Born in Chicago on October 26, 1947, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton has been the junior U.S. Senator from New York since her election in 2000. Re-elected in 2006, she is currently a member of ten Senate Committees and Subcommittees. Immediately prior to holding elected office, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton. She is the author of three books: Living History (2003); An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History (2000); and It Takes a Village: and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996).
Hillary Rodham grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, a solidly Republican suburb of Chicago. In 1964 she supported Republican conservative Barry Goldwater for U.S. President. The following year, she enrolled at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where her political views would undergo a radical transformation.
Rodham was deeply influenced by a 1966 article titled "Change or Containment" that appeared in Motive, a magazine for college-age Methodists. Authored by the Marxist/Maoist theoretician Carl Oglesby, who was a leader of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, this piece defended Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Maoist tactics of violence. Its thesis was that "certain cultural settings" (most notably American capitalism) were inherently inequitable and oppressive, and thus caused people to feel "pain and rage" that sometimes erupted into violence -- like that of "the rioters in Watts or Harlem" -- which was "reactive and provoked" rather than evil or malicious. Hillary later said that the Motive article had played a key role in her metamorphosis from Goldwater Republican in 1964 to leftist Democrat in 1968. During her years as First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Clinton would tell a Newsweek reporter that she still treasured the Oglesby piece.[1]
Following the June 1968 assassination of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Hillary Rodham ended her affiliation with the Wellesley campus Young Republicans and volunteered in New Hampshire to work on the presidential campaign of antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. When McCarthy later dropped out of the Democratic primary, Hillary threw her support behind the Party's eventual nominee, Hubert Humphrey. From that point forward, wrote Barbara Olson in her 1999 book Hell to Pay, "Republicans were the enemy and the enemy was allied with evil -- the evils of war, racism, sexism, and poverty."[2]
While attending Wellesley, Hillary Rodham participated in a number of antiwar marches in the Boston area.
In 1969 she wrote her 92-page senior thesis on the theories of radical Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals (1971) and Reveille for Radicals (1947). A great admirer of Alinsky's ruthless activist tactics, Hillary personally interviewed the famed author for her project. She concluded her thesis by stating: "Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared -- just as Eugene Debs [the five-time Socialist Party candidate for U.S. President] or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy."
Hillary would maintain her allegiance to Alinsky's teachings throughout her adult life. According to a March 2007 Washington Post report, "As first lady, Clinton occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate."
Ultimately, Hillary's investigation of Alinsky's methods and ideals led her to conclude that the Lyndon Johnson-era federal antipoverty programs did not go far enough in redistributing wealth among the American people, and did not give sufficient power to the poor.
When Hillary graduated from Wellesley in 1969, she was offered a job with Alinsky's new training institute in Chicago. She opted instead to enroll at Yale Law School.
At Yale, she was strongly influenced by the radical theoretician Duncan Kennedy, founder of the academic movement known as critical legal studies, which, drawing on the works of the Frankfurt School, viewed law as a "social construct" that a corrupt power structure exploits as an instrument of oppression to protect and promote its own bourgeois values at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Advocates of critical legal studies were interested in revolutionary change and the building of a new society founded on Marxist principles.
Hillary served as one of nine editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, where she worked collaboratively with Mickey Kantor (who, more than two decades later, would serve as U.S. Trade Representative and U.S. Commerce Secretary under President Bill Clinton) and Robert Reich (who would serve as Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary from 1993 to 1997). "For too long," said the Yale Review, "legal issues have been defined and discussed in terms of academic doctrine rather than strategies for social change." The publication was replete with articles by or about such radicals as William Kunstler, Charles Reich (author of The Greening of America); Jerry Rubin (who wrote a Yale Review piece exhorting parents to "get high with our seven-year-olds," and urging students to "kill our parents"); and Charles Garry (the civil rights attorney who defended Black Panther members accused of murder). The Fall and Winter 1970 editions of the Yale Review, on which Hillary worked as associate editor, focused heavily on the trials of Black Panther members who had been charged with murder. Numerous cartoons in those issues depicted police officers as hominid pigs.[3]
One of Hillary's Yale professors, Thomas Emerson (known as "Tommy the Commie"), introduced her to Charles Garry, who helped her get personally involved in the defense of several Black Panthers (including the notorious Bobby Seale) who were then being tried in New Haven, Connecticut for the torture, murder, and mutilation of one of their own members. Though evidence of the defendants' guilt was overwhelming, Hillary -- as part of her coursework for Professor Emerson -- attended the Panther trials and arranged for shifts of fellow students to likewise monitor court proceedings and report on any civil rights abuses allegedly suffered by the defendants. Striving to neutralize what she considered the pervasive racism of the American legal system, "Hillary was," as Barbara Olson observed in Hell to Pay, "a budding Leninist."[4]
Hillary's work for the Panthers earned her a summer internship at the Berkeley, California office of the hardline Stalinist attorney Robert Treuhaft in 1972. According to historian Stephen Schwartz, "Treuhaft is a man who dedicated his entire legal career to advancing the agenda of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB."
