Subject: Correct The Record Friday September 19, 2014 Morning Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 09:08:59 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

*​**Correct The Record Friday September 19, 2014 Morning Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*Los Angeles Times: “Hillary Clinton touts family issues and hints at 2016
domestic agenda”
<http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-hillary-clinton-economic-security-women-presidential-campaign-20140918-story.html>*

“Hillary Rodham Clinton joined some of the most powerful women in Congress
on Thursday to push for advances on affordable child care, paid family
leave and raising the minimum wage that could create greater economic
progress for women.”

*New York Times: “Hillary Clinton Pivots to Domestic Issues as Women Voters
Loom Large”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/us/politics/hillary-clinton-pivots-to-domestic-issues-as-women-voters-loom-large.html?_r=0>*

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent the past several months discussing her
foreign policy record as secretary of state, but on Thursday she officially
dived back into kitchen table issues during a panel discussion about equal
pay for women, affordable child care and paid sick leave.”

*Wall Street Journal: “Hillary Clinton Turns Attention to Women Voters”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/09/18/hillary-clinton-turns-attention-to-women-voters/>*

“Hillary Clinton is spending the latter part of the week speaking about
issues central to women, whose support would prove crucial to her
anticipated presidential bid.”

*Bloomberg: “Clinton Urges Shift: From Glass Ceilings to Office Floors”
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-18/clinton-urges-shift-from-glass-ceilings-to-office-floors.html>*

“Speaking at the Center for American Progress today, Hillary Clinton
decried the lack of paid leave, affordable daycare and other policies that
would make it easier for women to remain in the workforce.”

*Politico: “Hillary Clinton: Women’s economic issues need ‘movement’”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/hillary-clinton-economy-women-111106.html>*

“Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for a ‘movement’ to fight for women in
the debate over work and family policies, saying there’s no ‘secure floor’
for women and that lack of economic mobility is an issue ‘roiling’ beneath
the national political debate.”

*Time: “Hillary Clinton Calls for a Women’s ‘Movement’ Ahead of Elections”
<http://time.com/3398922/hillary-clinton-women-2014/>*

“Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for a women’s
‘movement’ on economic issues ahead of the midterm elections.”

*MSNBC: “Hillary Clinton slams ‘evidence-free’ lawmakers”
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton-slams-evidence-free-lawmakers>*

“Sitting on a panel of powerful women in politics, Hillary Clinton blasted
Republican lawmakers for blocking economic legislation that would help
women and the economy.”

*The Daily Beast: “Square Deal, New Deal, and Now, From Hillary Clinton, a
‘Fair Shot’”
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/19/square-deal-new-deal-and-now-from-hillary-clinton-a-fair-shot.html>*

[Subtitle:] “As Hillary Clinton spoke about women’s economic issues at a
liberal think tank, you could practically hear her campaign taking shape.”

*The Hill’s blog: Ballot Box: “Clinton: Congress 'living in an
evidence-free zone'”
<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/218223-clinton-congress-living-in-an-evidence-free-zone>*

“Former secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday slammed Congress for
‘living in an evidence-free zone’ and called for voters to turn women’s
issues into a ‘political movement.’”

*Vox: “Hillary Clinton's plan to use feminism to sell big government”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/9/19/6405561/hillary-clintons-secure-floor>*

“At a time when activist government was broadly in vogue, highlighting the
implications for family life was enough to sink the proposal. Clinton's
calculation seems to be broadly the opposite — that putting a gender equity
frame forward is a good way to bolster support for the welfare state at a
time when the national mood is swinging toward smaller government.”

*Mother Jones: “Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle: Obama's Done Okay But
Economic Benefits Need to Be ‘Broadly Shared’”
<http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/09/hillary-clinton-women-economics-minimum-wage>*

“Speaking in non-partisan terms, Clinton slammed Congress for its lack of
action on raising the minimum wage, with the former secretary of state
saying that a failure to boost the wages of the working poor is
particularly damaging for women.”

*The Hill: “Warren draws contrast with Clinton on Syria”
<http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/218268-warren-votes-no-on-syrian-motion>*

“Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday voted against legislation
authorizing President Obama to arm and train Syrian rebels, taking a stand
that could distinguish her from Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

*Washington Post blog: Ed Rogers: “The Insiders: Clinton vs. Sanders —
another Clinton plan?”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/09/18/the-insiders-clinton-vs-sanders-another-clinton-plan/>*

“So what do the Clintons really need?  What could be better for the Clinton
campaign than a pedestrian white guy who is a self-proclaimed socialist and
who mostly plods along in a predictable, ultimately harmless way?”

*The Atlantic: “’I Never Dreamed It Would Turn Out This Way’”
<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/i-never-dreamed-it-would-turn-out-this-way/379347/>*

*“On whether Hillary Clinton will run for president: *[Pres. Clinton:] I
have no idea if she’s going to run. I know nobody believes that, but I
don’t.”

*People: “Chelsea Clinton's Baby Nursery Décor: It's All About Elephants!”
<http://www.people.com/article/chelsea-clinton-pregnant-baby-nursery-elephant-charity>*

“While her parents are on ‘constant grandchild watch’, mom-to-be Chelsea
Clinton is incorporating her passion for elephant conservation into her
baby's nursery décor – and some of the items are from her own gift line.”

*Articles:*

*Los Angeles Times: “Hillary Clinton touts family issues and hints at 2016
domestic agenda”
<http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-hillary-clinton-economic-security-women-presidential-campaign-20140918-story.html>*

By Maeve Reston

September 18, 2014, 12:23 p.m. PDT

Hillary Rodham Clinton joined some of the most powerful women in Congress
on Thursday to push for advances on affordable child care, paid family
leave and raising the minimum wage that could create greater economic
progress for women.

Clinton, fresh off her campaign-style weekend visit to Iowa and her
summer-long book tour, used Thursday's panel at the Center for American
Progress to focus on issues that could form part of her domestic agenda
should she run for president in 2016.

Clinton noted that women hold two-thirds of the minimum wage jobs across
the country and three-quarters of the jobs that depend primarily on tips —
meaning that many of them are working full time but hovering at or below
the poverty line.

“We talk about a glass ceiling,” said Clinton, who ended her 2008 campaign
by proclaiming that she and her supporters had put 18 million cracks in it.
“The floor is collapsing.

“These women don’t even have a secure floor under them.”

The former New York senator and secretary of State noted that she had just
read a Bloomberg story listing eight things in a new poverty report that
“will make women mad.” Although there was a slight improvement in America’s
poverty rate, she said, “for women there’s a lot less to cheer about.”

“Gender inequality in the workforce remains a reality; we ticked up from 70
cents on the dollar for women, versus men in the work force, to 78 cents;
and we know that women are more likely to be impoverished even if they are
working,” Clinton said.

She praised her colleagues on the panel — House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New
York and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut — for pursuing policy changes to
give women “a fair shot.” (Pelosi and Clinton engaged in some good-natured
sparring over whether California or New York was more progressive on
women’s issues, with Pelosi touting the recent 10th anniversary of paid
family leave in California).

The panel was led by the center's president, Neera Tanden, who introduced
Clinton by noting that Clinton's “flexibility” as a boss when Tanden worked
for her had allowed Tanden to balance a demanding job and raising young
children. Clinton’s former congressional colleagues all spoke with
frustration throughout the panel about how Democratic efforts to raise the
minimum wage and expand paid family leave have stalled in Congress.

Joining the panel was Shawnta Jones of Maryland, who emphasized the
importance of subsidized healthcare after she became a teen mother at 17,
and Rhiannon Broschat, a 25-year-old Chicago retail worker who said she
lost her job at Whole Foods after she had to leave work early to pick up
her son on a day when his school closed in a weather emergency.

The most animated speaker was Gillibrand, who condemned opposition to
expanding paid family leave across the country.

“We are the only country in the industrialized world that doesn’t have paid
leave,”  Gillibrand said, her voice rising in indignation. “Pakistan and
Afghanistan, which don’t even educate their girls, have more paid leave
than America. That is outrageous.”

Clinton noted that the economy has not fully recovered from the 2008 crash,
though she praised her onetime rival President Obama for “getting us out of
the ditch we were in.”

