On The West Wing Thing podcast, Josh and Dave needed a break from the TV show. So they decided to address another artifact of centrist liberal culture: in 2022, MasterClass released a 16-part course on “Resilience” taught by Hillary Clinton. The West Wing Thing did five segments, each with sterling guests:

The Hillary Clinton Master Class Part 1 w/special guests Amber A’Lee Frost and Catherine Liu

The Hillary Clinton Master Class Part 2 w/special guests The Reply Guys (Reply Guys podcast)

The Hillary Clinton Master Class Part 3 w/special guests Tom Sexton & Aaron Thorpe (The Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast)

The Hillary Clinton Master Class Part 4 w/Special Guests Ashley Stevens & Meagan Day

The Study Guide Bio

Dunno if you had a look at the study guide they included. I figure I’ll start with that. Obviously, it’s meant to convey Clinton’s experience and historical standing, so people can feel that they’re getting valuable advice on this resilience thing. This is a bronze plaque, not a biography, or even a resume.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON is a woman of firsts. She was the first woman to be nominated for the presidency by a major political party in the U.S. and the first woman to win the popular vote. She was New York’s first female senator, and so far she is the only First Lady (the official title of a U.S. president’s wife) to serve in elected office. For generations of people around the world, her story is one of both tremendous accomplishment and unfinished business. Most of all, it’s a story of what it means to endure.

I love how they have to clarify these “firsts.” For example, “The first woman to be nominated for the presidency by a major political party in the U.S.” is notable, but dozens of women have run for President without getting the nomination, or they ran with smaller political parties.

She was “New York’s first female senator,” which I guess is a milestone if you ignore the 27 other women who’d made it to the Senate from other states. I’m not aware that New York was uniquely hostile to female politicians: they’d elected 18 women to the House as far back as 1929. One of those women was Shirley Chisholm, who racked up some similar firsts: “In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination.”

One fine example here is Elizabeth Dole, whose career makes her far more qualified for the Presidency than Hillary ever was. Remember, Hillary had been an attorney, First Lady of Arkansas, FLOTUS, a Senator, and then Secretary of State. But, “In January 1999, Elizabeth Hanford Dole resigned her position as president of the American Red Cross, a position she had held since 1991, to consider a run for the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency. She dropped out of the race in October, 1999. During the 1996 presidential campaign, Dole took a leave of absence from the Red Cross to campaign with her husband, Senator Robert Dole. She has held two cabinet posts: Secretary of Transportation (1983-87) and Secretary of Labor (1989-91). An attorney, Dole served as White House aide in the Johnson and Reagan administrations and was appointed by President Nixon to the Federal Trade Commission. She left her Reagan administration cabinet post to work for the presidential campaign of her husband. She was later appointed as Secretary of Labor by President Bush. She was elected as a U.S. Senator from North Carolina in 2002.”

I’d say she was at least as qualified as Hillary.

Raised in a middle-class family by a mother who was severely mistreated as a child and forced into self-sufficiency well before adulthood, Hillary caught the second wave of the women’s movement, a period of intense activism geared toward social and political parity for women, and rode it into a career focused on justice for women and children—fighting not just the forces that held her back, but those that had consigned her mother to years of poverty.

Note that it’s her mother who had the mistreatment and self-sufficiency. And this is always good for the sisterhood-is-miserable approach. But what of Hillary’s childhood?  What hardships did she face? Seems that her self-sufficient mother had married Hugh Rodham, and their family lived in the affluent suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois. Hillary’s childhood was pleasant enough that, at an early age, she felt she could aspire to great heights, like being an astronaut or even President.

Hillary’s “Sister Souljah” Moment

As an undergraduate at Wellesley College in Massachusetts (where she briefly led the Young Republicans Club), Hillary was selected by her classmates to speak at their graduation; she went off-script and voiced her generation’s frustrations with the elders who told them to slow down and wait their turn. “We feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible,” she said. “And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.” Her speech caused such a stir that she was featured in LIFE magazine, at the time a prominent American periodical.

To be honest, I’d have to agree that her “Young Republican” phase was brief– by her junior year in 1968, she was coming clean for Gene McCarthy. She’s not the first young conservative to have that kind of breakthrough, and not the first to relapse into something that felt comfortable.

The Wellesley speech looms large in Hillary’s legend. This business of her “going off-script” conjures up an image of Hillary tossing her notes aside, and delivering an extemporaneous barn-burner of a speech. Not exactly. She began with a short rebuttal to the previous speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke. Accounts of Hilary’s heroic speech claim he “celebrated incremental progress and spent a lot of time arguing against protest. Ultimately, he said, he believed “the overwhelming majority of Americans will stand firm on one principle: Coercive protest is wrong, and one reason it is wrong is because it is unnecessary.” Hokay, not great for the guy– it sounds like something Hillary’d say decades later. Hillary made a mild rebuttal before turning back to her well-prepared speech.

Here’s the fascinating thing. Edward Brooke was a moderate Republican from Massachusetts with a really fascinating career. He was the first African-American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate. He was a liberal who’d co-written the Civil Rights Act of 1968, was the first Republican Senator to call for Nixon’s resignation during Watergate. He was a considerable and, from what I can tell, pretty honorable figure in those days. (He was also a prosecutor who went after the Boston Strangler, and in the 1968 movie, he was played by William Marshall.)

So Hillary’s entire career, her first moment of national prominence, her first heroic stand for her values… was a Sister Souljah moment. She ‘s praised for sniping at a respectable and accomplished black political leader, in front of an audience of affluent, well-educated, professional-class white women.

Hillary Rodham, Single Female Lawyer

Continuing her education at Yale Law School in Connecticut, Hillary interned with a nonprofit organization called the Children’s Defense Fund, going undercover to expose segregationist policies in Southern schools. (Also at Yale, she met a fellow student named Bill Clinton. They married in 1975, and Bill became America’s forty-second president in 1993.) She returned to the organization after graduating, starting down a path of children’s and women’s rights advocacy that would follow her from then on.

Wikipedia has a fascinating item: somewhere between Wellesley and Yale, in the summer of 1970, “she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).” Read stuff like that, and you can see why people liked her. What happened to that young woman?

Her Yale years read like The Big Chill’s character bios. She linked up with Marian Wright Edelman and her husband Peter, did some campaign work for various Democrats, met Bill, did free-legal-clinic work, and apparently did do some significant work through the Children’s Defense Fund. Maybe they didn’t mention her time on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate because of space.

One of her adventures was interning at the Oakland law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein: not only was Bob Truehaft a former Communist, he’d married Jessica Mitford, journalist and author of The American Way of Death: apparently Hillary doesn’t mention this period very often. (That may be because, in 1979, the law firm got involved with a case involving an Arkansas prison escapee: “For left-wing activists, Walker’s challenge to his extradition represented a chance to call attention to prison conditions across the South. Mitford decided to try to leverage her husband’s ties to Mrs. Clinton to get Arkansas to drop the extradition or to pardon Walker outright. Despite an aggressive campaign, including a personal visit Mitford paid to Little Rock, the Clintons did not budge. Mitford, who clearly expected a different response, later described the episode as a “furious falling-out.”)

Bill was pursuing her all this time. He’d proposed marriage several times, but only after Hillary failed the DC bar exam, but passed the Arkansas bar, did she decide to “follow her heart instead of her head.”

The Turning Point

There is one HUGE lesson in reading up on Hillary’s career. She did some decent and respectable work early on. Her early feminist-political awakening was, well, of a piece with a whole generation of young women of the time. The CDF stuff, the early law practice, and internships, the Watergate work… they all indicate that she could have had a fine future working on good causes, and may have led to a greater radicalization on her part.

The turning point on her timeline is obvious: she married Bill Clinton. Suddenly, her story becomes the Rose Law Firm, the cattle futures, the secrecy, the convicts doing unpaid labor in the Governor’s Mansion. Even the good stuff she tries to continue to do, for children, wears away, gets redirected, turns into shabby compromises and union-breaking and career strategy.

Hillary Rodham may be a genuine tragedy, like Schuyler White in Breaking Bad. You have to wonder how she’d have turned out if she’d passed the DC bar, and kept her distance from that massive, malign creep.

But she’s learned Resilience

But now we come to the meat of the matter: why is Hillary qualified to speak on resilience?

Hillary’s barrier-breaking has at no point been easy. As the First Lady of Arkansas, she initially kept her name—Hillary Rodham—until she and her husband faced political backlash, and the last-name debacle was partly blamed for Bill losing his gubernatorial reelection campaign in 1980. In 1992, when her husband was running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency and Hillary’s career was a constant point of inquiry from the press, she told reporters, “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” The public’s reaction was swift; Hillary’s comment was seen as an affront to traditional families and stay-at-home moms.

More than two decades later, her “could have stayed home” line came back—this time projected on a giant screen behind American pop phenom Beyoncé as she performed at a rally in the final days of Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign. Words that had once caused so much controversy were repurposed as a feminist rallying cry.

I’d have thought that showing that quote, in that context, wasn’t a “feminist rallying cry” so much as a guaranteed laugh-getter: “Hey, everyone, remember when Hillary caught shit for saying this? Well, now she’s going to the White House! Fuck those assholes!”