During her time at Yale, Hillary became a prominent figure in the campus protest movement. She wore a black armband in remembrance of the students killed at Kent State in May 1970; she led demonstrations against the Vietnam War; and she led rallies demanding that tampons be made available in the women's rest rooms on campus.
In 1972 Hillary worked on George McGovern's presidential campaign and led a voter registration drive in San Antonio, Texas.
Also in the early 1970s, Hillary developed a close acquaintanceship with Robert Borosage, who would later become a major figure in such leftist organizations as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Campaign for America's Future, and Institute for America's Future. Hillary herself (along with Bill Clinton) would go on to develop close political ties with IPS; moreover, she would give that organization a great deal of money to further its cause.
In the early 1970s as well, Hillary started what would become her lifelong friendship with Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF). After graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, Hillary moved to Washington and took a full-time position as a staff lawyer with CDF.
Edelman helped Hillary secure a coveted research position with the Carnegie Council on Children, where the young attorney assisted Yale psychology professor Kenneth Keniston in the production of a report titled All Our Children, which advocated a dramatic expansion of social welfare entitlements and a national guaranteed income -- all in the name of children's rights. Moreover, the report maintained that the traditional nuclear family was not inherently better than any other family structure, and that society had an obligation to honor, encourage, and support alternate family structures such as single-parent households. What really mattered, said the Council, was the network of professionals -- teachers, pediatricians, social workers, and day-care workers -- who would collectively play the most vital role in raising children properly. In short, the Carnegie Council preached that childrearing was less a parental matter than a societal task to be overseen by "public advocates" -- judges, bureaucrats, social workers and other "experts" in childrearing -- who could intervene between parents and children on the latter's behalf. According to the report, the role of parents should be subordinate to the role of these experts.[5]
Viewing America as an authoritarian, patriarchal, male-dominated society that tended to oppress women, children, and minorities, Hillary wrote a November 1973 article for the Harvard Educational Review advocating the liberation of children from "the empire of the father." She claimed that the traditional nuclear family structure often undermined the best interests of children, who "consequently need social institutions specifically designed to safeguard their position." "Along with the family," she elaborated, "past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian Reservation system." She added: "Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect a child's future should not be made unilaterally by parents."[6]
Decades later, Hillary would take up these themes again with the 1996 publication of her book It Takes a Village, which stressed the importance of the larger community of adults -- many of whom are paid caretakers whose labors are funded by American taxpayers -- in childrearing.
In 1973 Hillary became one of the key inside members of a legal team consisting of more than forty attorneys working for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. With single-minded zealotry, she worked on the investigation anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week.[7]
In October 1975 Hillary married Bill Clinton, who she had met during her student days at Yale Law School.
In 1976 Mrs. Clinton worked for Jimmy Carter's successful presidential campaign. Soon thereafter, she found employment as an attorney with the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she would continue to work until 1992.
In 1978 President Carter appointed Mrs. Clinton to the board of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a federally funded nonprofit organization that functioned primarily as a vehicle for expanding the social welfare state and broadening the mandate for social welfare spending. Under Mrs. Clinton's leadership, LSC's annual budget more than tripled, from $90 million to $321 million. LSC used these taxpayer funds in a variety of ways, most notably to print political training manuals showing "how community organizations and public interest groups can win political power and resources," and to finance training programs that taught political activists how to harass their opposition. On one occasion, LSC contributed money to a mayor's political campaign in Georgia on the pretext that those funds were being spent on "a project to educate clients about their rights and the legislative process."[8]
During Hillary Clinton's years on the LSC board, the Corporation also worked to defeat a California referendum that would have cut state income taxes in half; called for the U.S. government to give two-thirds of the state of Maine to American Indians; paid Marxist orators and folk singers in a campaign against the Louisiana Wildlife Commission; joined a Michigan campaign to recognize "Black English" as an official language; and sought to force the New York City Transit Authority to hire former heroin addicts so as to avoid "discriminat[ing]" against "minorities" who were "handicapped."[9]
As the 1980 presidential election drew near, and it became clear that Ronald Reagan might defeat the incumbent Jimmy Carter, LSC redirected massive amounts of its public funding into an anti-Reagan letter-writing campaign by indigent clients. After Reagan was elected in November 1980, LSC immediately laundered its money -- some $260 million -- into state-level agencies and private groups so as to keep it away from the board that Reagan would eventually appoint. Hillary Clinton left LSC in 1981. [10]
Bill Clinton served as Governor of Arkansas from 1978 to 1980, and again from 1982 to 1992. Thus Hillary spent a total of twelve years as Arkansas's First Lady. During those years, she continued her legal practice as a partner in the Rose Law Firm. In 1978 she became a Board member of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), and from 1986 to 1992 she served as Chairwoman of the CDF Board.