Clinton, who has said she will announce her own plans next year, issued a
call to arms to women in the looming 2014 midterm elections. “Political
candidates and officeholders do pay attention when people vote on issues
that are of concern to them,” she said. “When we can turn an issue into a
political movement that demands people be responsive during the election
season, it carries over.

“These issue have to be in the lifeblood of this election and any
election,” she said. “The more we can do that — harnessing 6 million, or
however many we can ... bus tours, storming the gates.… Whatever it’s going
to take.”

*New York Times: “Hillary Clinton Pivots to Domestic Issues as Women Voters
Loom Large”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/us/politics/hillary-clinton-pivots-to-domestic-issues-as-women-voters-loom-large.html?_r=0>*

By Amy Chozick

September 18, 2014

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent the past several months
discussing her foreign policy record as secretary of state, but on Thursday
she officially dived back into kitchen table issues during a panel
discussion about equal pay for women, affordable child care and paid sick
leave.

“The difference women and men face in getting the kinds of jobs that will
provide the kind of income they need for themselves and their families is
roiling beneath the surface of the political debates,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The pivot to domestic issues comes as Mrs. Clinton contemplates another run
for president and as she campaigns for candidates ahead of the midterm
elections, in which women’s issues have become a central focus.

Democrats in several key Senate races have attempted to shift the debate
from President Obama and the unpopular Affordable Care Act to issues
affecting the key constituency of women, whose votes could sway close races.

Mrs. Clinton said women’s issues have become “imperative in the political
environment” and urged voters to make them part of their determination in
the midterm elections.

“When we can turn an issue into a political movement that demands people be
responsive during an election cycle, it carries over,” she said.

Democrats have said the ability to mobilize women, particularly those who
are single and struggling with minimum wage jobs while paying for child
care, could determine whether the party maintains a majority in the Senate
and wins governors races in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania.

Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Democrats of trying to cast some of
their candidates as anti-women in order to win votes. Emily’s List, a
“super PAC” that supports pro-abortion-rights women candidates, has seized
on comments made by Republicans, including an operative‘s likening Alison
Lundergan Grimes, a Senate candidate from Kentucky, to an “empty dress.”

Some of the top Democratic women — including Representative Nancy Pelosi of
California, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, Representative Rosa
DeLauro of Connecticut and Senator Patty Murray of Washington — joined Mrs.
Clinton on the panel, titled “Why Women’s Economic Security Matters.” The
event was hosted by the progressive think tank Center for American Progress.

Ms. Gillibrand, who has promoted legislation in the Senate to address the
sexual assault of women in the military, has lately homed in on other
women’s issues, including her personal challenges with weight loss and
child rearing, as she promotes her new book “Off the Sidelines: Raise Your
Voice, Change the World.” On Thursday, she delivered an impassioned case
for paid sick leave for working women.

“We’re the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have paid
leave,” Ms. Gillibrand said. “Pakistan and Afghanistan that don’t even
educate their girls have more paid leave. That is outrageous.”

Ms. Pelosi tried to put the issue into a broader context. “It’s about
women, it’s about their families, it’s about their retirement, but it’s
also about our economy,” she said.

Women’s issues have emerged as a consistent theme in Mrs. Clinton’s
post-State Department speeches, especially in recent weeks as she has
shifted gears from promoting her memoir “Hard Choices” about her time as
secretary of state to campaigning and fund-raising for midterm candidates.

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton is expected to deliver a speech on similar topics
at the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum here, where
President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will also speak.

At the Clinton Global Initiative, a gathering related to the Bill, Hillary
& Chelsea Clinton Foundation in New York next week, Mrs. Clinton will
participate in several speeches and panels related to advancing women’s
rights, as part of the foundation’s “No Ceilings” initiative.

The events allow Mrs. Clinton to focus on issues affecting women and girls
that she has worked on throughout her career, and they also allow the
potential 2016 candidate to lay the groundwork for what could be a campaign
message focused on elevating women in order to advance the economy.

Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and the policy
director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, moderated the
event, and told the story of Mrs. Clinton‘s supportiveness when Ms. Tanden
was trying to balance a demanding campaign job with raising small children.

The panel also included working mothers. Rhiannon Broschat and Shawanta
Jones talked about their own struggles of juggling child care with minimum
wage jobs, as the politicians on the panel nodded understandingly. “It’s
our lowest income workers who are the most vulnerable,” Ms. Tanden said.

Mrs. Clinton tried to tie her work abroad to her domestic efforts. “Where
women are not given the opportunity to pursue their economic well being,
their children suffer, their community suffers, indeed,” she said, and
“their countries suffer.”

*Wall Street Journal: “Hillary Clinton Turns Attention to Women Voters”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/09/18/hillary-clinton-turns-attention-to-women-voters/>*

By Peter Nicholas

September 18, 2014, 5:20 p.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton is spending the latter part of the week speaking about
issues central to women, whose support would prove crucial to her
anticipated presidential bid.

On Thursday Mrs. Clinton and various female lawmakers took part in a panel
discussion devoted to women’s economic concerns.

The event was hosted by the Center of American Progress – a liberal think
tank — and moderated by Neera Tanden, president of the group and a former
senior aide in Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid.

Mrs. Clinton is set to appear Friday at the Democratic National Committee’s
Women’s Leadership Forum.

In her appearance Thursday, Mrs. Clinton took a swipe at congressional
Republicans, whom she suggested were living in an “evidence-free zone.”

She also talked about hardships faced by everyday Americans, who are not
“getting the kinds of jobs that will provide the kind of income they need
for themselves and their families …” she said.

A recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that women have a far
more positive view of Mrs. Clinton than men.

Only 35% of men had a favorable image of the former secretary of state,
compared with 49% of women, the poll showed.

A closer look at the numbers shows Mrs. Clinton’s female support varies
among ethnic and demographic groups.

White women, for example, are roughly evenly divided in their view of Mrs.
Clinton. But she enjoys strong support overall among younger women. The
survey showed that of women between the ages of 18 and 49, 50% had a
positive impression of her, compared to just 27% who viewed her negatively

*Bloomberg: “Clinton Urges Shift: From Glass Ceilings to Office Floors”
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-18/clinton-urges-shift-from-glass-ceilings-to-office-floors.html>*

By Lisa Lerer

September 18, 2014, 2:53 p.m. EDT

Forget about the glass ceiling. For Democrats, it’s all about the concrete
floor.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress today, Hillary Clinton decried
the lack of paid leave, affordable daycare and other policies that would
make it easier for women to remain in the workforce.

“The floor is collapsing. We talk about a glass ceiling? These women don’t
even have a secure floor,” said Clinton.

The focus marked a political shift from her 2008 campaign, which became
famous for the desire to “break the highest glass ceiling.” For her part,
Clinton was reluctant during her first presidential primary run to focus on
women’s issues, waiting until the concession speech to fully embrace the
historic nature of her candidacy.

Now, as she eyes a 2016 bid, she’s talking openly about women breaking
barriers. At CAP, sitting beside some of the most prominent women in
Democratic politics, she pushed a uniquely female-focused brand of economic
populism.

“We have to make these issues part of every political debate,” said
Clinton. “It’s about a movement.”

It’s also about the midterms. New polling indicates that Democrats may be
losing their edge with women. A recent New York Times poll showed female
voters favoring Democratic candidates in the November elections by only one
point, 43 percent to 42 percent. Just a month earlier, women favored
Democrats by 51 percent to 37 percent in a Wall Street Journal poll.

*Midterm Races*

To cut against stiff headwinds in the congressional races, Democrats must
maintain the gender gap that boosted them to victory in the past two
presidential races.

To that end, today’s event was a bit of a pep-rally for female voters --
albeit a depressing one with panelists reciting data points describing how
women make less, struggle to find affordable child care, and rarely get
paid leave. Full-time working women earn 77 percent of what their male
counterparts earn, according to White House data.

“We need a call to action today to ask 6 million more women to be voting,”
said New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

And when Shawnta Jones, a “regular” woman on the panel shared her story of
finding affordable daycare that allowed her to balance work and childcare,
the audience broke into applause.

“It’s like a revival,” said Neera Tanden, president of CAP. It was also a
reunion.

The Center for American Progress, in Washington, was founded by John
Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. Podesta is said
to be under consideration for a high-level position in Hillary Clinton’s
campaign.