Then again, “Nevertheless, she persisted” is also a “feminist rallying cry.” Maybe they need to work on their PR a bit.

“We have unfinished business to do,” Hillary told supporters at that event. “More barriers to break and, with your help, a glass ceiling to crack once and for all.” (The metaphor she used refers to the institutional barriers that keep women from advancing in the world of business and politics and elsewhere.)

Strange how they had to explain what a “glass ceiling” is, to an audience already primed to buy Hillary’s course.

That particular glass ceiling is still intact. But Hillary remains one of the most influential women in the world, and she continues to shape the global discourse on gender, politics, and leadership. And now, she wants to bring her lifetime of knowledge to you.

In this class she’ll show you how to define the values that give you a sense of purpose, fine-tune your negotiating and communication skills, and stay focused through the inevitable challenges. Mostly, she wants you to understand that leaders aren’t born; they’re made. And you can use many of the same tools Hillary does to clarify who you are, where you want to be, and how to get there.

So okay. It’s not as if Hillary doesn’t have a lot of experience that could be instructive to a young person. (I figure, most of the people who buy this are going to be young women, but let’s be inclusive here.) She is genuinely smart, and there is substantial experience to draw from.

The Timeline

We get four pages on the history of women in American politics, and there are a few oddities. Take Hillary’s entry: “Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for a U.S. Senate seat and wins. She is the first woman to represent New York in the Senate and the first (and still only) First Lady to be elected to office.” Well, as I said, she’s nowhere near the first woman in the Senate, and the whole “first First Lady to be elected to office” is politically meaningless. Even if she wasn’t handed the Senate seat as a carpetbagger to prep her for a Presidential run, her election wouldn’t have shattered any glass ceilings. But however narrow the achievements, they are technically firsts.

Contrast this with: “Margaret Chase Smith becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate in her own right—that is, without being appointed to fill a dead husband’s seat (although Chase Smith had been appointed to fill her husband’s House of Representatives seat after he died in 1940, a common path to political power for American women).”

None of that italicized qualification is needed. In truth, these ‘firsts” are complicated. First female Senator was Rebecca Felton of Georgia, who took over when her husband died. Next was Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, also widowed into the job… but she won re-election, “in her own right.”  After a few more appointees and widows, Margaret Chase Smith gets elected all by herself. First woman to serve in both the House and Senate. Took on Joe McCarthy. No idea why we had to be reminded that she was widowed into her House seat.

Values

The first exercise in this particular self-help manual is to write down stuff about what you value, what makes you happy, what motivates you.

Self-Help Workbooks are good things

We finally get to the actual work part of the course.

I don’t look down on self-help books. When I started cognitive therapy, my therapist suggested I get two particular books, and do their exercises alongside of our regular sessions. So I did, and my first reaction to the exercises was that they were really simplistic, even trite.

But I decided to take them seriously, and started to do the exercises. That’s when I realized why they seemed simplistic and trite: they weren’t written for me, a smartass who’s used to reading some intense writers, and who’s going to smirk at the style. These books have to reach a lot of people, most of whom are not like that, but who are looking for help.

So it was up to me to put my cynicism aside– which was also a good thing, because that might have contributed to the depression. So, if someone wants to buy a “Master Class” on resilience, I sincerely hope they find the lessons they need.

Children Are Our Values

Back to the study guide. Hillary’s quoted with “Values are those things that you believe are important in your life, in your work, in your community that you are willing to stand up for, speak out for, work for, defend.” One of her continuing things in her official history has been work on behalf of children, usually citing her work with the CDF. And every so often, she has turned her attention to doing things for the kids. (Again, this is undermined by her work with Bill, which damaged the lives of millions of kids.)

We get this pair of paragraphs:

Some two decades later, as America’s First Lady, Hillary chaired the task force in charge of developing a comprehensive package promising universal health care coverage in the United States. The Clinton health care plan did not come to fruition—but instead of slinking away in defeat, Hillary turned to a task that harkened back to her days at the CDF: If she couldn’t get universal health care coverage, maybe she could at least improve it for poor kids.

Hillary helped to develop the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides federal funding to states so that they can cover the health care costs of children from low-income families that don’t qualify for Medicaid (a federal and state program that provides health care to American families of limited means). CHIP became law in 1997; more than nine million kids are now enrolled every year.

We know how that “universal health care coverage” stuff worked out for her– she worked up a scheme that left insurance companies in charge, which they rejected anyway, and the matter was ruined so effectively that no “serious” person thinks we can even discuss universal health care coverage. It was a spectacularly demoralizing failure, one which Hillary herself seems to have internalized– she referred to modern efforts for single payer as fantasies and empty promises. So much for her own “resilience” and “values”: when defeated, she accepted the lessons and now warns others against trying.

As for the CHIP program… well, most accounts have it that CHiP was Ted Kennedy’s baby, adapted from a Massachusetts program, and he and Orrin Hatch pushed for it after the Clinton debacle. When Hillary claimed to have had a pivotal role on it during the 2008 election, Orrin Hatch disputed it. Neera Tanden said that Clinton hadn’t wanted the amendment added to the budget bill. Ted Kennedy himself was equivocal, it being an election year, and he’d endorsed Obama by then anyway.  Others basically agree that the White House had little input into the program until Bill signed it.

Hillary’s Resume

That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

Not really. Four pages of civics-textbook descriptions of her jobs. Doesn’t tell us shit about resilience.

Roots of Resilience, Communicating, and Negotiating

The big question is, why should we learn “resilience” from Hillary Clinton? Well, the first reason is that there aren’t many psychotherapists specializing in resilience who can sell in her numbers. And most people think of Clinton as a figure who’s endured attacks, obstacles, frustrations, and betrayals, and can still hold her head high. (So has Monica Lewinsky, for that matter.) Maybe she has a trick or two to pass along. There’s probably a nugget or two that’ll be useful.

That’s because most of this stuff is therapy, self-help boilerplate about resilience, with Hillary’s name and others dropped in to keep it Hillary-focused. (I wondered if this stuff was available without the Hillary, and did some Google searches. I’d love to report that it’s just copy-pasted. But alas, it isn’t.)

The section on her UN speech is pretty bland, though I was amused by the lily-gilding in this sentence: “In a 2020 article she wrote for The Atlantic, a long-standing American magazine, she recalled worrying that her message could be dismissed if she infused her speech with too much emotion.”

But sometimes, it’s embarrassingly stupid.

When Hillary accepted President Barack Obama’s request to be his secretary of state in 2008, her acceptance was also an act of forgiveness—something researchers point to in discerning what creates resilience. Hillary and Obama battled each other in a difficult 2008 Democratic primary, with Obama emerging victorious. But when Obama extended an olive branch—and an important job—Hillary said yes, and the two leaders worked together in service of the nation.

Well, no shit: Hillary’d just spent eight years cultivating her path to the Oval Office. And just when the stars were in alignment– she’d performed adequately in the Senate, the economy was in free-fall, and America wanted a hero or heroine to step in… she gets clobbered by this lightweight newcomer with charm to spare. Time to start working on 2016… or 2012, if something unfortunate happens to a black man who’s been elected President. You bet she’s going to take that job. You bet she’s going to find some goddamned way to forgive Obama.

Further Reading

There’s a bibliography of further reading, mostly of books by women in politics. Many are Democrats– Hilary, Sonia Sotomayor, Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama– but bipartisanship is exercised here, with the presences of Laura Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Nikki Haley, and Carly Fiorina. One or two of the titles indicate stories of actual political engagement, like Lilly Ledbetter’s book about fighting Goodyear, and two history books.

One is about Victoria Woodhull. The other is The Women Behind the New Deal, which is striking because these women had their legacies erased by New Democrats like Gary Hart, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. In fact, “The End of the New Deal” was Gary Hart’s stock speech for many years.

The overall focus is basic identity politics. It’s isn’t about how to achieve things in politics, or even which things to accomplish in politics. What matters is that women achieved them. They might as well have included The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher.

Before the Videos: Brian Bloviates on Shit

These videos entangle two things that really can’t work together, and may even cancel each other out. There’s the self-help stuff, of course, the teaching of “resilience.” There’s nothing wrong with teaching this, or helping people cultivate it. We all want to empower people. I could even see using a famous political figure in this effort– because if the person is someone who has accomplished great things, then the self-help they offer might be based on something with terrific stakes and achieved through great struggle, and their insights might be genuinely enlightening.

But mixing it with politics makes it really difficult. For one thing, the speaker’s politics get in the way, and there’s the temptation to think their personal advice and politics are linked– remember, Hitler’s book was titled My Struggle, and yes, much of it could be read as a guide to self-actualization and becoming an effective public speaker. For another, most people are looking for resilience in their jobs and personal lives, fighting back against disappointment and heartbreak and betrayal… and equating those things with great political struggles lends itself to over-dramatization, the anxiety of measuring yourself against unrealistic standards, or even basing one’s politics on one’s personal issues. (Sometimes the personal is not political.)

But there really is this core conflict, or contradiction, between self-help and progressive politics. Self-help, as we generally recognize it, tells us that we have to adjust ourselves to deal with our environments– work on our depression, think about how we function, use practices and rituals to help us accomplish things. That doesn’t mean it teaches us to acquiesce to a situation– after all, we’re looking for a self-actualization that empowers us. But it makes us focus on ourselves first. On the other hand, progressive politics enables us to locate the problems in our environments first, so that we can change the environments and thus enable ourselves and others to become empowered. The former tells us to take responsibility for ourselves, the latter tells us not to blame ourselves for things we don’t control.

