H4a news Clips [April 26, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


National Coverage – HRC AND DEMS



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National Coverage – HRC AND DEMS
National Stories
Bill and Hillary’s Excellent Adventure [Michael Hirsh, POLITICO, April 25, 2015]
It’s clear that Bill Clinton played a concrete role in his wife’s State Department, but it is unlikely that much of what is alleged in ‘Clinton Cash’ will stick because it is impossible to peer into the sanctum of any marriage—especially that of the Clinton’s.
To get to the bottom of the latest incarnation of Clinton-gate, you’re going to have to get inside one of the most impenetrable marriages ever. Good luck with that.
A quarter-century ago, when Bill and Hillary Clinton first arrived on the national scene, their union represented an exciting new political dynamic—two equally smart, ambitious, career-driven people hungry for public office. Buy one, get one free. Today many critics see that as the main issue. The long-awaited close examination of the marriage that has been such an inseparable part of the Clintons’ public life, particularly as they’ve traded places and power in the 16 years since his political career ended and hers began, is finally here.
Even as new boss Barack Obama asked her to take the job of secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was already warning him that Bill was going to be a problem—that, according to the book Game Change, she couldn’t control him. The Clinton Foundation came up again and again at her confirmation hearing in early 2009. Then-Sen. Richard Lugar, the sober vice chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, noted the “risks” of the Bill-and-Hillary show and observed presciently: “Every new foreign donation that is accepted by the foundation comes with the risk it will be connected in the global media to a proximate State Department policy or decision.”
Well before she ran for president, in fact, Bill Clinton’s activities had caused headaches for his senator-wife: Bill jetting nonstop around the planet accompanied by rich and powerful friends in the service of a global foundation that appeared to be a vast unscramblable omelette of philanthropy and (potential) influence peddling. Bill flying to Kazakhstan in 2005 with Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining tycoon who was ushered into a private dinner with Clinton and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and came home with huge exclusive uranium contracts, according to the New York Times. Bill praising Nazarbayev for “opening up the social and political life of your country” while Sen. Hillary Clinton was blocking Nazarbayev’s bid to head a major U.N. organization on Capitol Hill.
By the time she got to the State Department, Bill Clinton managed to stay under the public radar, even as he became what Hillary Clinton once described to me as “a great sounding board” during her four years as chief U.S. diplomat. “He knows 90 percent of the people that I deal with in the world today and has astute observations about what moves them and what doesn’t and how it’s all interconnected,” she said in a 2010 interview. “So he remains a very important adviser to me and an important adviser to other people in the administration.”
Now a host of news organizations, spurred by a forthcoming book by right-wing author Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, are trying to show he was far more than adviser—that some of the things Hillary Clinton did or counseled as secretary of state were influenced by some of the big money Bill Clinton accepted as head of the Clinton Foundation. To prove it, all you need to do is unscramble the omelette. Among those that have pursued the story is the New York Times, which sought to pick up where it left off on its 2008 story on Giustra and Clinton in Kazakhstan based on some of Schweizer’s new material. On Thursday, the Times published a story suggesting that the donations of Giustra and other investors to the Clinton Foundation could have influenced a U.S. government decision to approve a lucrative buyout of Giustra's company by Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency.
Giustra, who sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation, has more recently been involved in Colombia, and as it happens at around the same time that the Obama administration was negotiating a free-trade agreement that would benefit Giustra’s Pacific Rubiales, a petroleum company caught up in labor disputes in Colombia. The Schweizer book seeks to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton pushed for the Colombian free trade agreement—opposed by both Clinton and Obama a during the 2008 campaign—because of influence by big pro-Clinton Foundation donors like Pacific Rubiales. Politico obtained a copy of the chapter, which appears to fall short of proving anything, and Giustra himself says he left his business in Colombia before the free-trade deal was signed. “At one point, I was an investor in Pacific Rubiales, a Colombian energy company. I sold my shares in Pacific Rubiales several years before the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” he said in a statement.
It’s clear that Bill Clinton played a very concrete role in his wife’s State Department and was so well briefed that, as one Obama administration official put it to me in 2010, “When they say on the seventh floor, ‘We need to run this by the president,’ the phrase doesn’t necessarily refer to Obama.”
Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that very much of what Schweizer alleges will stick, if only because that classic Washington omelette made of equal parts policy and political reasons can never be unmade once it’s cooked: Especially among the uber-cautious Clintons, you’ll never find the smoking ingredient; no one will ever be caught saying, “Let’s make a policy decision for Bill’s donors.”
Beyond that, because it is impossible to peer into the sanctum of any marriage—especially this one—we will almost certainly never get at the rock-bottom truth of whether Hillary Clinton ever even hinted at altering a policy in office because Bill Clinton told her he wanted it done for his Foundation. State Department and Clinton Foundation officials say they never pried into those conversations.
You wouldn’t find it even in those deleted emails.
Consider: The Colombian free-trade pact was first signed under George W. Bush and then President Obama took the lead, but held out for more labor and environmental concessions. It was only in 2011—after a two-year standoff—that the Obama administration and Colombia negotiated an “action plan” to try to protect labor rights in a way not necessarily favorable to Pacific Rubiales. Indeed, it is noteworthy that it was after Giustra contributed $100 million to the foundation in 2006 that Hillary Clinton first announced her opposition to free-trade pact. The book may also raise questions about how Hillary Clinton’s State Department certified annually that Colombia was “meeting statutory criteria related to human rights” in order to help the Colombian military. But in fact Colombia is said to have made substantial progress emerging from its past as a violent narco-state, and is considered by many military and diplomatic experts to warrant this treatment.
To get to the bottom of the latest incarnation of Clinton-gate, you’re going to have to get inside one of the most impenetrable marriages ever. Good luck with that.
A quarter-century ago, when Bill and Hillary Clinton first arrived on the national scene, their union represented an exciting new political dynamic—two equally smart, ambitious, career-driven people hungry for public office. Buy one, get one free. Today many critics see that as the main issue. The long-awaited close examination of the marriage that has been such an inseparable part of the Clintons’ public life, particularly as they’ve traded places and power in the 16 years since his political career ended and hers began, is finally here.
Even as new boss Barack Obama asked her to take the job of secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was already warning him that Bill was going to be a problem—that, according to the book Game Change, she couldn’t control him. The Clinton Foundation came up again and again at her confirmation hearing in early 2009. Then-Sen. Richard Lugar, the sober vice chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, noted the “risks” of the Bill-and-Hillary show and observed presciently: “Every new foreign donation that is accepted by the foundation comes with the risk it will be connected in the global media to a proximate State Department policy or decision.”
Well before she ran for president, in fact, Bill Clinton’s activities had caused headaches for his senator-wife: Bill jetting nonstop around the planet accompanied by rich and powerful friends in the service of a global foundation that appeared to be a vast unscramblable omelette of philanthropy and (potential) influence peddling. Bill flying to Kazakhstan in 2005 with Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining tycoon who was ushered into a private dinner with Clinton and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and came home with huge exclusive uranium contracts, according to the New York Times. Bill praising Nazarbayev for “opening up the social and political life of your country” while Sen. Hillary Clinton was blocking Nazarbayev’s bid to head a major U.N. organization on Capitol Hill.
By the time she got to the State Department, Bill Clinton managed to stay under the public radar, even as he became what Hillary Clinton once described to me as “a great sounding board” during her four years as chief U.S. diplomat. “He knows 90 percent of the people that I deal with in the world today and has astute observations about what moves them and what doesn’t and how it’s all interconnected,” she said in a 2010 interview. “So he remains a very important adviser to me and an important adviser to other people in the administration.”
Now a host of news organizations, spurred by a forthcoming book by right-wing author Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, are trying to show he was far more than adviser—that some of the things Hillary Clinton did or counseled as secretary of state were influenced by some of the big money Bill Clinton accepted as head of the Clinton Foundation. To prove it, all you need to do is unscramble the omelette. Among those that have pursued the story is the New York Times, which sought to pick up where it left off on its 2008 story on Giustra and Clinton in Kazakhstan based on some of Schweizer’s new material. On Thursday, the Times published a story suggesting that the donations of Giustra and other investors to the Clinton Foundation could have influenced a U.S. government decision to approve a lucrative buyout of Giustra's company by Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency.