*Employment Agency*

Podesta, who’s currently advising President Barack Obama in the White
House, embodies one of the less-public missions of the research group:
acting as an employment program for Democratic officials between
administrations.

Tanden was one of Clinton’s top policy advisers. Gillibrand, who took
Clinton’s seat when she headed to the State Department, has long cited her
predecessor as a mentor. And Clinton specifically singled out Ann O’Leary,
a CAP fellow who attended the event and is heading up a joint effort with
the Clinton Foundation to promote early child wellness.

But the most powerful indication of changing political winds came in who
wasn’t in attendance: anyone from the Obama administration, which recently
held a day-long conference on working families. It took more than 45
minutes for one of the panelists to mention the president.

“We do have a president who is speaking up on this issue,” said
Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, almost in passing.

*Politico: “Hillary Clinton: Women’s economic issues need ‘movement’”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/hillary-clinton-economy-women-111106.html>*

By Maggie Haberman

September 18, 2014, 2:26 p.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for a “movement” to fight for women in
the debate over work and family policies, saying there’s no “secure floor”
for women and that lack of economic mobility is an issue “roiling” beneath
the national political debate.

Clinton made the comments while on a panel hosted by the Center for
American Progress, a top progressive Washington think tank led by longtime
Clinton adviser Neera Tanden. Clinton placed the discussion in the broader
context of family economic decisions and of efforts to help the poor join
the middle class.

The conversation – studded with statistics about lack of pay equity for
women and stalled legislation – was in many ways the early seeds of Clinton
economic messaging for a potential 2016 presidential campaign. The former
secretary of state has been criticized for squandering opportunities to
distill a message on the main issue likely to determine the presidential
race: the economy.

Clinton and Tanden were joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Sens.
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa
DeLauro (D-Conn.).

“When we can turn an issue into a political movement that demands people be
responsive during an election season, it carries over,” said Clinton, who
would easily be the Democratic frontrunner should she choose to run in
2016. “So, these issues have to be the lifeblood of this election and any
election.”

The panel discussion, which also featured two women who shared personal
stories about struggles with finding child care and inflexible work
schedules, focused on policy issues such as paid family leave, equal pay
for women and affordable early childhood education.

“We need people to feel that they are part of a movement,” Clinton
continued. “That it’s not just about an election, but about a movement—a
movement to really empower themselves, their families and take the future
over in a way that is going to give us back the country we care so much
about.”

Earlier in the conversation, Clinton – who has a data project at her
family’s foundation devoted to pushing for full participation of women in
the workforce – discussed whether this is a turning-point moment for women
and equality.

The “difficulties that women and men face in finding the kinds of jobs that
will provide … is roiling beneath the surface of the political debate,” she
said. “We all see it, we know it.”

She praised President Barack Obama, saying he “deserves an enormous amount
of credit for stanching the bleeding” in the wake of the economic crisis
and “getting us out of that ditch we were in.”

“But we know if we don’t change our policies,” she continued, “a lot of the
benefits won’t be broadly shared, and that’s what we’re talking about here.
It’s just about more jobs and more people and better-paying jobs. It’s
about making sure that people themselves get to keep those benefits and
build that future back that they are desperate to see for themselves.”

There are “people who have been really egregiously impacted by the failure
of our political leadership on the other side of the aisle to recognize the
importance of making sure that people who work hard, play by the rules …
have a chance to get into the middle class and certainly have a chance to
stay in the middle class,” she said.

At no point did anyone use the phrase “income inequality,” which has become
a buzzword among the base of the Democratic party but which strategists
have long said is confusing to voters.

Clinton gave a landmark speech on women’s rights in Beijing in 1995. But
women’s economic issues only became a focal point in the political debate
after the recession that began six years ago, a period when Clinton was
largely out of politics.

The panel Thursday placed her physically in the middle of female officials
who have been leading that charge. Of the elected officials on the panel,
Gillibrand, 47,

*Time: “Hillary Clinton Calls for a Women’s ‘Movement’ Ahead of Elections”
<http://time.com/3398922/hillary-clinton-women-2014/>*

By Jay Newton-Small

September 18, 2014, 2:15 p.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] “These issues have to be in the life blood of this election and
any election”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for a women’s
“movement” on economic issues ahead of the midterm elections.

“These issues have to be in the life blood of this election and any
election,” the presumed 2016 Democratic front-runner said. “We need people
to feel that they’re part of a movement, that it’s not just part of an
election, it’s part of a movement to really empower themselves, their
families and take the future over in a way that is going to give us back
the country that we care so much about.”

Clinton was speaking on a panel at the liberal Washington think tank Center
for American Progress.

Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who shared the
stage with Clinton on Thursday, have pushed to make women’s economic issues
the forefront of the party’s 2014 campaign. Democrats lost the female vote
in 2010 for the first time since the Reagan era, and with it control of the
House and six Senate seats. They are trying to avoid a similar Republican
wave this year. “Why now? What is our strategy? Well, it’s because we want
women to vote,” Pelosi told the crowd.

The issue is also near and dear to Clinton’s heart. Many of her advisors
from her failed 2008 campaign say that, in retrospect, she should have
emphasized the historic nature of her campaign more. Clinton lost women to
Barack Obama in nearly half the primaries they fought.

As Secretary of State, Clinton focused on bolstering international support
for women and girls. In her second political appearance after resigning
from that office more than a year ago, Clinton kept her focus on those
topics. “We talk about a glass ceiling, but these [minimum wage] women
don’t even have a secure floor under them,” she said at the time.

The Democratic leaders lamented Thursday what they called Republican
obstruction of the women’s economic agenda in Congress. The GOP has blocked
Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage—which disproportionally
affects women—to $10.10 an hour, to fund universal pre-Kindergarten and
other expanded child care efforts, paid maternity and paternity leaves and
paid medical leave.

Clinton noted that by stymying women’s access to the workforce, the U.S.
leaves 10% of increased GDP “on the table.”

“The argument is grounded in reality, but unfortunately the reality is not
the context that these decisions are being made,” Clinton said.
“Unfortunately, the Congress… is living in a reality-free zone. Politicians
have to listen, and if they don’t it’s at their own peril.”

*MSNBC: “Hillary Clinton slams ‘evidence-free’ lawmakers”
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton-slams-evidence-free-lawmakers>*

By Alex Seitz-Wald

September 18, 2014, 3:09 p.m. EDT

Sitting on a panel of powerful women in politics, Hillary Clinton blasted
Republican lawmakers for blocking economic legislation that would help
women and the economy.

“The Congress increasingly, despite the best efforts of my friends and
others, is living in an evidence-free zone, where what the reality is in
the lives of Americans is so far from the minds of too many [lawmakers],”
Clinton said Thursday during an appearance at the Center for American
Progress, a Democratic think tank.

“We could all tell stories about people we know who have been really
egregiously impacted by the failure of the political leadership on the
other side of the aisle,” she added.

Clinton appeared with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Sen. Patty
Murray, the highest-ranking woman in the Senate; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand,
who has emerged as a leader on women’s issues in her short time in the
chamber; Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a longtime advocate in the House; and Neera
Tanden, CAP’s president, who used to work for Clinton.

Also on the panel were two women who have struggled to make ends meet, but
were able to get by thanks to the kinds of government programs supported by
the women leaders on the panel.

As she often does, Clinton framed the issue Thursday as an economic one.
When workforces have “full participation” from women, the economy does
better for everyone, Clinton said. She started an initiative at the Clinton
Foundation to promote female participation in the workforce.

Clinton did not directly discuss Paid Family Leave. Advocates criticized
her earlier this year for her stance on the issue. While on a tour
promoting her book “Hard Choices,” Clinton told CNN that while she supports
the policy, she didn’t think the country was ready for it. “I think,
eventually, it should be [implemented],” Clinton said at the time. “I don’t
think, politically, we could get it now.”

At a time when Democratic members of Congress, including some who were on
the panel her today, are pushing Congress to pass a Paid Sick Leave bill,
Clinton’s earlier comments surprised some and displeased others.

But Clinton did not address the controversy when she spoke on Thursday,
though she did reiterate her support for the policy. (Gilibrand called it
the one issue that makes her “the angriest.”)