From 1982 to 1988 Hillary also chaired the New World Foundation, which had helped launch CDF in 1973. During her years at the helm of New World, the Foundation made grants to such organizations as the National Lawyers Guild; the Institute for Policy Studies; the Christic Institute; Grassroots International (which had ties to Yasser Arafat's PLO); the Committees in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (which sought to foment a communist revolution in Central America); and groups with ties to the most extreme elements of the African National Congress.
When Bill Clinton became U.S. President in 1993, the Clintons asked Wellesley College to hide Hillary Rodham's aforementioned senior thesis (about Saul Alinsky) from the public. In compliance, Wellesley President Nannerl Overholser Keohane approved a policy that would make the senior thesis of every Wellesley alumna available in the college archives for anyone to read -- except for those written by either a "president or first lady of the United States."
In 1993 Mrs. Clinton latched onto the phrase "the politics of meaning," an opaque concept coined by Michael Lerner that blended radical politics with New Ageish human potentialism. She invited Lerner to the White House, briefly making him her "guru" until the ridicule this caused made her retreat from the connection. (In her autobiography, Mrs. Clinton strenuously avoids any mention of Lerner, or of Lerner's Tikkun Magazine, at all.)
During her early years as America's First Lady (a title she held from 1993-2001), Mrs. Clinton was put in charge of the 500-member Health Care Task Force which tried, in secret meetings and by stealth, to socialize medical care in the United States, a sector that represented approximately one-seventh of the U.S. economy. This modus operandi was in violation of so-called "sunshine laws," which forbid such secret meetings from taking place when non-government employees are present. Hillary was sued by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons for these violations. The trial judge, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, ultimately ruled against Hillary and the Clinton administration. In December 1997 Lamberth issued a 19-page report condemning as "reprehensible" the duplicity exhibited by Mrs. Clinton's Task Force. "The Executive Branch of the government, working in tandem, was dishonest with this court, and the government must now face the consequences of its misconduct," said Lamberth. "It is clear," he added, "that the decisions here were made at the highest levels of government. There were no rogue lawyers here misleading the court."
A few days after rumors of Bill Clinton's extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky first made headlines in January 1998, Hillary made a January 27 appearance on NBC's Today Show, where she told interviewer Matt Lauer that the charges had been fabricated by "this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced [that he would run] for President." Hillary would echo this theme numerous times thereafter. In a June 8, 2003 interview with Barbara Walters, for instance, she characterized the Republicans who had led the 1998 impeachment of her husband as "a right-wing network" that "was after his presidency" and had resorted to "perverting the Constitution."
After New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1998 announcement that he planned to retire from public life in 2000, Hillary prepared to run for the seat Moynihan would be vacating. In October 1999 she and Bill Clinton bought a house in Chappaqua, New York. They would later be embarrassed by public revelations that their $1.35 million mortgage had been secured by Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe.
In 2000 Mrs. Clinton defeated Republican Rick Lazio in the New York Senate race by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin. Clinton carried the heavily Democratic New York City by 74 percent to 25 percent, which was more than enough to compensate for her losses in the suburbs (by 53 percent to 45 percent) and upstate (by 50 percent to 47 percent).
In 2001 Senator Clinton voted in support of the anti-terrorism measure known as the USA Patriot Act. Four years later, when the Act was up for renewal, she expressed concerns over its possible infringements on civil liberties and voted against it in December 2005. Ultimately, in March 2006, she voted in favor of renewal after some compromises had been made on the bill's wording.
As a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Senator Clinton strongly supported U.S. military action in Afghanistan as a means of simultaneously combating terrorism and improving the lives of Afghan women who had been oppressed by the radical Islamist Taliban government that had been complicit in Osama bin Laden's activities leading up to 9/11.
On September 12, 2001, Senator Clinton joined President Bush in condemning the previous day's terrorist attacks. On May 16, 2002, however, she went to the Senate floor to charge that Bush had known in advance about a possible 9/11-type plot but had done nothing to prevent it. "We have learned that President Bush had been informed last year, before September 11, of a possible plot by those associated with Osama bin Laden to hijack a U.S. airliner," said Mrs. Clinton.