It’s not a contradiction, but people see it as a deep conflict. Conservatives and liberals play up the “personal responsibility” end, mainly to discipline people and avoid social change. The left’s focus on social issues can be discouraging to those who want to feel empowered, and we do get snarky over how self-help is capitalism’s consumer-grade examination of the soul. And there are some real disasters, like Fred Newman’s and Lenora Fulani’s New Alliance Party– which was notorious for urging political engagement as empowering psychotherapy, mainly through… the New Alliance Party.

What to Watch For

Outside of the 2016 election, what events in Hillary’s life have forced her to fall back on her resilience? The big one’d be the humiliation over the Lewinsky scandal, which came as a package with the right-wing’s media attacks on her as a human being. The next probably might be her loss to Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries. I’m going to watch for those, but I think she’ll stick to events where she can cast herself as the victim or as the noble one in the deal: the Benghazi hearings, maybe some negotiations at State. And resilience is a lot easier when you’re married to a Governor and President, and have teams of people offering support and protection and advice.

For the first six episodes, we don’t hear very much about any of the major traumas of Hillary’s career. It’s mostly fairly standard stuff about how to organize oneself, how to prepare for interviews and public speaking, etc. Maybe later on, we’ll get the deep stuff.

Episode 1, “Meet Your Instructor”

Anyway, we got Hillary Clinton offering personal advice on resilience, borne from her years of… okay, her fans, and a lot of women, see her as someone who’s achieved success while enduring decades of abuse, ridicule, and disrespect. Even many of her critics will stress how insane much of the right wing’s attacks have been. And there’s the humiliations of the 1990’s scandals. Anyone who’s endured that ought to have some insights on maintaining self-respect, right?

That’s the intro segment, basically. Only real low note I see here is the “Sixties montage” stuff, which is almost required for any Baby Boomer talking about “those times.”

Episode 2, “Discovering Your Mission”

We start with values. Obviously, Hillary can’t be too specific on the values, because some of her audience might already have their own. Later on, we get Missions, and the suggestion to develop a mission statement for your life. Hillary cites stories about her mother’s childhood hardships as a basis for her “life mission” to help children.

Here’s the first uncomfortable moment: Marian Wright Edelman. (Hope you don’t mind all the timecode stuff. Thing is, the timecode works if you put all the clips into a single timeline.)

00:14:10:09 – 00:14:34:26

HRC: up to his or her God given potential. That is how I thought about my work and how I thought about the contribution that I wanted to make, andI was really lucky that once I decided to go to law school my very first semester, I had the great good fortune of meeting Marian Wright Edelman, who was a graduate of Yale Law School of Spelman College and the first African-American woman to pass the bar in Mississippi, had worked there for civil rights and particularly focused on children. So she became an organizer for new programs like Head Start, which had been started by then President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, to try to help poor kids like the ones Marian was working with. And this new organization she was forming to be an advocate for children just struck my heart.

MWE: “The issue is not how can we afford to give our children health care? How in the world can we afford not to do it? I think that I was put on this earth to stay focused completely on children who need an outside voice. They’re just there.

HRC: And so I got something called a law students civil rights Research Council fellowship for that summer, and I went to work for Marian, and I worked on issues affecting migrant children, and I went undercover to Dothan, Alabama, to investigate. A segregated academy started there. You know, over the years, I have kept that focus on kids, but I’ve also expanded it to, you know, women’s rights and gay rights and other groups that are often left behind, left out, marginalized.

Hillary really leans into her work with Edelman, and the Children’s Defense Fund, when she talks about her values. Which is hilarious when you consider that her biggest impact on the lives of poor and marginalized children was her husband’s Welfare Reform act.

The harshest word I found about MWE was from Adolph Reed, whose essay “Liberals, I Do Despise” claims her husband Peter assailed welfare for “fostering dependence,” and that MWE’s focus on children “gives in to the right’s demonization of poor adults by conceding their worthlessness in order to focus on their presumably innocent kids.” It might be too harsh: when Bill Clinton signed off on welfare reform, Peter Edelman resigned from HEW in protest, and Marian and the CDF denounced the Clintons. Eventually, Marian and Hillary patched things up, and now the CDF says nice things about her.

The focus on children is pretty maudlin– we all know that Simpsons moment where Mrs. Lovejoy wails “Won’t somebody think of the children?”  One also suspects Hillary chose it because it could be vaguely feminist, but it might reassure conservatives– not that it did (she thinks children should be raised by a village), but it seemed like it could. You don’t need me to point out that Clinton’s Welfare Reform damaged the lives of thousands of children, so Hillary’s “values and missions” guff is pretty revolting… and as for extending this to “other groups that are often left behind,” well, lotsa luck.

Hillary circles back to the self-help stuff after this questionable little example, and offers advice. It’s a strange, rambling little monologue that begins,

00:17:19:15 – 00:17:34:03

So what do you care about? What will get you up in the morning? I mean, if you are working somewhere and you dread going to work, you just can’t see another day, but you do it because you have to make a living. Start thinking about what could you do that you care about? That could also help you make a living. Maybe not as much money, but certainly enough money. You just have to be creative and flexible in your thinking about how you define your values and then try to put them to work in your life and in work that will keep you going. Make a living for you. But that’s not the point of living a life. You shouldn’t let the idea of having a mission for your life, trying to understand the values that you think are important or even trying to build your own resilience overwhelm you because it can.

We don’t get anything like, “Ask yourself why you don’t have the time or money to do what you’d like. Why is that? Is your job draining too much out of you? Are you adequately paid? Could you try to fight for more in your workplace?” Hilary can’t raise those questions for a lot of reasons. We know from her record that she doesn’t want people going off and organizing unions or challenging management or asking for more. After all, if people did this, people like Hillary couldn’t swoop in and make a difference and be the hero.

Anyway, if you tell people to make plans and save up and work hard for a reward, like traveling, that’s one thing; telling them to do that stuff in order to organize your workplace is another. The latter is risky, demands a lot, requires the cooperation of others whom you may not even like, and all the experts say that it may not pay off.

There’s a moment (00:18:41:24) when she tells people that they have to “put in the work” to become a doctor or a lawyer. It’s not just the work. It’s getting into a university that’s not a scam, lining up financing that’d probably get you a decent house, and doing years of work in hopes of a career that might pay off the loans you’ve taken out to get that training.

After that, it’s generic self-help stuff. Set goals. Make plans. Be realistic. Be careful. But don’t give up. Think of Churchill.

Episode 3, “Hillary’s Framework for Hard Work.” 

Again, pretty basic advice on working hard and prioritizing– great advice if your job enables you to have that kind of control over your activities.

She talks about going to see Robert Byrd after she got elected to the Senate, who gave her the advice to “be a work horse, not a show horse.” And I wondered if this wasn’t Byrd’s subtle way of calling her a horse and she still hasn’t picked up on that.

There’s a segment where she talks about the “show horses,” which segues into a really fascinating comment:

00:26:07:11 – 00:26:25:27

To me, being a workhorse means being someone who works hard, is reliable and delivers impactful results to the mission at hand. Conversely, a show horse is someone who is surface level, cares more about promoting themselves and getting accolades and tries to take the easy way out. I think that there are too many people who think cutting corners works, and a lot of people can get away with cutting corners, taking the shortcuts, not working hard as long as nothing’s at stake. If you can just float through whatever job you do to make a living and nobody hold you accountable and nobody’s hurt by your failure to work hard, maybe you can get away with it.

But we’re living in a really unpredictable world right now, almost wherever you live, whatever walk of life you’re in. You have seen things in the last years, everything from a pandemic that struck us globally to natural disasters that are worse and more frequent than ever before to all of the job losses we went through because of the pandemic. People have really encountered all kinds of unexpected situations. And we need folks who show up and work hard and sweat the details more than ever. My advice to you is to be a workhorse and not a show horse.

That first portion, about the people who cut corners, really comes from the viewpoint of someone who is In Charge– the person who gains from the surplus value of the labor.

Keep in mind if your job is something like “Protect citizens from being economic victims” or “Get people health care.” If you fail to do that, well, it’s hard to hold you accountable for your failure to work hard– I mean, other than not voting for you.

And Hillary takes the pandemic and quarantine as a lesson that we need people who show up and work hard. And that’s true, as far as front-line tasks and health care workers are concerned– a LOT of us learned that our jobs are bullshit. But there’s a huge difference between saying “People should show up and work hard, and they’ll reap rewards” and “People who show up and work hard should be rewarded and paid well, and you should demand that for yourself.”

Then there’s this gem:

00:28:01:29 – 00:28:24:21

Don’t cut corners. Don’t take shortcuts. Don’t you think you can just kind of float through because you’ve got a great personality or you know, you’re related to somebody who is running the company you’re working for. Sweat The details try to learn as much as you can about how whatever job you’re asked to do is done.

Does “married to” count as “related?”