Clinton also addressed the struggles of women who work in the tipped
economy, where there is no guarantee of a livable wage if in states that
haven’t raised the tipped minimum wage. The issue was highlighted in a
recent report from the National Women’s Law Center, which found that women
are more vulnerable than men.

“The floor is collapsing. We talk about a glass ceiling – these women don’t
even have a secure floor under them,” Clinton said.

The plight of women and children has long been a central motivating issue
for Clinton. Her first job out of law school was at the Children’s Defense
Fund, and she continues to speak and write about the issues any chance she
gets.

She said nothing about her potential presidential candidacy on Thursday,
though DeLauro did make an oblique reference to Clinton’s “future.”

But Clinton’s advice about how progressives can change policies to support
women would be good advice for her to heed in her own presidential campaign
as well — if there is a campaign, of course. “We need people to feel like
they’re part of a movement,” she said. “It’s not just about an election;
it’s about a movement. A movement to really empower themselves.”

*The Daily Beast: “Square Deal, New Deal, and Now, From Hillary Clinton, a
‘Fair Shot’”
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/19/square-deal-new-deal-and-now-from-hillary-clinton-a-fair-shot.html>*

By Eleanor Clift

September 19, 2014

[Subtitle:] As Hillary Clinton spoke about women’s economic issues at a
liberal think tank, you could practically hear her campaign taking shape.

A hush fell over the room as some of the most powerful women in the
Democratic Party took their seats on a panel to discuss women’s economic
security. Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate in waiting and first
among equals, sketched out the challenges. Women hold two-thirds of
minimum-wage jobs, she said, and three-quarters of the jobs that rely on
tips, like waitresses, bartenders, hair stylists. In many states, the
minimum wage for tipped workers is as low as $2.13 an hour.

Although a census report released this week shows the poverty rate declined
for the first time since 2006, Clinton said it also found that more women
are likely to be impoverished even if they’re working. She urged a “fair
shot” for women, and if you’ve been watching the PBS series on the
Roosevelts, FDR’s New Deal, and TR’s Square Deal, you can begin to imagine
Clinton’s campaign taking shape.

“We need a broader-based economic platform that is inclusive,” she said, a
clunky way of fleshing out the fair shot she envisions for women, and
indeed all Americans. She gives President Obama full credit for “staunching
the bleeding” from the financial meltdown, but said, “Unless we change our
politics, a lot of the benefits are not going to be broadly shared.”

It may not have been lost on Clinton that soon after her event wrapped at
the liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), Senator
Elizabeth Warren would be headlining a “Hands Off our Social Security and
Medicare” rally on Capitol Hill, priorities for Clinton too but not as
female-centric and pitched to younger voters as the agenda she and others
outlined at CAP.

While Clinton seems to be searching for the magic she’ll need to inspire
voters in any run for the presidency, Warren just says what’s on her mind
about how the middle-class has been screwed, and Democrats swoon.  Warren
shows no inclination to challenge Clinton, and along with every other
female Democratic senator, she signed a letter of support to Clinton.
Still, her absence on the stage at CAP Thursday reflects an issue gap for
Democrats between the progressive left, where much of the party’s energy
is, and the center that Clinton and her husband have so ably represented
for the last quarter century. Tapping into middle-class grievances with
populist ideas on the economy is where Warren excels.

Flanking Clinton at CAP were pioneers like herself who have been in the
trenches fighting for women’s issues for decades. The indefatigable Nancy
Pelosi, former House speaker, now Democratic leader; Washington State
Senator Patty Murray, elected as a “mom in tennis shoes,” now chair of the
Senate Budget committee; Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut congresswoman, “the
godmother” of what she calls “family-centered economics.”

The only newcomer among these stalwarts, New York Senator Kirsten
Gillibrand, who has the seat that Clinton once held, raised the issue of
paid family leave—a core concern where women are shouldering the care of
parents as well as children. “Afghanistan and Pakistan have more paid leave
than us,” she said, “and they don’t even educate their girls.” With eight
out of 10 women in the work force, and four out of 10 the sole or primary
breadwinner, “I think we have a Rosie the Riveter moment for this
generation,” Gillibrand declared. Recalling the iconic World War II image
of a woman with her sleeves rolled up ready to contribute to the war
effort, Gillibrand said 6 million women entered the work force then.

Clinton supports the idea of paid family leave but has recently said she
doesn’t think “we can get there” politically right now. What Democrats have
to do, she said at the CAP event, is “turn an issue into a political
movement.” Bus tours, storming the gates, whatever it takes. She was
referring to the 40-odd days until the November election, but she might as
well have been talking about her likely presidential run. “Hillary, I don’t
know what this signifies in terms of your future,” DeLauro said at one
point almost as an aside as the audience tittered. Paid family leave, paid
sick leave, flexible work, day care, minimum wage, all these issues that
Clinton and the others had championed for so long and that were typically
marginalized as lacking urgency, or not big vote-getters, or too emblematic
of the “nanny party.”

Now they’re seen as the way to win elections. “This is the center of the
public discussion, and that is a very big change,” DeLauro enthused.
Rebutting critics who say Democrats are just playing election-year
politics, DeLauro said she introduced pay equity in 1997, and paid sick
leave in 2005. More than a year ago, Democrats stood on the steps of the
Capitol and declared quality affordable day care “the missing link” in
gaining women’s full participation in the work force. “The reason these
(issues) are so central, jobs do not pay enough for people to live on, and
for women, the challenges are overwhelming,” DeLauro said. And if you’re
watching ‘The Roosevelts,’ your heart sings and it longs for what happened
in the New Deal.”

The message is that strong progressive leadership is within reach if women
seize it at the ballot box. “What is our strategy?” Pelosi said. “We want
women to vote.” That’s what politicians pay attention to, and that’s how to
break the logjam in Congress. The measures these women are advocating will
pass, Pelosi said. “It’s inevitable to us, [and] inconceivable to them,”
referring to House Republicans. “We have to shorten the distance between
inevitable and inconceivable.”

*The Hill’s blog: Ballot Box: “Clinton: Congress 'living in an
evidence-free zone'”
<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/218223-clinton-congress-living-in-an-evidence-free-zone>*

By Alexandra Jaffe

September 18, 2014, 2:47 p.m. EDT

Former secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday slammed Congress for
“living in an evidence-free zone” and called for voters to turn women’s
issues into a “political movement.”

"The Congress, increasingly, despite the best efforts of my friends and
others, is living in an evidence-free zone where what the reality is in the
lives of Americans is so far from the minds of too many," Clinton said.

She said, however, the economic struggles of everyday Americans are
“roiling beneath the surface of the political debates,” and that there will
come a point where “politicians will have to listen, at their peril.”

The former senator spoke on a panel of female lawmakers and average
American women convened by the Center for American Progress to discuss
women's economic security. She, along with Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D-N.Y.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), urged voters to make women’s
issues — and particularly women’s economic struggles — a central focus in
this year’s elections and beyond.

"When we can turn an issue into a political movement that demands people be
responsive during the election season, it carries over," Clinton said.
"These issues have to be in the life blood of this election and in any
election."

It’s a discussion that’s been a constant focus for Democrats this fall as
they work to turn out female voters for the midterm elections. Democrats
are hoping the advantage they historically enjoy with women will help them
mitigate a tough political climate and expected dropoffs in turnout among
other base voters, and have been making female-centric policy proposals —
like fair pay and raising the minimum wage, which they’ve framed as being
beneficial to working mothers and families — central planks of their
campaigns.

It’s also one that would be a significant aspect of Clinton’s presidential
campaign, if she decides to run, as is expected. Clinton made expanding and
protecting women’s rights and opportunities across the globe a priority
during her time at State and as first lady.

DeLauro on Thursday confirmed the prospect of a Clinton presidential bid is
never far from Democrats’ minds, even if Clinton herself made no mention of
her interest.

"Hillary, I don't know if you're here — what this signals in terms of your
future — I know what it signals in terms of the issues that you care about
and what you have been championing for a lifetime," she said on the panel.