Giustra, who sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation, has more recently been involved in Colombia, and as it happens at around the same time that the Obama administration was negotiating a free-trade agreement that would benefit Giustra’s Pacific Rubiales, a petroleum company caught up in labor disputes in Colombia. The Schweizer book seeks to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton pushed for the Colombian free trade agreement—opposed by both Clinton and Obama a during the 2008 campaign—because of influence by big pro-Clinton Foundation donors like Pacific Rubiales. Politico obtained a copy of the chapter, which appears to fall short of proving anything, and Giustra himself says he left his business in Colombia before the free-trade deal was signed. “At one point, I was an investor in Pacific Rubiales, a Colombian energy company. I sold my shares in Pacific Rubiales several years before the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” he said in a statement.
It’s clear that Bill Clinton played a very concrete role in his wife’s State Department and was so well briefed that, as one Obama administration official put it to me in 2010, “When they say on the seventh floor, ‘We need to run this by the president,’ the phrase doesn’t necessarily refer to Obama.”
Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that very much of what Schweizer alleges will stick, if only because that classic Washington omelette made of equal parts policy and political reasons can never be unmade once it’s cooked: Especially among the uber-cautious Clintons, you’ll never find the smoking ingredient; no one will ever be caught saying, “Let’s make a policy decision for Bill’s donors.”
Beyond that, because it is impossible to peer into the sanctum of any marriage—especially this one—we will almost certainly never get at the rock-bottom truth of whether Hillary Clinton ever even hinted at altering a policy in office because Bill Clinton told her he wanted it done for his Foundation. State Department and Clinton Foundation officials say they never pried into those conversations.
You wouldn’t find it even in those deleted emails.
Consider: The Colombian free-trade pact was first signed under George W. Bush and then President Obama took the lead, but held out for more labor and environmental concessions. It was only in 2011—after a two-year standoff—that the Obama administration and Colombia negotiated an “action plan” to try to protect labor rights in a way not necessarily favorable to Pacific Rubiales. Indeed, it is noteworthy that it was after Giustra contributed $100 million to the foundation in 2006 that Hillary Clinton first announced her opposition to free-trade pact. The book may also raise questions about how Hillary Clinton’s State Department certified annually that Colombia was “meeting statutory criteria related to human rights” in order to help the Colombian military. But in fact Colombia is said to have made substantial progress emerging from its past as a violent narco-state, and is considered by many military and diplomatic experts to warrant this treatment.
Five Questions About the Clintons and an Uranium Company [Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, April 24, 2015]
The New York Times article concerning the relationship between former President Clinton and Uranium One raises questions about Hillary Clinton.
The Times has reported that people involved in a series of Canadian uranium-mining deals channelled money to the Clinton Foundation while the firm had business before the State Department. And, in one case, a Russian investment bank connected to the deals paid money to Bill Clinton personally, through a half-million-dollar speaker’s fee. There were a number of transactions involved, and corporate name changes, but, basically, a Canadian company known as Uranium One initially wanted American diplomats to defend its Kazakh uranium interests when a Russian firm, Rosatom, seemed about to make a move on them; and then, after the company decided to simply let Rosatom acquire it (through Rosatom’s alarmingly named subsidiary, ARMZ), Uranium One needed State Department approval. (The approval was necessary because Uranium One controlled American uranium mines and exploration fields, a strategic asset.)
The Times sums it up this way:
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million … Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
The Times says that the donations were not properly disclosed—the paper confirmed them by looking at Canadian tax records. Complicating matters, Uranium One’s corporate forebear had acquired the Kazakh interests after its major shareholder, Frank Giustra, travelled with Bill Clinton to Kazakhstan in 2005 and met with the country’s leader. Giustra sold his interest in the company in 2007, according to the Times, and so was not involved in the ARMZ dealings. But Giustra has put tens of millions of dollars into the foundation’s work; the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which bears his name, is a formal component of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. And Ian Telfer, the Uranium One chairman, whose family foundation donated the $2.35 million dollars, said that it had done so because he wanted to support that coöperation: “Frank and I have been friends and business partners for almost 20 years.” He told the Wall Street Journal that he’d pledged the money in 2008, before the sale was on the table. Telfer also said that he’d never talked about uranium with Hillary Clinton. After the story came out, Giustra issued an angry statement, calling it baseless speculation and “an attempt to tear down Secretary Clinton and her presidential campaign.” He added a note of Canadian admonishment: “You are a great country. Don’t ruin it by letting those with political agendas take over your newspapers and your airwaves.”
Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman, told the Times, “To suggest the State Department, under then-Secretary Clinton, exerted undue influence in the U.S. government’s review of the sale of Uranium One is utterly baseless.” There have been reports that other companies—Boeing, for example—gave money to the foundation while Clinton was Secretary of State and they had business before the department. The Uranium One story is more troubling, and potentially damaging, because of the personal ties, the foreign interests, the opacity, and the denouement, which involves Putin allies publicly gloating over Russia’s increased dominance of the world’s uranium supplies. The Times was tipped off to the story by a forthcoming book, “Clinton Cash,” by Peter Schweizer, which a Clinton campaign spokesman has called a “smear project.” The Clinton people and others argue that Schweizer has an expressly conservative agenda, visible in his previous work, and ties to Republican candidates. The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, addressing those concerns, said that, though she was troubled by the way the Times had described its relationship with Schweizer as “exclusive,” the paper had done its own reporting, and the story addressed valid questions about a Presidential candidate.
Here are five:
1. Was there a quid pro quo? Based on the Times reporting, there was certainly a lot of quid (millions in donations that made it to a Clinton charity; a half-million-dollar speaker’s fee) and multiple quos (American diplomatic intervention with the Russians; approvals when the Russian firm offered a very “generous” price for Uranium One). The Clinton perspective is that, although the approvals were delivered by the State Department when Clinton led it, there is no evidence that she personally delivered them, or of the “pro” in the equation. The Clinton campaign, in its response to the Times, noted that other agencies also had a voice in the approval process, and gave the Times a statement from someone on the approvals committee saying that Clinton hadn’t “intervened.” The Clinton spokesman wouldn’t comment on whether Clinton was briefed about the matter. She was cc’d on a cable that mentioned the request for diplomatic help, but if there is a note in which she follows up with a directive—an e-mail, say—the Times doesn’t seem to have it.
This speaks to some larger questions about political corruption. How do you prove it? Maybe the uranium people simply cared deeply about the undeniably good work the foundation is doing, and would have received the help and approvals anyway. In cases like this, though, how does the public maintain its trust? Doing so becomes harder when the money is less visible, which leads to the second question:
2. Did the Clintons meet their disclosure requirements? The Times writes, of the $2.35 million from Telfer’s family foundation, “Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.” This is one of the more striking details in the story, because it seems so clear-cut that the donation ought to have been disclosed. Moreover, the Times says that the foundation did not explain the lapse. I also asked the foundation to explain its reasoning. The picture one is left with is convoluted and, in the end, more troubling than if the lapse had been a simple oversight. The legalisms can be confusing, so bear with me:
the Clinton Foundation has several components, including the Clinton Global Initiative and—this is the key one—the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, formerly known as the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative. The memorandum of understanding makes it clear that the donor-disclosure requirement applies to each part of the foundation.
Craig Minassian, a Clinton Foundation spokesman, pointed out, though, that there are two legally separate but almost identically named entities: the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership and the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada). The second one is a Canadian charitable vehicle that Giustra set up—doing it this way helps Canadian donors get tax benefits. It also, to the foundation’s mind, obliterates the disclosure requirements. (There are also limits on what a Canadian charity is allowed to disclose.) Minassian added, “As complex as they may seem, these programs were set up to do philanthropic work with maximum impact, period. Critics will say what they want, but that doesn’t change the facts that these social enterprise programs are addressing poverty alleviation and other global challenges in innovative ways.” Minassian compared the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) to entirely independent nonprofits, like AmFAR or Malaria no More, which have their own donors and then give money to the foundation’s work.
This does not make a lot of sense unless you have an instinct for the most legalistic of legalisms. Unlike AmFAR, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) has the Clinton name on it. Money given to the Canadian entity goes exclusively to the foundation. Per an agency agreement, all of its work is done by the foundation, too. The Web site that has the C.G.E.P. name on it also has the Clinton Foundation logo and Bill Clinton’s picture; it also has a copyright notice naming the Canadian entity as the site’s owner. Anyone visiting the site would be justifiably confused. They are, in other words, effectively intermingled.