00:28:39:29 – 00:29:01:11

I want somebody on the fire lines in California or in the rescue team, in the floods in New York, who has sweated the details. When someone I care about is sick and has to go to a hospital. I want to make sure that the doctors, the nurses, the techs, everybody in that hospital has sweated the details. Now they know what needs to be done. For my loved one in my career, I’ve always tried to learn as much as I could about any issue that I’ve worked on. And as a public servant, you can’t lose sight of the fact that policies are about people.

I’d like to speak to the manager.

“When someone I care about is sick and has to go to a hospital. I want to make sure that the doctors, the nurses, the techs, everybody in that hospital has sweated the details.” Most people with loved ones in the hospital are not in any position to do this. We go in terrified, fully aware of our total ignorance, afraid to ask for more care because it’ll mean thousands more on the bill, unable to ask for treatments because our insurance companies are gonna question the procedure…

Again, this continuing sense that the person Hillary’s talking to is someone of the PMC, whose work gives them the flexibility to choose between being a show or work horse, with enough education and resources to ensure better health care… and the position to instruct one’s inferiors in the virtues of dependability. As she says later on, “You need to want people to sweat the details, to do the hard work, to rely on the facts and the evidence that affect their profession so that you in turn, can do what you have to do to keep a job going.” This is the viewpoint of a manager.

00:29:17:17 – 00:29:36:02

So what I focus on is who would this policy or policy change affect? What are we solving for and is this the most effective way to do it? Where do the affected communities exist and what context is important to consider about the history and culture of that community? And why hasn’t progress been made or has been limited so far? Understanding those details have helped me figure out how I could make a real, practical, measurable difference in people’s lives.

Okay  let’s take health care. Who would this affect? Everyone. What are we solving for and is this the most effective way to do it? Exploitation, financial ruin, lack of health care, and yes, national health care is the most effective way to do it. Where do the affected communities exist? EVERYWHERE. Why hasn’t progress been made? You fucked it up in 1993, and made sure no one else could do much more than that.

Know Your Limits

We get an admission of limits when she talks about becoming Secretary of State, when she traveled a million miles and made phone calls to 122 countries to tell them “We’re thinking of you, we care about you.” Which would be terrifying for a lot of those countries. Anyway, she worked so hard she got pneumonia.

00:32:39:15 – 00:32:57:00

“And then, you know, having people say I was dying. So you got to have stamina. But you also have to have common sense so that when you’re not feeling your best, when you have a health issue that you should deal with, don’t try to power through it every time. You’ll have more stamina over the longer run if you actually listen to your body and take care of yourself.” Yeah, I’m sure people will take that time off from their jobs.

Episode 4, “Organizing a Busy Life”

I love the Leslie Knope-style binder on her lap, with the “Hillary 4 America” logo. Okay, it’s not quite Leslie Knope-style, because there aren’t colored tabs or Post-its sticking out to help the reader flip to particular places.

I have to admit that I’m a little in awe of her briefing book. It’s cleanly laid out, easy to understand… and very clearly assembled by a professional staff that only a Cabinet member or corporate CEO could have for the task. But this kind of planning and organization just doesn’t scale down below that level. Again, Hillary is talking to an audience of proto-Hillaries who fully expect to be in the managerial class. Take her suggestion, “For instance, as you prepare for a job interview, you can use it to hold information about the company’s history, media highlights or interviewer bios.” Is that advice for the interviewer or interviewee?

You’re going to LOVE this

There’s a segment where Hillary goes over her schedule for a particular campaign day, March 22, 2016. It goes on for quite a while, and it’s an interesting echo of The West Wing’s Santos-Vinick race. It’s a hard day’s night of meeting with Senators, the Machinist’s Union, fundraisers, meet-and-greets, and finally heading to a high school, where an audience of 1000 people awaits.

But it’s not very instructive, and it doesn’t really address resilience either. Yes, it’s a very complicated schedule, requiring a LOT of planning, but Hillary had a gigantic campaign staff making all of the necessary arrangements– so this whole segment seems to be saying “Look at how important I was.”

Here’s the kicker.

That very same day, March 22, 2016, “Bernie Sanders brought his campaign for the White House to San Diego Tuesday, electrifying more than 10,000 supporters who had stood for hours in a line a mile long to hear him speak.”

As they said in What’s Up, Tiger Lily? I am such a GOOD henchman…

Episode 5, “Preparing for Public Speaking”

Now for a real Master Class from a master of public speaking, the woman who made “Pokemon Go to the Polls!” a national catchphrase.l

We begin with her “speaking off the cuff” moment at Wellesley College, 1969.

00:50:50:01 – 00:51:19:10

So when my time to speak on the program occurred, it was right after Senator Brooke, who was a very distinguished Republican, but he was also very supportive of Richard Nixon and the Nixon policies. So basically, Senator Brooke, whom I did admire, gave a status quo defense speech, and I knew it wasn’t at all what my classmates and I wanted to hear. So when I got up, I keyed off of what Senator Brooke had said and basically said, That’s not good enough. We are not ready to accept the status quo. We want you to feel like we’re making a difference in the world that we’re, you know, living with passion and energy.

I covered this in my notes for the study guide. Here’s an NPR article discussing why it wasn’t “off the cuff.”

The UN Speech

Speech #2 was her UN “Women’s rights are human rights” speech, and you know damn well that, unlike most public speakers, she had some experienced writers and advisors supplying a lot of the content.

I mean, just a year or so before, Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders attended a UN event on AIDS, and was asked if masturbation should be taught as a way to prevent its spread. Her reply, “I think that is something that’s part of human sexuality and it’s part of something that perhaps should be taught.” Man, her boss was so livid, she got fired for saying that. So speaking at the UN can be very tricky. Or, maybe not: consider the Clinton disregard for the UN during the Rwandan genocide.

I won’t go into the Clinton legacies, both Bill’s and Hillary’s, in foreign policy. But it’s striking that Hillary claims props for asserting “women’s rights are human rights” to the Chinese, when hers and Bill’s track record seems to jettison that idea when women are merely part of the aggregate of victims. Bombing, sanctions, the destabilization of Libya, the Haitian debacles… all destroyed the lives of thousands of woman and children. Those are certainly issues of “human rights,” but they’re all subsumed under the demands of American power and political vainglory.

According to Wikipedia, the phrase got a nice workout in the years that followed, in other speeches, songs, handbags, campaigns, T-shirts, and more. I can’t say whether it affected US-Chinese relations or not. But the funny thing is, Hillary’s using this speech to illustrate how to structure it around three basic points– she doesn’t say anything about “try to get your writers to work up a good ringing phrase that can fit on headlines and bumper stickers.” It’s sort of like Scorsese using Goodfellas to explain why it’s important to use a camera or have dialogue.

Episode 6, Studying Persuasive Speakers

I can easily imagine why Hillary could teach “resilience,” but she is notorious for being a poor political campaigner. The upside is that I’m sure she’s been given great advice on how to improve– she doesn’t have to have followed that advice, but at least she can pass it along to the rest of us.

At least she’s changed her mind about the importance of good public speaking. Back during the 2008 primaries, in an interview with Fox’s Major Garrett,  Hillary tried to impress upon people the fact that, while Obama might be fine with the pretty speeches, that doesn’t mean he can deliver the goods. To illustrate this point, she said:

“I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a President who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished.”

Here’s the video. Apparently, some people took this as shade against Dr. King:

“Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t make the statement,” Mr. Obama said. “I haven’t remarked on it, and she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that, but the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous.”

By the way, Hillary gave that Fox interview only a few hours after this:

Today, in Dover, Francine Torge, a former John Edwards supporter, said this while introducing Mrs. Clinton: “Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually” passed the civil rights legislation.

The comment, an apparent reference to Senator Barack Obama, is particularly striking given documented fears among blacks that Mr. Obama will be assassinated if elected.

We get a montage of effective public speakers– FDR, JFK, Angela Davis, MLK, and for some reason, Margaret Thatcher, who looks like a pelican trying to swallow a resistant fish.

An actual bright spot in this series

She focuses on three she’s known personally, Obama, Bill Clinton, and Rep. Barbara Jordan. Now, we could assume that Hillary included her for base reasons– she needed to include a woman, Jordan now has LGBTQ cachet, whatever– but I have to praise Hillary for bringing her memory back for the benefit of her audience. In the samples on this video, yeah, she’s a terrific speaker. Hillary may focus on

Her cadence and the tone of her voice, she had a low almost contralto voice, and she spoke slowly and enunciated every syllable. […] She literally could stop everybody in a 100 mile radius when she began to speak. She was that compelling and powerful, and I could never replicate that extraordinary. Persuasive, full body presentation that she made, but she’s.. she’s one of the people I just admire immensely.

… but what I immediately got was that wonderful, insinuating quality that some good preachers have– that tone that says that all of us here today already know what’s what.

I got nothing to say about her explanations for Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s speechmaking skills: it’s all been said before. But I do sympathize with Hillary when she tries to capture it, because she goes back to suggesting that people assemble bullet-points and main topics and the like. She’s an analytical person, and we analytical people have a hard time trying to learn word-magic. To be really good at it, you have to have that deep political intelligence of reading rooms and crowds. We nerds go into a room expecting that we’re going to lose everyone’s interest after the first stutter. (That’s why I’m a terrible storyteller. On paper, I can riff a little. But I can’t entrance a listener. I figure people want to walk away, so I boil things down to essentials when I’m talking.)