*Vox: “Hillary Clinton's plan to use feminism to sell big government”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/9/19/6405561/hillary-clintons-secure-floor>*

By Matthew Yglesias

September 19, 2014, 7:00 a.m. EDT

Political analysts have made repeated observations about the growing
importance of "social issues" to Democratic Party campaign strategy. But
speaking at a Center for American Progress panel Thursday morning alongside
Patty Murray, Kristen Gillibrand, Nancy Pelosi, Rosa de Lauro, and CAP
president Neera Tanden, Hillary Clinton tested a potentially potent fusion
of feminism framing and populist policy that shows how artificial the
division between "economic issues" and "social issues" really is.

"Women hold two-thirds of all minimum wage jobs," Clinton observed, and
"nearly three-quarters of all jobs that are reliant on tips" and thus
eligible for sub-minimum wages.

Clinton discussed the plight of a working-class mother with a
service-sector job that provides low pay and little flexibility. "We talk
about a glass ceiling," she said, "but these women don't even have a secure
floor under them."

Indeed, while people can debate the precise origins of the gender wage gap,
there's no denying that women earn substantially less than men on average.
Social safety net programs and income redistribution initiatives are
disproportionately beneficial to low-wage workers, and low-wage workers are
mostly women.

American political discourse often associates the gender gap in voting with
abortion rights and other "women's issues" that specifically highlight sex
or gender. But as political scientist Karen Kauffman has shown, these
issues do not particularly seem to divide men and women. Instead, starting
in the Reagan-era, men, but not women, have been attracted by the
Republican Party's tilt against the welfare state. Libby Copeland offered
an excellent overview of this literature for Slate in 2012, but it remains
largely unappreciated by political journalists. Further evidence for the
primacy of economics comes from international comparisons. Ronald Inglehart
and Pippa Norris show that women's voting has skewed left in all advanced
industrial economies.

Why is this? Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth offered a plausible
explanation in a 2006 article, writing that tje "partial socialization of
family work, even at the cost of higher taxes from the private sector,
increases a woman's ability to work outside the home and thereby increases
her exit options and her household bargaining position."

In other words, because conventional social norms leave the care of
children and the elderly to women, the expansion of the welfare state to
shoulder some of that burden not only helps the directly assisted, it helps
women by saddling them with less unpaid work.

This is, of course, not exactly how Clinton put it. But during the
discussion she referred to the Nixon-era push for a universal childcare
program, inspired by a desire to grow the economy by increasing women's
workforce participation rate. Clinton said that after being initially
supportive, the White House found itself pressed to veto the bill "on
ideological grounds not on evidence." Proponents of traditional patriarchal
family arrangements, in other words, feared exactly the Iverson/Rosenbluth
dynamic. More generous social provision might make the economy richer, but
it would also shift the intra-family balance of power away from men and
toward women.

At a time when activist government was broadly in vogue, highlighting the
implications for family life was enough to sink the proposal. Clinton's
calculation seems to be broadly the opposite — that putting a gender equity
frame forward is a good way to bolster support for the welfare state at a
time when the national mood is swinging toward smaller government.

*Mother Jones: “Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle: Obama's Done Okay But
Economic Benefits Need to Be ‘Broadly Shared’”
<http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/09/hillary-clinton-women-economics-minimum-wage>*

By Patrick Caldwell

September 18, 2014, 4:14 p.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton doesn't think much of her old employer. "Congress
increasingly...is living in an evidence free zone," she said Thursday,
"where what the reality is in the lives of Americans is so far from the
minds of too many." Speaking on a panel about women and economics hosted by
the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank run by Clinton's
ex-policy advisor Neera Tanden), Clinton gave a few hints of which domestic
policy proposals could anchor her presumed 2016 presidential campaign.

Speaking in non-partisan terms, Clinton slammed Congress for its lack of
action on raising the minimum wage, with the former secretary of state
saying that a failure to boost the wages of the working poor is
particularly damaging for women. She noted that two-thirds of minimum wage
jobs are held by women. "The floor is collapsing—we talk about a glass
ceiling, these women don't even have a secure floor under them," she said.

Boosting the minimum wage has become a standard Democratic talking point.
But Clinton went beyond that standard fare and emphasized the plight of
tipped workers, such as restaurant servers, bartenders, and hair stylists.
"Women hold nearly three-quarters of the jobs that are reliant on tips,"
she said. "And in fact, they don't get the minimum wage with the tips on
top of it."

Although the federal minimum wage has been set at $7.25 per hour since
2009, there is an exemption carved out for workers who receive tips.
Employers only have to pay those people $2.13 an hour (steady since 1991);
the tips are presumed to make up for the difference. But often times the
tips don't suffice, and employers, who are supposed to fill the gap, don't
always do so.

These workers are "at the mercy not only of customers who can decide or not
to tip," Clinton said. "They're at the mercy of their employers who may
collect the tips and not turn them back."

Clinton didn't dive into the policy details on how to fix this problem. But
the Center for American Progress released a report right after the event
that suggested raising the tipped wage up to 70 percent of the regular
minimum wage (which the report proposed bumping to $10.10 per hour).

The general tone of Clinton's speech suggested how she'd thread the needle
by supporting President Barack Obama's record while crafting her own agenda
when she hits the campaign trail. "The president came in—he deserves an
enormous amount of credit for stanching the bleeding and preventing a
further deterioration and getting us out of that ditch we were in," she
said. "But we know that unless we change our policies, a lot of the
benefits are not going to be broadly shared, and that's what we're talking
about here."

*The Hill: “Warren draws contrast with Clinton on Syria”
<http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/218268-warren-votes-no-on-syrian-motion>*

By Alexander Bolton

September 18, 2014, 6:24 p.m. EDT

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday voted against legislation
authorizing President Obama to arm and train Syrian rebels, taking a stand
that could distinguish her from Hillary Clinton in 2016.

She voted against legislation to fund the government until Dec. 11, which
included a provision giving Obama Title X authority to equip Syrian
militants in hopes they will fight violent Sunni extremists.

Warren has a thin foreign policy résumé but by voting against the authority
Obama requested, she will earn points with members of the Democratic base
who are skeptical about another military campaign in the Middle East.

“I do not want America to be dragged into another ground war in the Middle
East, and it is time for those nations in the region that are most
immediately affected by the rise of ISIS to step up and play a leading role
in this fight,” she said in a statement.

Many liberals who distrust Clinton’s cozy relationship with Wall Street,
and bitterly remember her 2002 vote to invade Iraq, want Warren to
challenge Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

Two other senators mentioned as possible challengers to Clinton in 2016,
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.Vt.), also
voted against the stopgap spending bill and the attached Syria measure.

Gillibrand is considered a likely candidate if Clinton unexpectedly pulls
out of the 2016 Democratic primary but she has made it clear she will not
challenge her predecessor as the junior senator from New York. She has
strongly urged Clinton to run.

Sanders is actively exploring a 2016 presidential bid but he has not
decided whether to run as an independent — his current status within the
Democratic caucus — or officially switch to the Democratic Party.

The vote on arming Syrian rebels could become a defining issue in the 2016
presidential campaign, much like the 2002 vote to authorize the invasion of
Iraq loomed over the 2004 and 2008 campaigns.

Clinton revealed in her memoir, "Hard Choices" that she wanted to arm
Syrian rebels early during their fight against President Bashar Assad, but
failed to convince Obama.

In an interview last month, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic
that the failure to arm the rebels led to the rise of ISIS.

Seven other Senate Democrats, a mix of centrists and liberals, voted
Thursday against arming Syrian rebels.

Warren gave little indication how she would vote before the question was
considered Thursday afternoon.

After the vote, she expressed concern that U.S. weapons could fall into the
hands of radical Islamic militants.

“Even if we could guarantee that our support goes to the right people, I
remain unconvinced that training and equipping these forces will be
effective in pushing back ISIS,” she said.

Last year, she issued a statement opposing calls to arm Syrian rebels who
are seen as more moderate than extreme groups such as ISIS.

“We need clear goals and a plan to achieve them or else the United States
could get bogged down in another war in the Middle East,” she said,
according to The Boston Globe.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who voted with Warren, said greater U.S.
involvement in the Syrian civil war would do little to degrade and destroy
ISIS.

“The moderate Syrian rebels have shown a disturbing willingness to join
forces with Islamic extremists like the Al Nusra Front, a wing of Al Qaeda,
and it will be nearly impossible to stop the rebels we train from joining
forces with groups that pose a real threat to the United States,” he said
in a statement explaining his vote.