And what would it mean if the Canadian explanation flew—that the Clintons could allow a foreign businessman to set up a foreign charity, bearing their name, through which people in other countries could make secret multi-million-dollar donations to their charity’s work? That structural opacity calls the Clintons’ claims about disclosure into question. If the memorandum of understanding indeed allowed for that, it was not as strong a document as the public was led to believe—it is precisely the sort of entanglement one would want to know about. (In that way, the Canadian charity presents some of the same transparency issues as a super PAC.) At the very least, it is a reckless use of the Clinton name, allowing others to trade on it.
3. Did the Clintons personally profit? In most stories about dubious foundation donors, the retort from Clinton supporters is that the only beneficiaries have been the world’s poorest people. This ignores the way vanity and influence are their own currencies—but it is an argument, and the foundation does some truly great work. In this case, though, Bill Clinton also accepted a five-hundred-thousand-dollar speaking fee for an event in Moscow, paid for by a Russian investment bank that had ties to the Kremlin. That was in June, 2010, the Times reports, “the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One”—a deal that the Russian bank was promoting and thus could profit from. Did Bill Clinton do anything to help after taking their money? The Times doesn’t know. But there is a bigger question: Why was Bill Clinton taking any money from a bank linked to the Kremlin while his wife was Secretary of State? In a separate story, breaking down some of the hundred million dollars in speaking fees that Bill Clinton has collected, the Washington Post notes, “The multiple avenues through which the Clintons and their causes have accepted financial support have provided a variety of ways for wealthy interests in the United States and abroad to build friendly relations with a potential future president.”
4. Putting aside who got rich, did this series of uranium deals damage or compromise national security? That this is even a question is one reason the story is, so to speak, radioactive. According to the Times, “the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States.” Pravda has said that it makes Russia stronger. What that means, practically, is something that will probably be debated as the election proceeds.
5. Is this cherry-picking or low-hanging fruit? Put another way, how many more stories about the Clintons and money will there be before we make it to November, 2016? The optimistic view, if you support Hillary Clinton or are simply depressed by meretriciousness, is that the Times reporters combed the Schweizer book and that this story was the worst they found. The pessimistic view is that it was an obvious one to start with, for all the reasons above, and that some names that stand out less than Uranium One and ARMZ will lead to other stories. Are the Clintons correct in saying that there is an attack machine geared up to go after them? Of course. But why have they made it so easy?
The campaign of Hillary and Mrs. Clinton [Jennifer Epstein, Bloomberg Politics, April 25, 2015]
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is all about showing voters who she really is.
The challenge is that there is more than one distinct identity bound up in Hillary Clinton.
There's Hillary, the proud new grandmother. She suggests road-tripping to Iowa instead of flying. She stops for lunch at Chipotle. She spends hours asking the people she meets for their views about what is and isn’t working in the economy.
“I’m going to talk about what’s happening in the lives of the people of New Hampshire and across America.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
This is who Clinton really is, her advisers and friends say; America just doesn’t know her yet, but they hope this campaign will be voters' chance to get acquainted.
Then there's the woman more familiar to America. Call her “Mrs. Clinton.” She's the wife of a former president and a former secretary of state who is trailed by Secret Service. She's a trailblazing lawyer who once defended her professional career by saying, dismissively, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” She's a polarizing public figure who can’t go anywhere without attracting cheering—and jeering—crowds. And now she's shrugging off scrutiny of the tangled web of her finances, family foundation, and work at the State Department as just the latest instance of being targeted by Republicans determined to take her down.
As hard as the Clinton team is working to keep the spotlight on Hillary, the first two weeks of the campaign showed how difficult that will be.
Campaigning as Hillary with all the trappings of being Mrs. Clinton means that her team must carefully plan each step she takes, especially when it's in front of the media. Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton overtakes Hillary.
Her Scooby van, as she calls it, attracted attention—much of it negative or mocking—in part because it's emblematic of those tensions. Yes, it's a van that she's using to travel 1,000 miles from New York to Iowa, just like plenty of other Americans. But it's a customized Chevrolet Express 1500 that, if she's in it, can be driven only by a Secret Service agent, and accompanied by an entourage of at least two more SUVs. When she wrapped up her two-day tours in both states, she flew home—once to her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and the other to her home in Washington—while the Secret Service drove the van back to New York.