In October 2002, Senator Clinton voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution which authorized President Bush to use military measures, if necessary, to force Saddam Hussein to comply with a United Nations Security Council Resolution to disarm. She was firm in her belief that Saddam posed a clear and serious threat to American national security, both in terms of his weapons programs and his affiliations with terrorists. On October 10, 2002, she said from the Senate floor:
"Today we are asked whether to give the President of the United States authority to use force in Iraq should diplomatic efforts fail to dismantle Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons and his nuclear program. ... I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt. ... In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security. Now this much is undisputed. ... This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make -- any vote that may lead to war should be hard -- but I cast it with conviction. ... Over eleven years have passed since the UN called on Saddam Hussein to rid himself of weapons of mass destruction as a condition of returning to the world community. Time and time again he has frustrated and denied these conditions. This matter cannot be left hanging forever with consequences we would all live to regret."
In September 2003, six months after the U.S. had routed Saddam's forces on the battlefield, Hillary proudly defended her vote for the Iraq Resolution. According to a Washington Times report: "she said the intelligence she saw leading up to the war was consistent with intelligence from previous administrations and she checked out information with trusted Clinton administration officials." Moreover, Senator Clinton credited her husband for having bequeathed to President Bush the military that had so swiftly deposed Saddam Hussein.[11]
But a month later, as the U.S. struggled to suppress a ferocious insurgency in Iraq, Senator Clinton condemned George W. Bush's foreign policy as "aggressive unilateralism" that the President had carried out "as a first resort against perceived threats and not as a necessary final resort."[12] With ever-increasing stridency, she began to charge that Bush had misled her, the Congress, and the American people about the extent of the threat posed by Saddam. In November 2005 she wrote an open letter to her constituents, which stated, in part:
"In October 2002, I voted for the resolution to authorize the Administration to use force in Iraq. I voted for it on the basis of the evidence presented by the Administration, assurances they gave that they would first seek to resolve the issue of weapons of mass destruction peacefully through United Nations sponsored inspections, and the argument that the resolution was needed because Saddam Hussein never did anything to comply with his obligations that he was not forced to do.
"Their assurances turned out to be empty ones, as the Administration refused repeated requests from the U.N. inspectors to finish their work. And the 'evidence' of weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda turned out to be false.
"Based on the information that we have today, Congress never would have been asked to give the President authority to use force against Iraq. And if Congress had been asked, based on what we know now, we never would have agreed, given the lack of a long-term plan, paltry international support, the proven absence of weapons of mass destruction, and the reallocation of troops and resources that might have been used in Afghanistan to eliminate Bin Laden and al Qaeda, and fully uproot the Taliban."
But Mrs. Clinton's claim that she had been deceived into supporting the war, and that she had turned against it only upon subsequently becoming aware of that deception, was untrue. As David Horowitz explains:
"Starting in July 2003 ... the Democratic National Committee ran a national TV ad whose message was: 'Read his lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.' This was the beginning of a five-year, unrelenting campaign to persuade Americans and their allies that 'Bush lied, people died,' that the war was 'unnecessary' and 'Iraq was no threat.' In other words,... the leaders of the Democratic Party have been telling Americans, America's allies and America's enemies that their country was an aggressor nation, which had violated international law, and was in effect the 'bad guy' in the war with the Saddam Hussein regime....
"The one saving grace for Democrats would be if their charges were true -- if they were deceived into supporting the war, and if they had turned against it only because they realized their mistake. But this charge is demonstrably false.
"In fact, the claim that Bush lied in order to dupe Democrats into supporting the war is itself the biggest lie of the war. Every Democratic Senator who voted for the war had on his or her desk before the vote a 100-page report, called 'The National Intelligence Estimate,' which summarized all America's intelligence on Iraq that was used to justify the war. We live in a democracy; consequently, the opposition party has access to all our secrets. Democrats sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees all of America's intelligence agencies. If any Democrat on that committee ... had requested any intelligence information Iraq, he or she would have had that information on his or [her] desk within 24 hours. The self-justifying claim that Bush lied to hoodwink the Democrats is a fraudulent charge with no basis in reality."
In June 2007, New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., authors of Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, wrote that Mrs. Clinton refused to say whether she had ever read the complete NIE report, which was made available to all 100 senators ten days before the October 10, 2002 Senate vote, and which included caveats about Saddam's weaponry and doubts about any alliance he may have had with terror groups like al Qaeda.
On domestic policy, Senator Clinton described the Bush 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" with policies that are "making America less free, less fair, less strong and smart than it deserves to be in a dangerous world."
