Hillary is extremely intelligent and accomplished.
This talking point is getting extremely annoying. Hillary's actual resume is actually quite unremarkable.On the contrary, these throwaway superlatives do not do her justice.
She was the elected president of the Wellesley College Graduate Association, where she "organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty" and was "instrumental in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges," and a "number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first female President of the United States". She was the first student commencement speaker in Wellesley's history, and gave a speech which received a 7-minute standing ovation and was featured in Life Magazine.
She entered Yale Law School only the second year after it began to admit women, the first class having only 7 women. There, she researched childhood development to contribute to a then cutting-edge work, wrote a frequently-cited article in the Harvard Education Review on the children's' rights movement, and worked as a congressional aide for Walter Mondale. After law school, she served on the Watergate impeachment committee researching the historical grounds for impeachment, sitting to the left of inquiry leader John Doar.
By then, her star was considered so bright that Democratic consultant Betsey Wright moved to Washington from Texas in part to help her political career, and "thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president". When Bill Clinton decided to run for congress in Arkansas, she was "on the phone with him, sometimes four times a day, giving him advice, mentoring him". When a friend discovered a letter from her to Bill around this period, it "talked of thier future plans... politicial plans that is the best way tot put it... the letter had everything to do with their careers, so unusual in that there was no talk of home, family and marriage."
Would Bill have been elected president without her?
She joined the Rose Law firm, the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi, as its first woman partner, and continued to publish scholarly articles. An American Bar Association chair later said, "Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate."Historian Garry Wills would later describe her as "one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades." She was campaign director of field operations in Indiana for Jimmy Carter, on the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation, and was chair of the board for two years during which funding increased threefold.
This is just until 1980!
If I go on any longer, no one will read it (if you made it this far).
All of the above is reduced to "a mere political spouse"?
The woman had accomplishments in spades. I mean look, I don't think you're a sexist or anything, but it stinks how when a woman is married to a man whose career is more high flying than hers, her own accomplishments, no matter how great, get somehow erased and dissolved and folded into his identity.
But she does have a career of her own. That's the thing. No one says that Obama doesn't have a career of his own because he wouldn't be where he is without Michelle (who helped him sell himself as authentic to black community) or David Axelrod (who helped him sell himself to whites) or wealthy Chicago donors like Penny Pritzker (who bankrolled his early career). He wouldn't be where he is without any of those people. None of us would be where we are without our parents, at the very least.
Why is Hillary held to a higher standard then? No one says Ted Kennedy never had a career of his own because he wouldn't have been Senator had he not been a Kennedy.
When she put on that wedding ring she didn't stop becoming a person. She didn't give up her right to a career. Nor did she when her husband was elected. She ran for Senate, putting together a campaign, visiting every county in New York, staking out positions, participating in debates, making ads, just the same as everyone else who runs a Senate campaign. Her race was competitive.
She got as much legislation passed as one could expect of a junior Senator in the minority who was given no special favors. Does she have a seminal law in her name from her time in the Senate? No. Neither does Obama or any other Senator running for president this year. Neither did Jack Kennedy. Everything she has, she's accomplished out of her own efforts.
She did great in her 2008 campaign. She was only favored by a relatively small margin throughout most of the campaign. She was running against a phenomenon-- a guy who could get 20,000 people to show up at my alma mater to see him (Howard Dean only 3,700; Gore only got 800). A guy who could get 20,000 people in blood red states like Idaho and North Dakota and Kansas to show up and see him. A guy who received incredibly positive news coverage -- Chris Matthews even got a tingle up his leg! -- and endorsements from most major newspapers, as well as the party's previous presidential nominee, and its most famous senior Senator. A guy who could rack up 95% of the vote in a demographic that made up 20% of the primary electorate, leaving her with the option of winning the rest by a landslide if she wanted to win by the narrowest of margins.
And yet she still pulled even -- winning roughly the same amount of votes, and winning the last primary in South Dakota even as the media was calling the nomination for Obama.
And yet she endorsed Obama immediately, campaigned for him, and served as his Secretary of State without drama, and led her State Department for 4 years, during which time she initiated talks with Iran on its nuclear deal that now look likely to bear fruit.
And that's still not enough?