Anyway, that’s the first six eps. I’ll work on the next five later on.

Episode 7, “Maximizing Your Strengths & Learning To Pivot”

This segment’s a general urging that you’ll probably have to make yourself over to a profound degree in order to become an effective public speaker. Her advice is very female-centric. Her first example is Margaret Thatcher, who took lessons with someone from the National Theater to lessen her Yorkshire accent, and to lower her voice a half-octave or so, along with changes in her dress and presentation.

I don’t need to talk Thatcher’s politics– even Hillary has to say she abhorred her politics, which doesn’t help Hillary very much. (Ya gotta wonder– Which politics did Hillary object to?)

This entire lesson is astonishing. Our culture likes to think that it recognizes authenticity. We don’t, actually. Our culture is full of phonies. Even the subcultures that practically scream for authenticity, like the folk revival of the early 1960s, had its share of falsified identities, like Rambling Jack Elliott (born Elliot Charles Adnopoz) and Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman). But it’s something we want.

So why urge women to put on a false face– to shed those things they grew up with, to match the expectations of a male-dominated world? Doesn’t feminism urge us to cultivate respect and admiration for things that women actually have, rather than the beauty-pageant shit? And if women are under extra scrutiny from a male-dominated society… why risk phoniness and being clumsy at it?

I tried to think of a female political figure Hillary could have used other than Thatcher, a heroic or successful female figure, with decent politics, who had to change everything about themselves to succeed. I really couldn’t think of any: only Thatcher was known for remaking her public image so consciously. On the other hand, look at Rep. Barbara Jordan in the previous lesson: that’s someone who cultivated her authentic voice. (Or, a voice that sure sounded authentic. As I said, we have a lot of phonies. Let’s not be too trusting.)

Why stress the willingness to make oneself over like this? Well, maybe it’s because Hillary’s famous for trying so hard to turn herself into a crowd-pleasing politician. Every campaign she’s done, there’s been at least one story discussing her clumsiness and gracelessness, her gaffes, her awful jokes. I recall even Steven Spielberg offering to give her advice in 2016.

So what we have is Hillary advising women to be prepared to change the way they present themselves, in order to get ahead, but she herself is famous for being unable to use that very advice. She’s like a seven-fingered woodworker teaching about shop safety.

It’s called Perfect Situational Awareness, Lana

Here, the phrase is explained by an expert.

I’m sure Dave would have a lot more to add on this, because Hillary’s talking about working audiences, even handling hecklers, and these are skills a standup has to cultivate. Maybe in the age of Donald Trump, you need a standup comic’s speed and resilience.

There’s a moment when she talks about how Trump would hover around her during the town hall debate. And that really was an uncomfortable moment, because if you’re Hillary, how do you deal with that? He’s breaking all the rules and propriety of the debate format! Sure, in hindsight, we can all think of something she could have done. I’m not sure if Hillary should offer a “what-I-should-have-done” theory at this late date– she doesn’t want to look as though she’s been obsessing over this for the past five years. And we’re not watching game films to find out what our side did wrong.

But here’s Hilary talking about situational awareness, and handling hecklers… and this was the big moment when she failed at this. Sure, she knew Trump was hovering around like a wildebeest. But she didn’t have the wit to cut him down. I mean, if she’d turned around and said, “You okay, Donald? Need to go to the bathroom or something?” she’d have won the night.

This entire segment is basically, “You need to cultivate public speaking skills. Here’s Margaret Thatcher, who changed her entire wardrobe, accent, and voice, unlike women who actually did good things. And I’ve had decades of highly-paid experts trying to get me to improve me. And to illustrate what you should do, here’s a famous moment when I froze up on national TV and cost the country its well-being and sanity.”

Episode 8, “The Fundamentals Of Negotiation”

The Adoption and Safe Families Act

01:30:55:25 – 01:31:19:25

And, you know, the nineties over health care, the children’s health insurance program or reforming the foster care and adoption system and all the other things that I was working on.

Well, we know how those negotiations on health care went, and I covered the CHIP program in my writeup on the study guide. The third, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, is something that Hillary can legitimately claim to have had a major role in. It’s been a part of her stump speech ever since. She also brings this legislation in Segment 10, “Taking Criticism Seriously, Not Personally.”

In the 2016 campaign, Hillary told a story about how she’d worked with Senator Tom DeLay on this project, demonstrating her ability to reach across the aisle and get things done. One problem: DeLay had almost nothing to do with the legislation. Even DeLay said this. Mother Jones has a good piece about this whole story, which includes a moment when DeLay recalled, “She had Strom Thurmond on one side of her and me on the other […] I thought, ‘What a terrible thing to do a young lady.’ Strom Thurmond, he kept hitting on her.”

ASFA was designed to push states toward increasing adoptions. To get there it included a controversial timeline known as the 15/22 rule. If a child has been in foster care for 15 out of the last 22 months, states must move to terminate the biological parent’s parental rights — thus “freeing” the child for adoption. Three exceptions to that rule are allowed: if a child is living with kinship relatives; the agency documents a compelling reason that parental termination is not in a child’s best interest; and when the state has failed to provide services for reunification.

A little later on in her video, Hillary says,

01:32:08:03 – 01:32:30:02

You must also figure out what your other parties or in an adverse negotiation your opponent wants and how important it is, and whether there’s some other way of satisfying that particular party by getting to a different outcome.

At the time, the guy the Clintons would negotiate with was Newt Gingrich. That same year, Gingrich wrote a bill proposing that prohibited welfare benefits for any woman who had a child under the age of 18 for the rest of her life, and using the savings to take away the children of unwed teen mothers and put them in orphanages.

Richard Wexler, of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, gives a really interesting  history where Frank Luntz counseled Gingrich to stop with the “O” word. So the Republicans began hyping adoption. They claimed that there were hundreds of thousands of decent, middle class people desperately wanting to adopt children away from their impoverished parents, but Big Government was gumming up the process. Democrats agreed, and thus, ASFA was born.

In 2006, the Black Congressional Caucus released a study conducted with the Brennan Center for Justice, which “faults the federal Adoption & Safe Families Act for unintentionally expediting the permanent separation of children from incarcerated parents.”

According to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (“AFCARS”), administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, of the children in foster care at the end of fiscal year 2003, over 29,000, or 6%, had been removed because of parental incarceration. The majority of parents in state prison are convicted of non-violent offenses, including drug offenses. As a growing number of families suffer the consequences of parental incarceration, states need federal guidance and support in order to help families reunify.

Richard Wexler claims:

• ASFA encouraged a take-the-child-and-run mentality on the frontlines of child welfare. Thousands more families, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately families of color, were destroyed by wrongful removal of the children.
• Instead of reducing the foster care population, ASFA increased it, trapping thousands more children in a system that, according to one major study, churns out walking wounded four times out of five.
• ASFA effectively turned the child welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.
• And when the army of childless yuppies didn’t show up to adopt in anywhere near the numbers predicted, ASFA created a generation of “legal orphans” with no ties to birth parents and no adoptive homes either — probably at least 100,000 more such “legal orphans” than had ASFA not become law.

As Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, the removal of all these children “disrupt[s] the family and community networks that prepare children to participate in future political life.” And this needless removal of children reinforces the very stereotypes about Black families that are used to excuse such removals in the first place.

Latagia Copeland Tyronce, who’s lost children to this system, has been writing about it for Medium ever since. (She also recommends this TED talk by Jessica Pryce on race and child welfare.) There’s also a nice Jacobin article about Hillary’s child work and her husband’s legacy.

In a later segment course, “Taking Criticism Seriously,” Hillary claims to have made efforts that work against these things. I don’t think we have the time to evaluate the finer points of what she did or didn’t do, or what was “in her heart.”

Back to Negotiation

01:33:01:16 – 01:33:26:01

And you should know when good enough is good enough so that you can say yes to an outcome and feel like you’ve achieved as much as you possibly could. So whether you’re negotiating in an office or at a garage sale, remember to understand your objectives before you begin. Design a tiered system with your desired outcomes, like what you want and what you’ll walk away from. Try to understand what your opponent wants and know when to end the negotiation.

One of the biggest misconceptions about negotiation today is that a lot of people believe it’s somehow illegitimate to negotiate. You know, if you are on social media or you follow certain people in the press who make absolutist claims from various points on the political spectrum. They set it up so that if you negotiate, you’re somehow conceding that your position isn’t 100% perfect and you’re giving ground to somebody who has a different point of view.

Unless you are in a totalitarian state where you can order people to accept certain outcomes and negotiation in a democracy in a free society is, by its very nature, a discussion and there will be give and take. You can draw red lines, as we say, saying, you know, I can’t go any further than this or this has to be in. I can’t leave it out. But if you’re not willing to engage in a discussion for a negotiation, then you’re never going to get anywhere. And unfortunately, a lot of people are taking these absolutist positions and they’re in their bunkers against people on the opposite side of the political divide.

This is from a politician who simultaneously stresses the need to negotiate with Republicans, but who felt comfortable dismissing the demands of her own party’s left wing. The difference lies in how much power they’re perceived to have: the Republicans are powerful, the Left’s just a buncha hippies and petitions. You won’t get this lesson said out loud.