During her years in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton consistently voted against the income tax cuts introduced by President Bush -- most notably the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 -- depicting them as fiscally irresponsible measures that were designed to help only the wealthy. At a fundraiser in 2004, she told a crowd of financial donors: "Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you ... We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
Senator Clinton also repeatedly opposed cuts in capital gains taxes. On May 21, 2001, she voted against a temporary reduction of the maximum capital gains rate. On November 17, 2005, she voted to raise capital gains taxes on wealthy individuals. On February 2, 2006, she voted to repeal an extension of reduced tax rates for capital gains and dividends. And on February 13, 2006, she voted to allow the capital gains tax cuts to expire.[13]
After the passage of Bush's tax cuts in 2001, Senator Clinton often stated that they harmed the U.S. economy. In April 2003, for example, she claimed, "there is no escaping the wrongheaded very destructive economic policies that this administration has chosen to inflict on our country." The following month, she told the U.S. Senate: "We are in danger of being the first generation of Americans to leave our children worse off than we were."[14]
Contrary to her claims, however, the post-tax cut U.S. economy immediately produced federal tax revenues of unprecedented heights. As Steve Forbes said on March 20, 2006: "In 2003 ... those tax cuts ... set off the boom that we are having today, strong economy. We're the largest growing economy among large economies in the world. We've created ... nearly five million jobs and we've had a 4 percent-plus growth rate. That would not have happened without the tax cuts." Similarly, CNBC's Larry Kudlow said in February 2006: "[T]he reality is that the Bush tax-cut incentives continue to propel economic growth."
During her years in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton cast numerous important votes on the issue of immigration:
* In March 2002 she co-sponsored a bill to extend the deadlines by which illegal aliens living in the United States would be required to obtain visas. "This is good news indeed," she said of the bill's passage. "Instead of being forced to return to their home country to apply for permanent residence status, many immigrants will be able to seek permanent resident status while working in the U.S."[15]
* In October 2003 she favored granting temporary protected status to illegal Haitian immigrants.
* In September 2004 she co-sponsored an agricultural jobs bill offering illegal farmworkers a speedy path to citizenship.
* In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, she co-signed a September 2005 letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to prevent the deportation of any illegal aliens whose immigration status came to the government's attention "after they [had] sought assistance" from the American taxpayers.[16]
* In 2005 she opposed the REAL ID Act, which stipulated that all driver's license and photo ID applicants must be able to verify they are legal residents of the United States, and that the documents they present to prove their identity must be genuine. It also contained provisions to prevent terrorists from abusing asylum laws, and to streamline the deportation of immigrants convicted of terrorism-related offenses.
* In June 2007, she voted against a bill that would have prohibited illegal aliens convicted of serious crimes from gaining legal status.
* That same month, she voted in favor of a bill to establish restrictions on admission into the United States for immigrants who have previously been convicted of criminal gang activity, child abuse, human trafficking, obstruction of justice, domestic violence, or a felony count of driving under the influence.
* Also in June 2007, she voted in favor of the Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which would have provided a path to legalization for all illegal aliens residing in the United States.
In 2005 Senator Clinton gave a speech to members of the National Council of La Raza, an organization that supports open borders as well as expanded rights and amnesty for illegal aliens. She told them: "You are doing your part to make sure that every child in every American family has access to the tools necessary to live out their dreams, to a have piece of the American dream, but I don't know that your government is doing its part, right now -- I'm not sure we are doing everything to make your job easier, to make sure the opportunities and society are alive and well for everyone." She further expressed her support for the Dream Act, legislation that would allow illegal aliens to attend college at in-state tuition rates -- which are much lower than those paid by out-of-state U.S. citizens. "We need to open the doors of college to immigrant children who came here did well and deserved to go on with their education," she said.[17]
In 2006 Senator Clinton appeared with Senators Kennedy, McCain, and Schumer before a group of illegal Irish immigrants who had come to Capitol Hill to lobby the U.S. government for amnesty. "It is so heartening to see you here," she told them. "You are really here on behalf of what America means, America's values, Americans' hopes."[18]
On issues other than immigration, two particular votes cast by Mrs. Clinton during her first Senate term give insight into her agendas and values:
* In 2001 she voted in favor of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, which opened the floodgates for "soft-money" campaign contributions to so-called "527 organizations" engaged in stealth electioneering on behalf of Democrats.
* In October 2003 she voted against the Partial Birth Abortion Act, which bans that procedure in all cases except when the mother's life would be endangered by not performing it. In 2007 she condemned a Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the 2003 Act.
Depicting herself and fellow leftists as the champions of the underdog, Mrs. Clinton has often characterized Republicans and conservatives as being inclined toward racism and discrimination. At a Martin Luther King Day celebration in January 2006, for example, she told a black audience at Harlem's Canaan Baptist Church: "When you look at the way the [Republican-controlled] House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And you know what I'm talking about. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard." She went on to condemn Republicans' "constant exploitation of race." Al Sharpton later praised her comments.