Murphy said the moderate rebels would be likely to turn against ISIS
because they share the goal of deposing Assad.

Other Democrats have warned Obama’s request to back Syrian rebels could
lead down a slippery slope to a broader military engagement.

“In regards to Syria, I have serious doubt about authorizing military
operation. I think we need to have further clarification from the
administration as to the ... objectives that they are accomplishing in
Syria and we have to be very careful about the authorization of the use of
our military in a country where we are not invited,” said Sen. Ben Cardin
(D-Md.), who ultimately voted for the legislation.

Other Democrats who expressed concern about arming Syrian rebels said they
were reassured that the authority would run out by mid-December, when
Congress is scheduled to debate a broader use-of-force resolution against
ISIS.

*Washington Post blog: Ed Rogers: “The Insiders: Clinton vs. Sanders —
another Clinton plan?”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/09/18/the-insiders-clinton-vs-sanders-another-clinton-plan/>*

By Ed Rogers

September 18, 2014, 2:33 p.m. EDT

An item caught my eye this week that made my Republican conspiratorial
instincts bristle. When speaking at a National Journal/CNN event Tuesday
night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said outright that he was thinking about
running for president.  And, his statement came on the heels of former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admission at the Harkin Steak Fry in
Iowa that she is also thinking about running.  Naturally, because of the
timing of their back-to-back non-announcements, I instantly saw the
Clintons’ hands at work.  Republicans can’t help it.  We think of the
Clintons as the perfect Machiavellian machine; nothing happens in their
universe that is not planned or manipulated by their political operation.

One thing Hillary Clinton lacks is a good opponent. Even AFL-CIO President
Richard Trumka said that a coronation “is dangerous for the candidate.”
Clinton needs to face an opponent in order to rev up her fundraising and
ground game organizations. At the same time, that opponent can’t be someone
who is fresh. The last thing Hillary Clinton wants is to run against a
candidate like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has legitimate appeal
and could upend Clinton’s base of support. Clinton does not want to be up
against someone who will burst on the scene and out-class her or who will
gain an emotional foothold in the party and become an ideological favorite,
like Barack Obama did in 2008.

So what do the Clintons really need?  What could be better for the Clinton
campaign than a pedestrian white guy who is a self-proclaimed socialist and
who mostly plods along in a predictable, ultimately harmless way?  Enter
Bernie Sanders: If the Clintons aren’t behind a Bernie Sanders candidacy,
they should be. A Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton matchup offers little
drama and no sore losers after Clinton thrashes him.  Also, this weak
challenge would make it easier for Clinton to pivot to the right and appeal
to a wider base in the general election.

If Sen. Sanders does ultimately decide to run, it would prove once again
that the Clintons are incredibly lucky — and in politics, luck counts.

*The Atlantic: “’I Never Dreamed It Would Turn Out This Way’”
<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/i-never-dreamed-it-would-turn-out-this-way/379347/>*

By James Bennet

September 17, 2014

[Subtitle:] On the 10th anniversary of the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill
Clinton assesses the state of the world, and of his post-presidency.

About two weeks after Bill Clinton left the White House, in 2001, I went up
to Chappaqua, New York, in hopes of getting a sense of his new life, for a
story I never wound up writing. As a reporter for The New York Times, I had
covered his second term—that tornado of surpluses and subpoenas, V‑chips
and cruise-missile strikes—and I was having trouble wrapping my head around
the idea of Bill Clinton at rest. The newly retired president didn’t look
all that pleased to spot one of his old shadows in the crowd when he
emerged, in blue jeans and a jean jacket, to shake a few hands after eating
a chicken sandwich for lunch, seated prominently in the window of the
Chappaqua Restaurant & Cafe. “What are you doing up here, James?” he asked,
moving away down the line. “Must be a slow news day.”

Then, inevitably, he drifted back, and began talking about just how much he
was enjoying being out of office: what “great therapy” it was to be
unpacking in his new home, emptying some 180 boxes and filling shelves with
1,100 books; what “a great thing” it was to have time to read (“I’ve got 10
or 12 books I’m fooling with”); how relaxing it was to watch a lot of
basketball (okay, along with some C-SPAN); how restorative to get up
whenever he felt like it in the morning. “Most days, I just glance at the
newspaper,” he insisted. “It’s amazing how oblivious you can get to
whatever’s going on.”

It was hard to square this picture of puttering domesticity with the
restless person I’d covered—and with the simple fact that he was lingering
to talk, signing autograph after autograph, shaking hand after hand. When
his successor’s then-much-ballyhooed faith-based initiative was mentioned,
the old Bill Clinton immediately snapped into focus. “We actually did quite
a lot of it, particularly in welfare reform,” he said immediately, before
observing that George W. Bush might face some constitutional obstacles to
his own plan. Then he caught himself: “But I don’t want to offer any
opinion, because I don’t know what the facts are.”

He did not seem, in other words, entirely reconciled to a quiet life in the
suburbs. He was, after all, just 54 years old. “I miss the work,” he told
me. “I loved the work.”

He said he needed to pay attention to the family finances for a time, in
case something happened to him. “Not all the men in my family are all that
long-lived,” he remarked—a reference, I thought, to the early death of his
father, which has always seemed to haunt him. (His own quadruple bypass lay
three years in the future.) “I’ve got all these ideas,” he said. “What I’m
really interested in is what my kind of public service is going to be, here
in America and around the world … I’ve got to think that through.”

At the time—indeed, for the next couple of years—even people close to Bill
Clinton wondered whether he would ever bring that period of cogitation to a
definitive conclusion. They wondered whether he could discipline his
curiosity and impulses sufficiently to focus on just a handful of causes,
as Jimmy Carter had so effectively done, or whether, as The Atlantic put it
in 2003, his post-presidency would turn out to be “limbo in overdrive.”

In his distinction-defying way, Clinton has managed to prove the worriers
both right and, more fundamentally, wrong. He certainly hasn’t focused;
instead, he has found a way to turn his appetite for everything and
everyone—along with his instinctive preference for what he has called
“bite-size” approaches over sweeping, one-size-fits-all solutions—into a
force for significant change, through the Clinton Foundation and through
the do-gooder conference he created, the Clinton Global Initiative, or CGI,
as he usually calls it. Overall, Bill Clinton has conducted the most
energetic, high-profile post-presidency since at least Teddy Roosevelt’s,
pouring himself into philanthropic, political, and, yes, moneymaking
ventures. But besides supporting his wife as she worked as a senator,
secretary of state, and once-and-future presidential candidate, he has made
his most unconventional contribution through the Clinton Global Initiative.
On the cusp of its 10th anniversary, I sat down with the former president
in Washington, D.C., to ask about its lessons so far, and what he hopes to
do with it in the future.

He said he came up with the idea for the Clinton Global Initiative after
attending too many conferences where, he felt, elites chattered about the
world’s problems but never committed themselves to useful action. He
thought he could use his influence to get philanthropists, corporations,
and nongovernmental organizations to coalesce around specific projects.

“What I was trying to do when I started was to create a—not so much a
clearinghouse, but a network of people committed to the principle that,
instead of just talking and learning about problems, we ought to all do
something about them. And it shouldn’t matter if we can’t do everything,”
Clinton told me. “That, in the aggregate, if everybody who could do
something did, and there was some place to learn what made the most
sense—what was likely to have the greatest positive impact—that in the end
it would make a real difference.”

The “Commitments to Action” that Bill Clinton has required for
participation in his initiative have resulted, over 10 years, in a
bewildering array of some 2,900 projects, from mentoring female
solar-energy entrepreneurs in Nigeria, to promoting bicycle riding in Sri
Lanka, to expanding kids’ vocabularies in Oakland. Clinton argues that
these initiatives can be summed to clear bottom lines. “You’ve got big
numbers: more than 40 million people with better access to education and
almost 30 million with better access to sanitation and clean water; 11
million women with better access to credit,” he said. “You know, this kind
of stuff—it just built up over time.”

Over the course of the next hour and 20 minutes, he proceeded to hopscotch
from Ukraine to India to Arkansas, from a novel way to determine fish
prices along the Indonesian coast, to an efficient means of training
Rwandan health-care workers, to the reason he missed out on the boom in the
stock market. What follows is an edited transcript of his remarks.