That remark about “tiered outcomes” is both common sense and lunacy. It’s common sense to have a compromise in mind when going into a negotiation, some range of what’s acceptable and what amounts to that classic win-win conclusion. But you don’t make that calculation public. You don’t aim for the tiers– you aim for everything with the understanding that you’ll whittle down from there.

Negotiation and Trust

01:36:26:20 – 01:36:56:14

And then finally, I’d say one of the other misconceptions about negotiations is that you can negotiate. With people and not keep your word by that, I mean, if you tell somebody in a negotiation something you can do or something you intend to do or you have done, then you’d better do it because negotiations ultimately rest on trust. And if people don’t trust you, they’re going to be reluctant to give you much of anything in a negotiation. So there are a lot of misconceptions, and I think the reason negotiation is taught in so many schools and so many books are written about it is that it? It does take a certain set of skills, but underneath those skills that come with practice are certain fundamental principles about, you know, engaging in a respectful discussion and being willing to look for ways that it can be a win-win.

I can’t find the source, but Nixon was once quoted as saying that sincerity is the quality that really comes through on television.

The 9/11 Health Bill

I have to admit that this was a moment when Hillary was genuinely on the right side of things, and was practically first in line to do something about it. Every account I could find has it that Hillary was on the 9/11 site almost immediately, networking with responders’ groups, and challenging the Bush Administration’s assertions that the air around Ground Zero was sweeter than Gramma’s apple pie. I had no trouble finding various officials and organizations that praised her work on this.

And it’s not exactly Hillary’s fault that passing a health bill for 9/11 took nearly ten years. We had Bush and Cheney in the White House, and Gingrich and Hastert running the House, until 2007-2008. By then, Hillary’d left the Senate, so for the last two years, Kristen Gillibrand was doing the negotiation for New York. Most peoples’ negotiating skills may not have been as effective for those years. (Though I dearly wish she’d tried withholding approval for the Iraq War for leverage on health care.)

So it’s really strange that she’d cite this in a segment about negotiation. To start with, help for 9/11 victims was a guaranteed vote-getter and even a decently populist move. She’s going on knowing that the people of NYC were firmly behind her. Why, only a demon would have looked at 9/11 and decided that the people there didn’t need any help as badly as a network of defense contractor buddies. But that was the next problem– the people negotiating on the other side were exactly that kind of demon. The only negotiation strategies that would lead to anything were refusal or capitulation.

Episode 9, “Navigating Compromises & Tradeoffs”

Hasn’t this been a large part of her message– that life is full of trade-offs and compromises, because that’s how things get done? Wasn’t that something she insisted was an important lesson?

For example, Hillary tells us, she didn’t take Bill’s name when she married him. This may have cost him re-election as Governor. So, she changed her name. “You know, most decisions you make will have upsides and downsides.They’ll have opportunity costs like, what are you foregoing by making a certain decision one way or another? And when it came to the decision about would I or would I not add my husband’s name to mine, I made a trade off.”

Or, during that marriage, she was presented with occasions demonstrating that her husband was a philanderer, making their marriage a sham, trashing the sacrifice she made over her name, and calling into question her self-respect as a woman and as a feminist. She had a choice: leave him and strike out on her own, or continue with the marriage and destroy the reputations of the accusers. Hm, hard choices.

Or, take the decision that many voters have to make every four years. Usually, we want to vote for people who share our values and who will fight for them. And even though we only seem to get people who fail that basic requirement, we can’t let Republicans win. So at the cost of actually accomplishing anything, we make a trade-off.

Her comments that follow this crisis– this compromise with her values– is followed by:

01:46:39:15 – 01:47:00:17

I think everyone has to be aware of the societal and cultural influences and pressures that you live with, because when you make a decision that runs against them, you need to understand there may be consequences to that decision and then you have to decide what price you’re willing to pay or not. In any situation where I’m trying to find compromise. I find it helpful to weigh my values against the opportunity cost. You want to understand what you have to lose when you choose between two or more options. I look to see which path keeps me closest to my morals and values, my integrity and my goals. You have to decide what’s really important to you and what your core beliefs are. And if it doesn’t attach to one of your core beliefs, like for me adding my husband’s name wasn’t attached to this core set of beliefs I have.

Maybe this is why she invoked Martin Luther King, Jr. as a model for public speaking, rather than as a model for acting upon your principles, taking tremendous risks, and putting your life on the line.

She keeps using illustrative examples that simply don’t apply to her ideas. She tells a quick story about helping Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu secure federal aid after Hurricane Katrina. Now, that’s certainly kind of Hillary to do that, and it’s the sort of thing we want our leaders to do. But where’s the compromise here? Where’s the trade-off? What principle did Hillary compromise on to do that? Did Hillary ask for anything in return? That would be an interesting negotiation, but we don’t hear that.

I wouldn’t call this hypocrisy, though there’s enough of that in the Clintons’ history. This is just a total disconnect between subject and example. Which is weird, given Hillary’s reputation for her analytical ability and attention to detail. Maybe there’s a scriptwriter to blame.

Episode 10, “Taking Criticism Seriously, Not Personally”

All right. Now we get to something that really does deal with “resiliency.”

We start off with a dull anecdote about a church and a dress. Which I guess is intended to make Hillary seem relatable to the rest of us. but then we go back to the Adoption and Safe Families Act. Hillary says that people had this punitive attitude towards abusive parents, while she and others wanted to consider the experience of the child in deciding whether to separate them or not. I don’t have the time to research this to figure out where Hillary was coming from on that project, who she argued this with, or what values she compromised over. We know she helped develop it, we know her husband signed it, and we know what it did.

Here’s the weird part. This is a segment on taking criticism, and being able to be dispassionate and analytical about it. This ASFA story doesn’t seem to involve Hillary actually taking criticism. It tells about a time when she had to consider other peoples’ arguments about policy. That’s not criticism: that’s doing research. Once again, it’s a disconnect between the subject and the example. Or, does she hear other people’s opinions as criticism?

I loved this moment:

01:59:36:05 – 01:59:52:27

I trust the people who are around me. I trust obviously my family, but also my staff and my friends who have often been very helpful in offering criticism like, you know, you could have answered that question better or, you know, I did think that you were kind of dancing around instead of getting to the point. I know that it comes from the right place and I would hope for you that you would always have people around that you could trust enough to ask for legitimate criticism.

Man. Consider how badly her advisors botched her campaign for her. How accounts of her campaign have it that Hillary’d surrounded herself with core of friends whose advice may not have been terribly good. And as much as she says she trusts her family, she didn’t listen to Bill’s excellent campaign advice. (I’m sure Shattered has a lot about this. I can’t locate my PDF file very readily.)

Episode 11, “Ambition Sexism & The Double Bind”

02:03:40:03 – 02:04:01:24

“So in this lesson, I’ll break down what ambition, sexism and the double bind mean to me.”

Oooh. boy.

Right out of the fucking gate, when Hillary says, “After decades of working in male dominated fields, I’ve experienced firsthand how so much of the criticism of women is steeped in bias or gender based stereotypes and expectations,” what image appears on our screen?

She follows those with pics of John Edwards and Donald Trump, both men known to treat women like shit. (All three are making large gestures– is this now a “tell” for rape culture?)

So much for resilience. I mean, she did win the 2016 primary, so she ought to be happy with that. Bernie campaigned for her more than she did in those remaining months, and you’d think she’d try to reduce any lingering resentments, and maybe cultivate some respect and gratitude for the man. But she still feels the need to trash him, seven years later, when she’s left politics and he’s still working for the public good. She’s teaching us about resilience, and she still can’t get over the fact that she was opposed?

This undermines pretty much everything else she says in this video about sexism, too. At no point did Bernie make Hillary’s gender an issue. Bernie’s record on working for women is at least as strong as hers is, and that there’s virtually no evidence that he has personally abused women, used them sexually, or treated them badly, and his marriage seems to be happy and stable. (Unlike such sterling Hillary supporters as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, or even the pre-2012 Donald Trump.) Nope– Bernie was a dirty little finger-wagging sexist scumbag, just like the other two men in her montage. If you want to believe that women are vindictive egomaniacs who cry “sexism” over imagined slights, then here’s your evidence, courtesy of a leading feminist icon.

02:05:36:15 – 02:05:48:29

I remember running for class office when I was in high school and I was thinking about running for president of the student government. And, you know, a couple of boys said, How silly are you? A girl can’t be president.

I bet she remembers those boys’ names, and if she’d won, they’d be getting phone calls from reporters.

The Double Bind

02:07:42:10 – 02:08:02:24

You know, women who try to balance family and work often find themselves in a double bind. They feel like they’re not. Doing everything they should be doing at home with their family, and they’re not doing enough in the workplace. Their hopes and dreams and aspirations for their family are often in conflict with their own ambitions for themselves professionally. You know, there’s just this constant pressure coming from all directions that every woman I know has experienced in some form or another.

Well, no shit. They’re also burdened with most of the caregiving and child-rearing in this country, with no recompense, and with little help from the government. There’s no more welfare to help out the sisters at the low end of the poverty ladder, for some strange reason. They have to stay in shitty, abusive marriages, and work in tough, soul-killing, dangerous jobs for sexist bosses, because they can’t afford to lose health care for their children.