Throughout her adult life, Mrs. Clinton has embraced the worldviews and ideals of radical feminism. Following the February 2006 death of Betty Friedan, the longtime communist who co-founded the National Organization for Women, Mrs. Clinton said that Friedan's activism and writing had "opened doors and minds, breaking down barriers for women and enlarging opportunities for women and men for generations to come. We are all the beneficiaries of her vision."
Also in February 2006, Senator Clinton spoke at the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, where she criticized the concept of school vouchers: "First family that comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher.' Next parent that comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist ...' The parent says, 'The way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy...You gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me...' So what if the next parent comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the School of the Jihad?...' I won't stand for it."
In the election cycles of 2002, 2004, and 2006, Senator Clinton's political action committee, HILLPAC, made more than 170 contributions to the campaigns of other political candidates, all of them Democrats. Among the beneficiaries were: Barbara Boxer, Max Cleland, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Frank Lautenberg, Walter Mondale, Jay Rockefeller, Paul Wellstone, Tammy Baldwin, Lane Evans, Maurice Hinchey, Nita Lowey, Carolyn McCarthy, Jerrold Nadler, Major Owens, Charles Rangel, Jose Serrano, Louise Slaughter, Nydia Velazquez, Evan Bayh, Tom Daschle, Russell Feingold, Barack Obama, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, and Ted Kennedy.
As November 2006 approached, Senator Clinton campaigned for re-election to the U.S. Senate. During her 2000 campaign, she had pledged to bring 200,000 new jobs to New York State. By late 2006, however, New York had lost 112,000 jobs and its jobless rate had risen by 0.7 percent. Nonetheless, Mrs. Clinton won the 2006 election by a wide margin over a weak Republican opponent, John Spencer.
In January 2007, two months after her re-election to a six-year term in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton announced that she would run for U.S. President in 2008.
On the campaign trail, candidate Clinton said that to restore "fiscal responsibility to government," she would like to return "high-income tax rates to the 1990s levels."
In April 2007 Mrs. Clinton spoke at an event held by Al Sharpton's National Action Network, where she stated that her own presidential bid was possible only because of the dedicated work of longtime civil rights leaders who had fought on behalf of those traditionally excluded from power positions in American life. She specifically cited Jesse Jackson and Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman (both of whom were on the dais that day). "I have enjoyed a long and positive relationship with Reverend Al Sharpton and National Action Network," said Mrs. Clinton, "and I don't ever remember saying 'no' to them and I intend to remain their partner in civil rights as I clean the dirt from under the carpet in the Oval Office when I am elected President."
That same month, Senator Clinton appointed Raul Yzaguirre, who served as President and CEO of the National Council of La Raza from 1974 to 2004, to co-chair her 2008 presidential campaign and to direct her outreach efforts to Hispanic voters.
Another notable co-chair of Mrs. Clinton's campaign was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, supporter of the radical Chicano student organization MEChA.
In May 2007, Clinton outlined an economic vision of "shared prosperity" that would focus on the redistribution of wealth by raising the incomes of, and benefits for, lower earners. She lamented the "economic policy dynamics [that] are generating rising income inequality," and expressed her desire to make "corporations pay their fair share of taxes." She did not note that corporate taxes in the U.S. are already among the highest for OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. Moreover, her claim that "the percentage of taxes paid by corporations have fallen" was incorrect. In fact, the percentage of taxes paid by corporations was 11.5 percent in 2006, considerably higher than the 8.2 percent figure for 2000, the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency.
Also in May 2007, Senator Clinton declared that she deemed it vital to replace the conservative notion of an "ownership society" with one based on communal responsibility and prosperity. She lamented that the contemporary American economy leaves "it all up to the individual" in "the 'on your own' society" that increases the income gap between the "rich" and the "poor." Though Mrs. Clinton depicted the American middle class as a shrinking entity, Democratic economist Stephen Rose notes (in his 2007 book, Social Stratification in the United States) that once people outside their prime working years - i.e., the elderly and the young -- are excluded from the equation, the median income of American families is approximately $63,000.
At a June 4, 2007 event hosted by Sojourners, the Jim Wallis-founded evangelical Christian ministry that preaches radical leftwing politics and has long championed communist causes, Mrs. Clinton said, "...I certainly think the free market has failed. We've all failed." She further said she would repeal the Bush tax cuts to help finance universal, government-funded health care.