On his core goal, promoting interdependence in the face of resurgent
nationalism:

I think there is a contest here in the world today where there are
basically … three models. There’s autocratic governments trying to take
advantage of market opportunities—what [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor
Orbán embraced the other day, authoritarian capitalism [1]. And then there
are nonnational, nongovernmental forces like Boko Haram [and] the IS in
Iraq and Syria, who believe that the most important thing they can do is to
be effective forces of destruction … The third forces are the ones that I
tried to help dominate in the 1990s and have worked for since in the
private sector, in the nongovernmental sector: the people who believe that
… if we are interdependent, we basically [have] to define the terms of our
interdependence in positive ways. That requires more shared prosperity,
more shared responsibilities in the form of inclusive governments, and a
vigorous private and nongovernmental sector—and at the core believing that
what we have in common is more important than our differences, and that we
have to quit fighting over a meager pie and try to build a future together.

Why this struggle is so intense today:

I had hoped that by now what we tried to do in the ’90s would have borne
more fruit. But I think it’s impossible to minimize the impact of 9/11 and
the way we reacted to it, and the financial crisis and the inevitable
consequences which flowed from it. I think [9/11 and the financial crash],
in ways that were both direct and often indirect, gave energy to the forces
of disintegration, if you will, and required those of us who believe in the
forces of integration to work even harder.

Yes, the international headlines today are awful—but the underlying trends
remain hopeful:

I think in spite of the truly terrible headlines in so many areas today—you
know, the 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, the people killed in the
Kenyan mall by al-Shabaab, including an unbelievable Dutch nurse who went
back to Harvard and got her Ph.D. in public health, who was running our
operations in Tanzania. When she was eight and a half months pregnant, she
and her architect partner went to Nairobi because it’s the best place to
have a baby. And she was just walking in a mall and they were wiped out [2].

But the trend lines underneath that are still pretty positive … There’s
been a precipitous drop in the number of truly poor people in the world and
a substantial increase in the global middle class [3]. And if you just look
at the economics that way in the developing world, the only places … where
poverty’s going up and there’s not an expansion of the middle class are
places where the population’s growing so fast that there’s no way they can
create enough jobs to overcome that. Everyplace else in the developing
world, the trend line is good. There have been dramatic improvements in
health care. There’s been a big increase in the number of girls in school
and the number of women in the workforce and the number of women who have
access to credit and are going into business for themselves. And the bad
things that we read are in effect a reaction to a trend that Malala
[Yousafzai, the young Pakistani activist] reflects—that is, she got shot by
people who were reacting to something that really is going on. And it was a
tragedy, and it’s a great credit to her that she’s spending her life trying
to keep the courage of young girls and women and their allies up …

Look at the fact that information technology can be used to detonate
improvised explosive devices and roadside bombs, but is largely being used
to empower the poor in many places. In Haiti, most Haitians had no access
to basic banking services and they almost all had cellphones, so Denis
O’Brien, an Irish entrepreneur who owns the biggest cellphone company in
Haiti, partnered with a Canadian bank, Scotiabank, to begin offering
banking services to low-income people who had cash. Pretty soon, they had
competition …

[There’s also] the continent-wide effort that’s being made now to use
mobile technology to involve Africans in banking, even though Africa’s the
poorest continent. Twenty-three percent of Africans now have a bank account
because of the cellphone [4]. And so all these things that are going on
sort of are under the radar screen, but they deserve to be considered,
because by and large, more people are being affected by the positive
developments than the negative ones.

So it’s too soon to declare the experiment in positive interdependence a
failure.

Why conflict between Israel and Hamas reveals a dark side of
interdependence:

Hamas is feeling weak and disempowered, and they fire 3,000 rockets into
Israel. And because of the Iron Dome, they don’t kill anybody, and they get
to say the Israelis are the bad guys for killing 1,800 people while all
they did was kill 65 citizens, even though they had rockets in schools.
They positioned themselves in a way to force the Israelis to kill
civilians. It shows you the tragedy of really tight interdependence—because
[the two sides] live next to each other, defined in negative terms. Those
tunnels were to be used for destruction … Ever since [Benjamin] Netanyahu
succeeded to the prime ministership, he’s had a government without a
majority … for making peace with the Palestinians. So [the two sides are]
no less interdependent than they were when Yitzhak Rabin was alive and
handed over the first big chunk of the West Bank to the Palestinians,
[which] cost him his life …[5]

But it’s a complicated world. In every one of the instances, we have to ask
ourselves, even if we’re not in government: Is there anything that I can do
about this? How can I elevate the positive forces and undermine the
negative forces of interdependence?

How American contractors profiteer from government-funded development:

The typical American-funded project has American contractors who take,
between overheads back home and in-the-area administrative fees, 35 to 50
percent. It used to be, by the way, that every developed country did this,
but America is about the only one still doing it. And I’ve been trying to
break it for a long time …

I’ll tell you how much money we’re gonna save over a five-year period
[through the Clinton Foundation’s Health Access Initiative in Rwanda, where
the administrative fee is only 7 percent of the total cost]. It will give
75 million more dollars to the Rwandans. That’s a small country of 11
million people [where we can put that money] directly into health-care
training and management … We’re doing this with funds from our donors,
because I never take any money from the American government. This is just
money to the government of Rwanda. But we’re doing this with them with all
these universities who are extremely proud to be doing this and are trying
to break the stranglehold of excessive overheads by contractors. And you
know, it’s a small miracle, but it’s sort of a miracle. And if everybody
knows about this, I keep thinking, surely sooner or later we’ll have to
stop the old way and start the new way, and we can take the money we are
spending and save millions more lives. That’s the sort of thing CGI was
organized to do: find ways to do things faster, cheaper, better.

Why corporations increasingly identify their own interests with global
development:

Companies are geniuses at supply chains, especially global consumer
companies. So for example, Coca-Cola … made a commitment and [brought]
clean water as well as Coca-Cola … to remote parts of the world as part of
their commitment [6]. PepsiCo just did a partnership with us to bring
nutritional supplements that we’re going to manufacture in India to stunted
kids in poor rural areas that would otherwise not be able to get [them]
[7]. Walmart has done as much as almost any big company overseas to
integrate sustainability and environmental practices into their core
business model—especially in poor countries, because it’s also good
economics as well as responsible to the environment. So a lot of these
companies, they do these things knowing that over the long run, if they
want to keep reaching out, they can’t sell 100 percent of their product to
[the] 15 percent of the world’s population that [is] already well-off by
Western standards. They gotta keep reaching everybody else.

My favorite is Procter & Gamble, which makes a lot of consumer products.
About a year ago, Chelsea went to Asia to celebrate with them their 6
billionth [liter of clean water]. They’ve got a little package that if you
put in basically a big vat of fetid water—it costs a dime—it will suck all
the impurities out of the water and put it at the bottom. Then you just
pour the water through a filter—which can be a simple cotton cloth—and a
family of four has enough water to last three days. And they’re
probably—they’re way beyond 6 billion now [8].

If they have healthy people in remote rural places, then they can extend
their supply chain and they’ll have people who’ll be able to buy consumer
products. So I think that they really do believe—I think—that instead of
seeing this as separate “corporate social responsibility,” to the extent
that this can become an integrated part of their mission, they can build a
world that we can all share.

But government still matters:

So are the companies more important than the American government? I don’t
think so. I think it’s not an either/or thing … It is quite possible that
between the business community and the U.S. government, we could have
basically an investment of about $30 billion a year in Africa. The Chinese
[pledged $20 billion in 2012], with all government. The money we spend is
often not as visible to people, because an enormous amount of American
money is spent on health care … So the point is, we can do this in ways
where the government does what it can and should do—in this case focus on
something that you can’t expect the private sector to finance alone, like
health care or education. And we then take all of what is now a fair amount
of loose cash in the hands of American companies and individuals around the
world … So I don’t think it’s either/or.

About those overpaid American contractors again:

Let me back up and say that the United States has always given, in absolute
terms, a lot of money in foreign aid. But in comparative terms, we give a
smaller percentage of our national income in foreign assistance than any
other wealthy country [9]. In the Cold War, this was largely and widely
accepted, because we were spending more on defense, so we essentially
provided a defense umbrella that included Europe and Japan … So don’t
misunderstand me. I think America should give more in foreign assistance
than it does. But we could give more effectively if we just cut how much we
[give] to our own contractors. And, you know, it’s an obsession of mine in
my old age—I hope that I don’t have to be buried knowing that we’re still
the only rich country in the world that gives this … percentage of
foreign-aid money to our own people.