But that choice between career and family? Yeah, it’s a real bear.

Misogyny in Politics

At least she used video of John Edwards, in his fullest smarmy glory.

Episode 12, “Overcoming Setbacks”

Well, it’s about resilience, at least.

02:19:21:16 – 02:19:47:23

And I can share with you what I have tried to do, but I want to inspire you to think about setbacks you’ve already had in life, whether it be personal and relationships or professional or public. What did you do and what can you learn from overcoming the setbacks in your life so you’re better prepared the next time it happens?

For example, what if the marriage of “equals” you’d invested so much time and effort is undermined by your husband’s infidelity? What if the campaign to help you achieve an historic First is usurped by someone else achieving a different historic First? What if the campaign you wage, to come back from the previous setback, is challenged by some angry little garden gnome who still thinks unions are a smart idea? And what if you’re finally handed a political party and a billion dollars to make history, become an historic First, show everyone who doubted you that they were wrong, rebut every sexist male asshole in the world, and finally assert your full identity… only to be beaten by the single worst human being America may have ever produced?

1993’s Health Care Reform

02:20:42:24 – 02:21:03:25

Our goal was to come up with and have enacted into law a universal health care system that would take care of everybody and would be affordable and accessible and of high quality. That was our goal. But when we began working on it, it was immediately obvious that the broken system we had was, number one, very profitable for a lot of people within the health care business. And number two, it was the system that people knew, and they were afraid that any change would disadvantage them, and that was a powerful set of beliefs and values. As you might say, that really made it difficult and in the end, impossible to enact a universal health care system. The effort to try to explain what we were proposing was being met with, you know, really raucous negative crowds filled with quite threatening people and talk radio was stirring everybody up.

Doug Henwood writes in Harper’s:

More substantively, Hillary was given responsibility for running the health-care reform agenda. It was very much a New Democrat scheme. Rejecting a Canadian-style single-payer system, Hillary and her team came up with an impossibly complex arrangement called “managed competition.” Employers would be encouraged to provide health care to their workers, individuals would be assembled into cooperatives with some bargaining power, and competition among providers would keep costs down. But it was done in total secrecy, with no attempt to cultivate support in Congress or among the public for what would be a massive piece of legislation — and one vehemently opposed by the medical-industrial complex.

At a meeting with Democratic leaders in April 1993, Senator Bill Bradley suggested that she might need to compromise to get a bill passed. Hillary would have none of it: the White House would “demonize” any legislators who stood in her way. Bradley was stunned. Years later, he told Bernstein: “That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton. You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. . . . The disdain.”

Health-care reform was a conspicuous failure, and most of the blame has to fall on Hillary. Dusting herself off, she soon reinvented herself as a freewheeling “advocate.”

No. No. It was the fault of those people, all those Americans who simply could not learn any alternative. They failed to make any effort to understand my plan, and their simple folk beliefs and irrational fears made them turn against us.  Why, it was like bringing electricity to the Congo– they were terrified of the big scary complicated thing.

And now Hillary turns to her work on the CHIPS program, which I covered elsewhere.

Be Optimistic

You have to admire the chutzpah here. I don’t have a problem with maintaining an optimistic, hopeful outlook. But wasn’t so much of her campaign message that you could only hope to accomplish so much? That it was useless to ask for a candidate who offered the hope of great and good changes, and it was the only smart choice to vote for the candidate who might win? About the only thing she offered as a “hope” was smashing a glass ceiling– all the rest was compromise, accepting weakness, coming to terms with failure, recognizing limits, facing facts…

Don’t Give Up

This is really what these Master Classes are– recorded affirmations from respected celebrities. Whether it’s Hillary Clinton or not, I can’t imagine that they’d do one of these “courses’ where the instructor explains how many people living in crushing, inescapable poverty, where they can’t realistically maintain hope that they can work hard to make things better.

Episode 13, “Daring To Compete”

This title reminded me of the title of one of Nixon’s books, In The Arena.

Right off the bat, Hillary says that “running for office” was something she was afraid to do. Okay, I can believe that there’d be some fear there. But let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton wasn’t some librarian or schoolteacher or bartender who launched a quixotic campaign with a handful of friends and some credit cards. (If she was, the DNC would have shut down her candidacy because she couldn’t afford the approved campaign strategists.) When Daniel Moynihan announced his retirement, the Dems asked a lot of people to run, including Hillary. She launched her Senate campaign while she was still First Lady, an advantage point almost nobody else has had. (In fact, between January 3rd and January 20th, she was both First Lady and a Senator.) She ran in New York State at the invitation of the entire Democratic Party. She had the means to relocate her residence to Chappaqua so she could run in that state. Okay, maybe she was nervous… but she had far less reason to be nervous than almost any other human being.

“Dare to Compete” whisper 

I checked out Hillary’s anecdote about the athlete telling her to “dare to compete,” hoping to find it was bullshit. It seems to be perfectly true. In March 1999, when people were still speculating about who’d run for Moynihan’s seat, Hillary was at the HBO event where Sofia Totti whispered that to her. By September, Hillary’d relocated to Chappaqua.

“Ruminating”

I have to be a little personal here, because when Hillary talks about “ruminating,” she’s talking about a part of cognitive therapy that’s helped me a lot.

When we ruminate, we’re imagining situations where disaster’s going to happen. And that causes us to worry, to be hypercritical of ourselves, and to become extremely wary of situations– like, fight-or-flight-level wary. I do this a lot: if I’m not worrying about things that might go bad, I’ll ruminate on things that did go bad and that I can’t change.

Therapy’s intended to help us break the ways we ruminate on things. There are a lot of strategies to do this. For one thing, recognizing how your own mind is lying to you about these things is a big part of it, and there are many good reasons to make your expectations a lot more optimistic.

For another, my therapist suggested that I write down some of the little fear-ridden or self-critical narratives I’d indulge in. Well, I tried… and when I’d start, the stories looked really ridiculous. It was embarrassing that I’d dwell on certain things. And then I’d just stop ruminating, and I couldn’t go on with writing it down. Turns out that was the intent of the exercise– it taught me a way to shut down those ruminations.

The thing is, it takes a lot of work to train yourself to stop doing this to oneself. I do it a lot when I first wake up, so it’s still difficult to knock my head out of that rut.

Here’s what Hillary says about it:

02:40:16:19 – 02:40:36:20

You can let anxiety and insecurity take over your life. You know, there’s a concept I learned some years ago called ruminating, where people keep thinking and thinking and they’re afraid to try because they think of everything that could go wrong and they’re worried that they’re going to fail.

You’ve got to stop it. You have to say to yourself, I’m going to try. And yeah, I know it’s easy to say and harder to do, but say it to yourself. You know, your thoughts can be translated into how you literally talk to yourself, how you try to buck yourself up, cheer yourself on, pick yourself up, and you’ve just got to be willing to try that and see whether it can work for you. I want you to dare to compete and to ask yourself this question Am I holding myself back because of fear? And if the honest answer is yes, then find ways you can work through that discomfort.

All right. These videos were never intended to accomplish what psychotherapy does. And I’m not saying that Hillary’s comment is harmful, or even wrong. But I truly wish that Hillary’d said something a little more earthy and direct and useful than “buck yourself up, cheer yourself on, pick yourself up.” Maybe explain more about rumination, and maybe offer a trick or two to counter it. Things like that really do build resilience.

Episode 14, “Bonus Resilience in Action w Huma Abedin”

Here’s a short excerpt from Shattered:

Several Clinton insiders said at the time that it was unclear who was really running the campaign. To the extent anyone was truly in charge, it was Hillary. But aides and advisers often pointed to Abedin as the staff member who influenced Hillary the most—despite her inexperience as a campaign operative. As she had at State, Abedin concerned herself with elements of the operation for which she had no credentials. But she had a corner on the most valuable commodity of any presidential campaign: the candidate’s time. Abedin was with Hillary around the clock. She had the final say on where Hillary went and who had access to her. Rather than just being a gatekeeper, Abedin took on the role of channeling Hillary for the rest of the campaign. That created internal resentment, as it had at the State Department.

Besides, Clinton aides groused, Abedin was a walking political time bomb. Her husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, had quit the House after sending sexually explicit tweets to women and then lost a mayoral bid after revealing he hadn’t stopped sexting women he’d met online. And that was just the screaming tabloid headline aspect of Abedin’s potential for inflicting damage on the campaign.

And that’s what happened:

No one in Hillary’s camp thought Comey really had new information that could lead to a prosecution, but they knew that perception mattered more than reality in a campaign—especially with so little time to make their case. The peril was compounded by the fact that the FBI had connected Hillary’s server investigation to a probe into Weiner’s sexting scandal. The tie-in: some of Abedin’s State Department e-mails had been accessible from the laptop. Hillary was again connected to a politician charged with sexual misconduct. It wasn’t her own husband this time, but it was hard to find someone closer to her than Abedin.

And this revelation from Comey damaged Hillary in the polls not long before the election, and it may have cost her the Presidency. She even cut Huma loose after that, for a while.

The Clintons have had to cut people loose in the past, and they’ve done this without a lot of sentiment or apology, but Huma and Hillary are still friends. This has to be one deep friendship– like, deep on some Marianas Trench level that surpasses human understanding. (Yeah, there’s always the possibility that they’re romantically involved, but snarking over that possibility– or even mentioning it, “just puttin’ it out there”– feels reactionary and straight-guy shitty.)

