Hillary's womanhood, "35 years" and vicious attacks

Some think women will come out in droves for Hillary,

I should add that this was also an invaluable opportunity to sort of let Hillary into people's living rooms, something everyone needs to be comfortable with in any president. She certainly passed that test. And also it was a chance to allow people to see, who don't get to go to these sorts of events, just how impressive she actually is in this setting; I'm a little jaded having seen her do this sort of thing live so I'm no longer surprised by it, but to those that haven't, it's probably quite eye-opening.

while others question her service to women

I wish I felt what Robin Morgan feels. "Our President Ourselves!" she cheers, in a rousing pitch for Hillary Clinton. "We need to rise in furious energy – as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jimenez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through."

Morgan asks, "Why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans women and men are justly proud of their struggles?"

I wish I felt her poet's passion for Clinton as a player in the global women's movement, but I don't. Indeed, I'm reminded that there are parts to be proud of in this movement of ours, and less attractive parts, of which Hillary Clinton, I'm sad to say, constantly reminds me.

Morgan recalls how Clinton defied the US State Department and the Chinese Government to speak at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women. I saw Hillary Clinton speak that rainy day in China and her defiance was something of which to be rightly proud. But even as Clinton called for the recognition of women's rights as human rights, the rigged-for-profit trade policies that she supported then and continues to endorse were encouraging a global sweatshop economy that has all but eradicated the right to unionize in most of the world -- a working woman's best protector. (It took her six years to get off the board of the anti-union giant Wal-Mart.)

"For too long the history of women has been a history of silence," Clinton told the World Conference then. But almost exactly a year later, she supported her husband's signing of the so-called Personal Responsibility Act, which successfully shifted responsibility for poverty in an affluent society off that society and onto the backs of poor mothers. Those moms barely got to say a word, while DC pols slandered and steamrollered them.

...and still others question Hillary's go-to phrase over the last year in which she touts her "35 years" of experience or public service. While I doubt many would say she has not done a lot for this country, her phrase is misleading in that she probably knows that most people don't really hold her fifteen years at one of Arkansas' most prestigious law firms and six years on the board at Wal-Mart in such high regard.

From The Nation:

After uncritically echoing that line for a year, the media has begun to do the math. "The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder," McClathy reports today. "The whole story is more complicated---and less flattering."

After graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, Clinton spent a year at the Children's Defense Fund, her only full-time non-profit job. She worked as a law professor and on the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate.

Yet Clinton, as McClatchy notes, spent the bulk of her career in Arkansas--15 out of 35--at one of the state's preeminent corporate law firms, representing clients like Tyson Foods. During that time she did a number of good works. But from 1986-1992 she also sat on the board of Wal-Mart, pushing gingerly for women's rights while staying quiet as the company aggressively opposed labor unions.

The only demographic in which Hillary edged out Obama in South Carolina, if I remember correctly, were with voters who were looking for a candidate with experience. I've never understood how she gets so much of an edge for that. It's a shame Obama's campaign hasn't effectively countered the claims, seeing as

As if often the case in politics, reality is cloudier than spin. Barack Obama started as a community organizer in 1985, at the age of 23. He's 46 now. That gives him 23 years of so-called "experience," working as an organizer, president of Harvard Law School, civil rights attorney, constitutional law professor, state senator and US Senator.

He's not exactly new to this.

You can also listen to this report at NPR:

When Hillary Clinton makes a campaign appearance, she almost certainly will highlight her experience — 35 years, she says — as one of her qualifications for president.

But Clinton is a little less specific when it comes to describing what exactly she was doing in the years before she became a U.S. senator in 2001.

Suzanne Goldenberg is author of a new book about Clinton, Madam President, and a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian.

Goldenberg says it's difficult to see how Clinton calculates her 35 years of public service, since her fulltime job for many years was working for a corporate law firm in Arkansas.

From 1977 to 1993 — with intermittent breaks to campaign for her husband and after the birth of her daughter, Chelsea — Clinton worked at Arkansas' largest law firm, the Rose Law Firm, where she was also its first female partner.

Hillary certainly does get much more personal attacks than does Obama, I would say, and so would Stanley Fish [via 3 Quarks Daily]:

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

I can't be sure, but I bet the guy he's talking about is Robert Morrow, of whom I'm familiar only because he carpeted South Carolina with pre-recorded phone calls before the primaries here. He has made it his life's work to trash the Clinton's.