While most presidential candidates just starting their primary campaigns are eager for media attention, the Clinton team is doing all it can to cut down on the number of eyes on its candidate. During Clinton's first forays onto the campaign trail, reporters had access to only a few of the meet-and-greets she did each day, and were limited to a small pool of about a dozen people. In New Hampshire, three meetings Clinton attended were open only to a single reporter who e-mailed quotes and descriptions of the event to others.
Pre-screened 'everyday people'
Her first morning of campaigning, in Le Claire, Iowa, set the tone. Clinton's team drove in a few Democrats to join her for coffee—or, in her case, masala chai. A small pool of journalists watched and took photos before being ushered out through a side entrance. Once outside, they milled about, tweeting photos of the Scooby van, and resisting staffers' urgings to get on the road if they wanted to make it to her next stop, a roundtable 90 miles away in Monticello.
There, and at the three roundtables she's done since, the format has been the same. Clinton starts with an opening statement about her goals for the early stages of her campaign and her overarching views on the economy, education, and campaign finance before spending about 45 minutes asking half a dozen pre-screened “everyday people” about the pressures they feel in their lives.
There weren't any memorable moments. But there weren't any mishaps, either.
And while the national press hoped to push Mrs. Clinton on the allegations leveled against her and her husband in Clinton Cash, a forthcoming book that alleges the Clinton State Department offered quid pro quos for donations to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary was getting lead-story and front-page attention from the local press. The local media of course also covered the controversies, too, but gave plenty of attention to supporters' enthusiasm about her trip.
Clinton happily took voters' questions, but answered only a few shouted queries from the press over the course of her first two weeks of campaigning. In the first situation, she gets to embrace being Hillary, while the second forces her to step back into the familiar role of Mrs. Clinton.
“We will be subjected to all kinds of distractions and attacks, and I’m ready for that ... I know that that comes with the territory,” she said on Monday at a furniture factory in Keene, New Hampshire, responding to shouted questions about Clinton Cash. She took a follow-up, about her e-mail use while at the State Department, and dismissed that too as a “distraction.”
Then, shifting back to her Hillary role before walking out of the room: “I’m going to talk about what’s happening in the lives of the people of New Hampshire and across America.”
Three days later, she was in New York, where dozens of journalists watched her draw standing ovations at Tina Brown's Women in the World Summit at Lincoln Center (ironically enough in the David H. Koch Theater). She then rode crosstown in her Scooby van to the DVF Awards at the United Nations. There, she posed for photos with Naomi Campbell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and sat beside Gloria Steinem and Diane von Furstenberg.
As much as the Clinton team has said that it is determined to reset its relations with reporters, it's more interested—for obvious reasons—in reaching out to voters. It also was clear that organizing is a work in progress, as the state-based press and advance staffs struggled with some logistics and, in New Hampshire, gave out press credentials in the form of Sharpie-scribbled initials on the back of journalists' hands.
Journalistic footrace
With the campaign actively trying to avoid making national news and limiting press access to just a few events a day, journalists looked elsewhere to get unstaged tidbits.
In Iowa, it was a much-mocked footrace behind Clinton’s motorcade as she arrived at a community college in Monticello. The reporters actually allowed to cover Clinton’s speech were inside the building, but a mass of others sent to cover her anyway and desperate for scraps ran as Scooby rolled by.
A few reporters leaving Des Moines for New York joked about changing their flights to possibly end up on the same flight as the candidate, suspecting she might be taking the 6:50 a.m. direct on Delta. Instead, she spent much of the next day in Council Bluffs before flying home from Omaha.
The close watch got even more microscopic this week in New Hampshire.
The Boston Globe staked out Dilant-Hopkins Airport in Keene on Monday morning, just in case Clinton flew there. On Tuesday afternoon, some journalists staked out the statehouse in Concord after hearing Clinton utter the word “capitol” while shaking hands with people who had attended her roundtable that morning.
She wound up at New Hampshire Democratic Party headquarters in Concord that afternoon and, keeping watch over Clinton’s mini-motorcade there, local news site NH1 caught State Representative Chip Rice backing his BMW into the van on Tuesday, and posted video of the incident on Wednesday.