In July 2007, Senator Clinton voiced her opposition to a new Supreme Court ruling that public school systems may not achieve or preserve racial integration through measures -- such as busing or quotas -- that take explicit account of students' racial backgrounds. According to Clinton, this decision "turned the clock back" on the history of hard-won gains in the realm of civil rights; it represented "a setback for all of us who are on the long march toward racial equality and the building of a stronger, more unified America"; and it demonstrated the John Roberts-led Supreme Court's "willingness to erode core constitutional guarantees."
Mrs. Clinton added that "all students benefit from racially diverse classrooms," and that "[r]ecent evidence shows that integrated schools promote minority academic achievement and can help close the achievement gap." Her claims are contradicted, however, by the scholarship of Thomas Sowell, who has found that "[n]ot only is there no hard evidence that mixing and matching black and white kids in school produces either educational or social benefits, there have been a number of studies of all-black schools whose educational performances equal or exceed the national average"; that black students who have been bussed into white schools have seen no discernible rise in their standardized test scores -- "not even after decades of busing"; and that "[n]ot only is there no hard evidence" for the dogma "that there needs to be a 'critical mass' of black students in a given school or college in order for them to perform up to standard," but "such hard evidence as there is points in the opposite direction."
On June 5, 2008, after a hotly contested race with Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, as it had become apparent that Obama's lead was insurmountable.
Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the Working Families Party (WFP), which was created in 1998 to help push the Democratic Party ideologically toward the left. WFP is a front group for ACORN, whose voter-registration campaigns have been repeatedly implicated in fraud and corruption. When Mrs. Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, she was listed on both the Democratic Party ticket and the WFP ticket. During the 2000 campaign, she spoke at numerous WFP events, most memorably at the party's debut convention in March 2000 -- an event which the Communist newspaper People's Weekly World approvingly called "a turning point in New York politics." After receiving WFP's endorsement, Clinton vowed to wage a "people's grassroots campaign." "[T]here have been few candidates in history more supportive of our issues than Al Gore and Hillary Clinton," said WFP campaign literature.
Mrs. Clinton has close ties to the billionaire financier George Soros and his so-called "Shadow Democratic Party," or Shadow Party. This term refers to a nationwide network of unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks that actively campaign for the Democrats and leftist causes. The Shadow Party was conceived and organized principally by Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Harold McEwan Ickes -- all identified with the Democratic Party left. And, as Richard Poe has revealed, other key players included:
- Morton H. Halperin: Director of Soros' Open Society Institute
- John Podesta: Democrat strategist and former chief of staff for Bill Clinton
- Jeremy Rosner: Democrat strategist and pollster, ex-foreign policy speechwriter for Bill Clinton
- Robert Boorstin: Democrat strategist and pollster, ex-national security speechwriter for Bill Clinton
- Carl Pope: Co-founder of America Coming Together, Democrat strategist, and Sierra Club Executive Director
- Steve Rosenthal: Labor leader, CEO of America Coming Together, and former chief advisor on union matters to Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich
- Peter Lewis: Major Democrat donor and insurance entrepreneur
- Rob Glaser: Major Democrat donor and Silicon Valley pioneer
- Ellen Malcolm: Co-founder and President of America Coming Together, and founder of EMILY's List
- Rob McKay: Major Democrat donor, Taco Bell heir, and McKay Family Foundation President
- Lewis and Dorothy Cullman: Major Democrat donors
A New York hedge fund manager with a personal fortune estimated at about $7.2 billion (aside from the billions of dollars in investor assets controlled by his management company), Soros is one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful individuals. Since 1979, his foundation network -- whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI) -- has given an estimated $5 billion in grants to a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent with those of Soros. OSI alone donates scores of millions of dollars annually to these various groups, whose major agendas can be summarized as follows:
- promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
- promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
- promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
- promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
- financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
- promoting socialized medicine in the United States
- promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism
- promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
Hillary Clinton shares each of the foregoing Soros agendas.
At a 2004 "Take Back America" conference in Washington, DC, Mrs. Clinton introduced Soros with these words: "Now, among the many people who have stood up and said, 'I cannot sit by and let this happen to the country I love,' is George Soros, and I have known George Soros for a long time now, and I first came across his work in the former Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, when I was privileged to travel there, both on my own and with my husband on behalf of our country. ... [W]e need people like George Soros, who is fearless, and willing to step up when it counts."[19]
Mrs. Clinton also has particularly close ties to a vital think tank called the Center for American Progress (CAP), which was founded jointly by George Soros, Morton Halperin, and John Podesta. Soros and Halperin first proposed CAP's creation in 2002 to promote generally the cause of the Left and the Democratic Party. But CAP's overarching objective is considerably more specific than that: As an inside source told reporter Christian Bourge of United Press International, CAP is in fact "the official Hillary Clinton think tank."
