward working for poor people.
For Hillary Clinton, that was the road not taken.
Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org
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