On whether Hillary Clinton will run for president:

I have no idea if she’s going to run. I know nobody believes that, but I
don’t.

But if she becomes president, CGI might stop taking foreign money, to avoid
any conflict of interest.

I would bend over backwards to do whatever was necessary … I think CGI now
is enough of a brand, it has enough support, that we can do what we have to
do to finance it from American sources and then make it available to the
rest of the world.

His next frontier for encouraging philanthropy:

I’d like to get the Asians more involved, because I think these Asian
countries, they’re rising, but … India … still [has] more really poor
people than anybody else in the world. China still has over 150 million
people living on less than [$1] a day, for all their prosperity … I’m very
encouraged that Alibaba [the enormous Chinese e-commerce company] is going
to have an IPO this year and Jack Ma, [a] founder of the company, is going
to, I think, leave the operations and run [his] foundation * … And he
sought out Bill Gates, he sought out me and two or three other people, and
we talked about what he can do to be effective. So I think that … trying to
build civil society elsewhere is quite important [10].

On using technology to promote development:

I also think that we have only scratched the surface of the benefit that
technology can provide … I just went back to Aceh, [Indonesia,] for the
10-year review of what happened after the tsunami [11]. One of the most
popular things we did [was] we tried to get fishing boats for every family
that lost a boat … And we also tried to get them all cellphones. Because
once they could call 30 miles up and down the coast, they always knew what
the real price of fish was. And it increased their incomes, on average, 30
percent. So I believe that we have only scratched the surface of the
economic and educational empowerment opportunities that information
technology will give. I think it’s just the beginning.

On Al Gore’s legacy:

I loved [my years in government], but … if you go back and look at the
headlines of most of the major political struggles and all that, they were
mostly over “What are you going to do, and how much money are you going to
spend on it?” … There was very little attention to the question of “No
matter what you’re going to do and no matter how much money you’re going to
spend, how do you propose to do it?” So that you turn your good intentions
into real changes. That’s what our reinventing-government effort was about,
and I think it really is one of Al Gore’s great legacies [12]. I think we
really did a good job with that reinventing-government effort, but it was
alien territory when we started. Most people … couldn’t imagine that was
something government did—constantly reexamining whether you were actually
achieving your purposes. And it turns out it’s sometimes more difficult to
measure outcomes than you think.

Why he still gives paid speeches:

You know, I had my heart problem, first one thing then another happened.
And then when Hillary became secretary of state—actually, when she ran for
president, then when she became secretary of state—I decided that we
wouldn’t have any investments. So I left the money in the bank, and the
good news is, I missed the stock-market crash; the bad news is that I
missed the uptake. So I just left the money in the bank. So I still have to
work a little bit, but I don’t mind that [13]. I enjoy that. I like those
speeches: I get up and meet people all over the world and all over the
country and learn things I wouldn’t learn otherwise. It keeps me in touch
with the life of younger people, which I like.

On whether, in the end, he did figure out the right formula for his
post-presidency:

It’s worked out great. This foundation is my life now. I love it. I never
dreamed that it would be what it turned out to be … And then there’s CGI,
which has acquired a life and an identity of its own … It’s much more
famous than the other things that I do in America. It’s somehow branded in
people’s minds. I was trying to figure it out in 2001, and it’s worked out
pretty well. And it looks like I’m going to live to be a grandpa, so it’ll
be good …

I have always believed you should never worry about doing something you
can’t do anymore. You just gotta keep doing new things. And I’ve enjoyed
every phase of my life, from the time I was a little boy, but I’ve really
loved this. I never dreamed it would turn out this way. You know? And I
mean, look, I’m not naive, I know it’s the government that still really
matters. It matters—there are things you can only do with and through
government. But it still is just stunning, the sheer numbers of people that
you can help through philanthropy.

*People: “Chelsea Clinton's Baby Nursery Décor: It's All About Elephants!”
<http://www.people.com/article/chelsea-clinton-pregnant-baby-nursery-elephant-charity>*

By Sandra Sobieraj Westfall

September 17, 2014, 8:50 p.m. EDT

While her parents are on "constant grandchild watch", mom-to-be Chelsea
Clinton is incorporating her passion for elephant conservation into her
baby's nursery décor – and some of the items are from her own gift line.

Clinton teamed up with her former Oxford roommate, Jen Lee Koss, to launch
this week a line of elephant-themed gifts on Koss's website, BRIKA.com to
benefit groups working to stop the international poaching of African
elephants killed for their ivory tusks.

And the former first daughter already has her eye on the toy baby elephants
that sell for $27 apiece.

"We’re very baby-oriented right now, so we’ll definitely be buying a felt
elephant or two. I think those will look great in our nursery," Clinton
told the website Refinery29 on Monday. "And, it’s safe to say that as last
year, this year too, a lot of our friends will be getting elephant-themed
Christmas presents."

As for when that nursery will be occupied, Clinton gave no hint, although
her mother, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it sound like
her daughter could go into labor at any minute. And former President Bill
Clinton joked a week earlier, when his phone rang in the middle of a
speech, "I hope I'm not being told I'm about to become a premature
grandfather."

Clinton certainly sounded like a woman nearing the end of her pregnancy
when she was asked by Refinery29 for one "styling trick she relies on to
look and feel good."

"You're asking someone who is very pregnant," Clinton said. "In the here
and now, [I wear] anything that fits over my belly. Increasingly, that's my
husband's T-shirts or button-down shirts. So, the honest answer in the here
and now is a different answer than it would be had you asked me a few
months ago, or ask me again in nine months. But, for right now, it’s really
my husband's shirts, because they're the only things that fit me."

*Calendar:*

*Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official
schedule.*

·  September 19 – Washington, DC: Sec. Clinton fundraises for the DNC with
Pres. Obama (CNN
<http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/27/politics/obama-clinton-dnc/index.html>)

·  September 21 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton attends CGI kickoff  (The
Hollywood Reporter
<http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/clintons-honor-leonardo-dicaprios-environmental-731964>
)

·  September 22 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton at CGI (CGI
<http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/public/2014/pdf/agenda.pdf>)

·  September 23 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton at CGI (CGI
<http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/public/2014/pdf/agenda.pdf>)

·  September 23 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton headlines the Goldman Sachs
10,000 Women CGI Dinner (Twitter
<https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/510157741957316609>)

·  September 29 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton headlines fundraiser for DCCC
for NY and NJ candidates (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/hillary-clinton-new-york-fundraiser-110902.html?hp=r4>
)

·  September 29 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton headlines another fundraiser
for DCCC (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/hillary-clinton-headline-dccc-fundraiser-110764.html?hp=l8_b1>
)

·  September 30 – Washington, DC: Sec. Clinton keynotes Congressional
Hispanic Caucus Institute, Inc., conference (CHCI
<http://www.chci.org/news/pub/former-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-to-address-leadership-luncheon-at-public-policy-conference>
)

·  October 2 – Miami Beach, FL: Sec. Clinton keynotes the CREW Network
Convention & Marketplace (CREW Network
<http://events.crewnetwork.org/2014convention/>)

 ·  October 2 – (Miami, FL) Sec. Clinton signs “Hard Choices” at Books and
Books [HillaryClintonMemoir.com
<http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/miami_book_signing>]

·  October 6 – Ottawa, Canada: Sec. Clinton speaks at Canada 2020 event (Ottawa
Citizen
<http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/hillary-clinton-speaking-in-ottawa-oct-6>
)

·  October 13 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton keynotes the UNLV Foundation
Annual Dinner (UNLV
<http://www.unlv.edu/event/unlv-foundation-annual-dinner?delta=0>)

·  October 14 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes
salesforce.com Dreamforce
conference (salesforce.com
<http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF14/highlights.jsp#tuesday>)

·  October 28 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton fundraises for House
Democratic women candidates with Nancy Pelosi (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-nancy-pelosi-110387.html?hp=r7>
)

 ·  December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts
Conference for Women (MCFW <http://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/>)