Another key ally of Mrs. Clinton is the organization Media Matters for America, headed by David Brock. Media Matters is financed, in part, by the Soros-funded Democracy Alliance, whose goal is to raise money to drive a leftwing political movement and Democratic electoral victories.
Like Media Matters, Hillary Clinton supports the re-establishment of the so-called Fairness Doctrine (which was repealed by Congress in 1987), just as she did during her years as First Lady. This Doctrine would dilute, restrict, or limit the message of influential conservative broadcasters and, consequently, influence the thinking and the voting decisions of the American people.
Hillary Clinton is a former Board of Advisors member of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
David Horowitz has provided the following incisive analysis of Hillary Clinton's broad agendas and the tactics she employs in pursuit of them:
"It is possible to be a socialist, and radical in one's agendas, and yet moderate in the means one regards as practical to achieve them. To change the world, it is first necessary to acquire cultural and political power. And these transitional goals may often be accomplished by indirection and deception even more effectively than by frontal assault. ... New Left progressives [such as] Hillary Clinton ... [share the] intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them ... For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal -- 'social justice' -- is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. 'Social Justice' for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself. ... In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which 'social justice' prevails. ... In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them. ... The focus of Hillary Clinton's ambition ... is the vision of a world that can only be achieved when the Chosen accumulate enough power to change this one."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
On December 1, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama named Hillary Clinton to be the Secretary of State in his forthcoming administration. According to the public interest organization Judicial Watch, however, Mrs. Clinton was technically ineligible for this post because of a stipulation in the Ineligibility Clause of the U.S. Constitution. That clause prohibits any active member of Congress from being appointed to an office that has benefited from a salary increase during that legislator's current term in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. An Executive Order increasing the salary for Secretary of State had been indeed signed by President Bush in January 2008, when Clinton was in the early stages of her second Senate term.
In March 2009, Mrs. Clinton suggested that Mexico's drug war was, in large measure, the fault of the United States. "Our [America's] inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians," said Clinton. She contended that illegal drugs had been coming from Mexico into the U.S. to feed "our insatiable demand" for such substances, and in exchange American weapons had been flowing south.
In reality, however, the Mexican drug cartels acquire their weaponry not from the U.S. but rather from the black market, from such nations as Venezuela and Iran, and from Hezbollah-type terror groups wishing to destabilize North America. Moreover, in many cases they simply "procure" their weapons from less-than-savory elements within the Mexican military—weapons which in all likelihood did come from the U.S. through legal channels.
In a March 26, 2009 television interview, Fox News reporter Greta Van Susteren questioned Mrs. Clinton about North Korea's recent announcement that it would soon be test-launching a communications satellite, a launch that regional powers believed was actually intended to test a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. "What are we going to do about North Korea?" Susteren asked. Clinton responded:
"... I have been very clear, President Obama has been very clear, we would like to get back to the kind of talks that led to the initial steps in their de-nuclearization. The six-party framework that involves all of the neighbors, each of whom have a stake in what happens in North Korea -- we have offered that. I sent word that we would like to have our special envoy for North Korean policy go to Pyongyang. They didn't want him to come.
"So we're working hard. And if they're watching you [on TV], I'm sure that since you were there [Susteren had visited North Korea], you made a big impression, went to a karaoke bar in Pyongyang. (laughter) They probably still remember you. If they're watching -- if anybody from North Korea is watching this program with you, Greta ... You know, we'd love for them to begin to talk about what we can do together to fulfill the framework of the six-party talks."
In a May 2010 speech to the Brookings Institution, Mrs. Clinton spoke about the virtues of high taxation rates: "The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [America currently does] — whether it's individual, corporate or whatever [form of] taxation forms." She went on to cite Brazil as a model: "Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they're growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty."
Most of this profile is adapted from the article "Hillary Rodham Clinton: Her Career and Agendas," written by John Perazzo and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on July 20, 2007.
Notes:
[1] Barbara Olson, Hell to Pay (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1999), pp. 59-59.
[2] Ibid., p. 37.
[3] Ibid., pp. 59-61.
[4] Ibid., pp. 56, 62.
[5] Ibid., pp. 102-104.
[6] Ibid., pp. 105-107.
[7] Ibid., pp. 120-122.
[8] Ibid., p. 128.
[9] Ibid., pp. 128-129.
[10] Ibid., pp. 129-130.
[11] Amanda B. Carpenter, Dossier on Hillary Clinton (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006), p. 162.
[12] Ibid., pp. 162-163.
[13] Ibid., p. 53.
[14] Ibid., p. 56.
[15] Ibid., p. 125.
[16] Ibid., p. 126.
[17] Ibid., p. 131.
[18] Ibid., pp. 131-132.
[19] Cited in David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 53.