They start off with Huma as a hard-working campaign intern, whose ethic got her noticed and into a paying White House job. Which is great if you can afford to take an internship for a few years. There’s some back and forth on what they’ve meant to each other, expanding each other’s horizons and such. They start to home in on “resilience” by talking about Huma’s initial insecurities, and recognizing that they’re universal, and “it’s OK” to have them.

At the 02:54:42:12 mark, Huma brings up the term “Hillaryland,” which has its own Wikipedia entry. It was the almost-entirely-female group around Hillary, first noted in 1992, very loyal, very insular, very mutually protective, and noted for a specific charm that feels like the conclusion of the movie 9 to 5. The two women stress the feeling of community and mutual reinforcement within the group. Which is all very nice.

I don’t want to jump to the idea that this sisterhood-is-powerful thing is some weird, malign entity. There’s lots of boys’ networks that do shitty things. And the problems with protecting Hillary during the 2016 campaign aren’t entirely due to “Hillaryland.” Shattered describes a core group called the “Super Six,” which included Huma, but also included John Podesta and Robby Mook, who were perfectly capable of fucking things up on their own. (Her tightness with Huma created one problem: Huma was the only person who knew Hillary had pneumonia during the campaign, and kept it quiet.)

But what about resilience? We basically learn that Huma put in a lot of hard work and made herself invaluable to Hillary, and that Hillary was a kind and supportive boss. So it doesn’t seem as though Huma was put through any serious, soul-crushing difficulties– no oppressive bosses, no impossible workloads, no threats, no outside responsibilities that would demand time and effort outside of the job. There’s no indication of any hardships beyond the fact that her work was hard– nothing about any problems within the campaign, or the personal impact of Anthony Weiner’s behavior.

Episode 15, “The Would Be Victory Speech”

02:58:31:00 – 02:59:06:15

“Being resilient is tougher when you have to push through your biggest disappointments and find the will to keep going. But our failures are not things we have to shy away from. In this lesson, I’m going to face one of my most public defeats head on. By sharing with you the speech I had hoped to deliver if I had won the 2016 election.”

Or:

“I will now give every Trump supporter the most satisfying moment of triumph they might ever feel in their entire lives.”

I don’t think I can add anything unique to the commentaries we’ve already seen about this coulda-been speech. Going through it for nitpicks and snark would be a waste of effort.

Overall, the speech tries to be lofty and aspirational, but it seems to avoid anything like a particular issue aside from the glass-ceiling stuff. (And man, that phrase “glass ceiling” is never going to feel the same after Hillary’s campaign.)

So I guess the question is how reading this speech relates to resilience. I’m not even sure if rereading it to herself would have been healthy. Frankly, it reads more like a list of all the wonderful things we can now never have… which is just a recipe for feeling genuinely awful about the future, especially if one feels responsible for losing those things. (On the other hand, it might feel deliciously nasty to read this aloud, if one believes that others are to blame, and deserve to feel miserable for ruining things for everyone.)

That’s what Hillary doesn’t really talk about very much. Maybe she covered it in her book What Happened?, but not here. Clearly Hillary’s managed to pull herself together enough to keep on keepin’ on. But how does she feel about it all? All those walks in the woods we heard about… did she find any lessons? What did she tell herself, if only to keep functioning? Did she get any good or useful advice from friends? Was Bill of any help at all? I think stuff like that would be far more useful in teaching “resilience.” Might be in her book ($17.99 in hardcover, $14.99 Kindle), but it’s not here.

Instead, when Hillary’s actually trying to give people useful advice… we get this wallow in failure and defeat. Maybe it’s an artifact from that alternative timeline where we’re sipping mimosas at brunch while President Hillary gives that Putin what-for and all the men beg for forgiveness. Or, maybe, a reminder that we could have had her for a President, if only, if only we were worthy of good things…

Episode 16, “Choosing A Life Of Resilience”

It’s that final word of encouragement to the person who bought this, that last pat on the shoulder as they exit the door. There’s not much to say about that part of the segment, but there is this:

03:19:28:04 – 03:19:56:08

I like the idea that I’ve maybe blazed some trails, knocked over some obstacles, put some cracks in the glass ceiling so that other girls and women can pursue their dreams too. […] But I do want to be remembered as someone who has tried to live a life based on my values, tried to live a life of service to help others, tried to be an American who exhibited my love of our country and its values by standing up and fighting for it. I mean, there’s just a lot that I care about that I hope would be part of whatever legacy I leave behind.

I don’t have any really big “summing up” comments to give. This Master Class isn’t going to do much for or against her reputation. Most of the people who buy it have already signed on to that image of Hillary Clinton anyway. Although she made some questionable claims about her legacy, she’s done that elsewhere. And while the self-help advice she gives has some odd features– she doesn’t really say much about resiliency, many of her examples don’t fit the topic, etc.– it’s pretty run-of-the-mill, and none of it is egregiously bad for other people.

I thought of writing something like “It’s like hearing Richard Nixon give advice on honesty,” but it isn’t. Nixon oozed ruthlessness– even when he tried to say something uplifting, he and his cronies knew what he really thought. You can’t imagine him doing a Master Class without looking like C. Montgomery Burns with five o’clock shadow.

With Hillary, the insincerity seems to come from what Catherine Liu called the “virtue-hoarding” of her class. The belief that she is a good person, with good intentions and good goals, overrules a lot of self-doubt and introspection over the bad aspects of her record. Those are always the fault of the circumstances, and the need for compromise. Or they’re the fault of her opponents. Frequently, they’re the fault of her allies: she’s disavowed her role in some of Bill’s awful record, and wasn’t shy about blaming Bernie for her 2016 defeat.

That’s assuming she’s as benign as she wants to appear. I haven’t read a lot about life within the Clinton sphere, or Billaryland; lost interest during the Lewinsky scandal, mainly because their opponents were at least as awful as they were. I don’t know if there’s a truly malign, selfish, calculating Nixon lurking behind the pantsuits, but there’s enough out there to make that an unsurprising revelation. She was willing to sign on to the smearing of the women Bill had had his way with, she latched onto Dick Morris early on, the compulsive secrecy that helped undo her ambitions, the easy use of bombing as foreign policy, the core of cronies and loyalists around her, the redbaiting of Bernie Sanders…

I’m not worried about people taking this Master Class and following her advice. But I can worry about people who’d actually read a few biographies or autobiographies, and draw the conclusion that her worst aspects are necessary for effective governance.

One last word on the Hillary masterclass

Hope there’s still one more podcast on the Hillary Masterclass, so this might be a point to raise.

I was listening to Marc Maron’s podcast, where he interviewed W. Kamau Bell about his Cosby documentary. He talks about interviewing some of the survivors, the sixty or so women who reported being assaulted by Cosby over the decades. And I’m thinking about how these women had somehow persevered over the years. Some of them gave up, some of them tried to put Cosby past them and move on… and the word resilience floats up right away.

And suddenly Hillary’s little Masterclass looked a lot worse than it had. Let’s just think about the women who are likely to buy Hillary’s course on resilience, the ones aiming for lives among the professional-managerial class. It might offer them some insights on the values of outlining speeches (good) and planning schedules (hire staff). But can Hillary’s course help a young woman whose boss has started making demands that go beyond the office work? What to do when you see other women enduring this, or collapsing under it? When the company sides with the creep? When the only choice is to slink away and give up hope for justice? Does girlboss feminism really require this… erasure of the struggles of millions of women?

(Or, when a boss to whom you owe your past and future career is accused of sexual assuault? Do you find resilience in some fuzzy “sisterhood is powerful” where you have to establish solidarity with people of different classes? Or, do you accommodate yourself to things, so you can forge ahead as an individual? This dilemma may be neoliberalism in a nutshell.)

The fact that Hillary’s audience is so limited means that we don’t have to really think about resilience. Because people who are facing genuine, profound challenges aren’t going to waste their money on this. If you stay on the phone with a health care “provider” to bargain down the price of your child’s insulin, well, that’s certainly “resilient,” but it’s nowhere near as heroic as making a fine speech. Does anything in Hillary’s course offer any help to a woman who needs to escape a violent husband, maybe with kids in tow?

And what about men? We need resilience, too: we don’t exist as a gender solely to keep those fantastic girlbosses down in the steno pool. We’re expected to be breadwinners, to meet a lot of expectations, and we’re frequently single parents as well. Speaking personally, when the pandemic ebbs a bit I’m going to re-enter the job market… at age 59. I have resources, and help, and I can force some optimism on myself, but I get absolutely nothing from Hillary’s course on a very important trait I’ll need to have a better life.

Hillary’s work in addressing the situation of women, falls into three categories. The first is, it was work she did as a young lawyer or intern or trainee. The second is that she’s given public statements about a problem, or she’s presumed to be generally sympathetic to women and is less likely to harm them than a male politician would.

The third is just a guess. Maybe she has actually done something that has genuinely helped millions of women. But for some strange reason, she never mentions it, rarely publicizes it, and chooses instead to cite projects where she was not a main player (the CHiP program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act), or where the help for women is ambiguous at best (how she and Bill “got” millions of women off Welfare).