The Globe quickly caught up with the lawmaker, who said the whole incident was “a little embarrassing” but, despite the mishap and the hour he spent meeting with Clinton behind closed doors, hadn't decided whether to support her.
“We’ll just have to see how the campaign plays out,” he told the paper.
Rather than trying to anticipate Clinton’s movements, Daily Mail Online chose to trail her small motorcade across the Granite State. On Monday, U.S. politics editor David Martosko and a photographer traveling with him, Jeffrey Hastings, caught the Scooby van going 92 miles per hour in a 65 mph zone on Interstate Highway 89. The Drudge Report linked to the story within minutes.
On Tuesday, Martosko followed Clinton from Concord, New Hampshire, to Boston’s Logan International Airport, where she, along with aides including Huma Abedin, boarded a flight to Washington. He bought a ticket for the same flight and, once on the ground, shouted questions at Clinton about Benghazi, which she ignored. A Wall Street Journal social media editor happened to be on the flight, too, and tweeted that Clinton was sitting in the first row of first class, something that is much more Mrs. Clinton than it is Hillary.
Hillary Clinton is not ‘calculating’ or risk-averse. I watched her take a huge gamble — and it paid off. [Lissa Muscatine, WaPo Post Everything, April 25, 2015]
Hillary Clinton is a woman who, under intense pressure and scrutiny, took a risk at a special session of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and it paid off.
As our plane descended into Beijing in the middle of a late summer night in 1995, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was waiting to see the final version of the next day’s speech. She had been invited by the United Nations secretary general to deliver the keynote address to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women. As her speechwriter at the time, I raced to make last-minute edits before we landed. When I finished, I handed her the draft. She looked at me and said, “I just want to push the envelope as far as I can on women’s rights and human rights.”
Now, 20 years later, Clinton is running for president amid critiques that she is calculating, always scripted and risk-averse. But those of us who worked with her on the Beijing speech saw a woman who, under intense scrutiny and pressure, was willing to gamble for a cause and principle she cared about. In the end, Beijing laid the groundwork not only for her advocacy of women’s rights as senator and secretary of state, but also for the global women’s movement. It never would have been happened if she hadn’t overruled the counsel of senior administration advisers, stood up to Democratic and Republican opponents in Congress and trusted her own judgment over the optics. She took big risks – and they paid off.
For months before Clinton’s trip, administration officials and politicians in both parties had warned her that going to Beijing for a global women’s conference simply put too much at stake – the administration’s domestic political agenda, public opinion, our country’s diplomatic relationship with China and internal White House politics.
Many Democrats, including high-level West Wing staff, were unenthused. Clinton’s signature policy project, health-care reform, had recently failed, only to be followed by disastrous midterm elections for Democrats. Soon enough, the administration would enter a difficult budget battle with the new Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. And less than two years away loomed a presidential election. “There was definitely angst,” Mike McCurry, then White House press secretary, reminisced with me recently. “There was anxiety on the West Wing front that they did not want the trip to generate ‘issues.’”
At the State Department, there were concerns, too. What if the first lady eclipsed Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the international stage? What if she diverted attention from higher administration foreign policy priorities, or further strained already delicate Sino-American relations? “I remember all the hand-wringing over that trip,” recalls Mary Ellen Glynn, the deputy White House press secretary who had also served in the press office at the State Department.
Leading Republicans in Congress, including Sens. Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm, were also staunchly opposed, with Gramm labeling the conference “an unsanctioned festival of anti-family, anti-American sentiment.”
The conference had international detractors, too. The Vatican worried about what the conference platform would say about abortion, and some Islamic countries had objections to elements of the women’s rights agenda. Meanwhile, the Chinese had a conundrum of their own: Clinton would bring international attention (something they craved) to a global conference they were hosting. On the other hand, they couldn’t control — and had no idea — what this outspoken lawyer and wife of an American president would actually say. Making matters more complicated, just months before the trip the Chinese government arrested a naturalized American citizen and dissident, Harry Wu, as he attempted to enter the country. Wu’s detainment expanded the chorus against Clinton’s trip, with editorial writers, human rights groups (already furious with China for their suppression of non-governmental agencies), and Wu’s vocal wife now chiming in.
That left Clinton’s staff, women’s rights activists, the president and a few stray allies in the administration, as the only ones who wanted her to go.
Clinton herself, though, was undeterred. At one point she even told us she would travel to Beijing on a commercial airliner as a private citizen – a comical thought to everyone but her. Growing up, she’d listened to her mother’s stories about her difficult childhood and her lack of opportunities. As a law student and young lawyer, as a children and family’s advocate, and as first lady of Arkansas, she had witnessed disparities and inequities and had worked for expanding women’s legal protections, economic empowerment, health care and education. Now she wanted to use her platform as first lady – as one of the most visible women in the world – to speak out for millions who couldn’t speak out for themselves.
Wu remained in custody while the summer wore on, and the drumbeat against the trip persisted, but I began working on the speech with Clinton, her chief and deputy chief of staff, and one adviser on women’s issues. We discussed how a white, professional, First World feminist could connect to women around the world from far different backgrounds, experiences and cultures. Gathering in her staff’s office suite in the Old Executive Office Building or upstairs in the residence, we kept the drafts largely to ourselves and resisted attempts by others to tamper with the message.
Meanwhile, both the president and the first lady spoke publicly against the Republican rhetoric that the conference would be anti-family. The president said the United States was not sending “some sort of radical delegation” to Beijing and promised that the conference would be “true blue to families.” In the meantime, we just we hoped that efforts to free Wu would yield results.
On Aug. 24, just 11 days before the conference was to begin, the Chinese convicted Wu of being a spy and deported him. We were thrilled that he was out, but top White House officials were not assuaged. They were nervous about the upcoming budget battle with Gingrich, the possibility that renewed attention on Clinton might prolong the political damage from health-care reform, and further harming relations with China. They even suggested to the White House press corps that she wouldn’t make much news in Beijing. At least that’s what they hoped.
Yet every time I talked to her about the speech, she was emphatic about not watering it down. On Sept. 5, the day after we landed, she gave her speech in the main auditorium of the Beijing International Conference Center.
I watched from behind a curtain on the stage with deepening alarm. Well into the address, her audience of 1,500 official delegates sat stone-faced and silent. What had we gotten wrong? Had we overreached? I began to panic.
There was no need, it turned out. Audience members had been listening to simultaneous translations in their native languages and were not necessarily at the same points in the speech. When applause finally broke out, Melanne Verveer, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and I looked at each other in utter relief, only then realizing what had happened.
The 20-minute speech instantly reverberated around the world. Clinton’s line that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all” is still a mantra today. And her graphic litany of abuses that women and girls in many countries were regularly subjected to was as forceful as any language ever used to talk about women’s rights. “Women comprise more than half the world’s population, 70 percent of the world’s poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write,” she said. “We are the primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued — not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.” This was simply not something major state actors made a habit of talking about in 1995.
Editorial pages that had been critical beforehand praised her afterward. Even higher ups in the West Wing were pleased. With the exception of a few right-wingers, Republicans, were glad to see Clinton criticize Chinese policies on coerced abortion and human rights. The Chinese, on the other hand, were not so happy. The authorities censored the speech on official Chinese radio and television, preventing Chinese citizens from hearing it or seeing it.
By the end of the conference, delegates from 189 countries had adopted the Platform for Action, spurring measurable progress for women in the years since. A report released in March by the No Ceilings initiative at the Clinton Foundation — based on the most exhaustive collection of data on women globally over two decades – cited areas where progress has been slow but also several positive trends since Beijing: the global rate of maternal mortality has dropped by 42 percent; the gender gap in access to primary education has virtually closed globally; by 2013, 76 of 100 countries had passed legislation outlawing domestic violence, up from 13 in 1995; and almost twice as many women hold political office today compared with 20 years ago (though they are still very much a minority, holding less than one-quarter of seats in national legislatures).
Most people remember Beijing as Clinton’s first major step in a long career spent advocating for women and girls. But I remember mostly her intrepidness – her willingness to take personal and political risks — to achieve something she believed in.
A presidential campaign imposes heavy constraints on a politician, rewarding candidates who stick to the script and punishing those who are spontaneous or off-message. But Beijing showed that when Hillary Clinton cares deeply about something, she is more than willing to be bold and take risks. She will push the envelope. And that’s worth knowing about a woman asking us to make her our next commander-in-chief.


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