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How right he is. In fact, Hillary Clinton was prepared to be
president in 2008 and she is even more prepared now: Yale
Law School; first female full partner at the prestigious
Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas; First Lady of
Arkansas for 12 years; First Lady of the United States for
eight years; U.S. Senator representing the State of New York
for eight years and U.S. Secretary of State for four years.
It is not simply that she has held such positions. Her
accomplishments in those positions have been both prolific
and groundbreaking. As a first lady, she had been appointed
by her husband, Governor, then President, Bill Clinton, to
develop policy initiatives in the areas of children’s
rights, health care reform and education reform and to sell
those ideas to legislators and the public.
Clinton has spent a lifetime as an advocate for women and
children, an advocacy that began shortly after she earned
her law degree from Yale and fully blossomed when she served
the state of Arkansas as first lady for 12 years.
During this election cycle, we will be bombarded here in
Ohio – a key swing state – with television ads telling us of
Clinton’s concern for the health, education and general
well-being of children and families. The abundance of those
ads will probably be more than we can bear in very short
order but the fact is that Clinton’s concern is not simply a
political ploy she has recently invented to gain votes –
it’s the work of a lifetime.
After law school, Clinton spent a year at the Yale Child
Study Center and published an article examining how children
were viewed under the law and offering substantial proposals
for reform. She then landed a job at the Children’s Defense
Fund working to expose discrepancies between school
enrollment figures and census data.
In 1974 she moved to Arkansas to marry Bill Clinton and to
practice law. In 1977 she co-founded the Arkansas Advocates
for Children and Families, a group still working to enhance
opportunities in early education, to reform juvenile justice
and to increase funding for child health care.
After Bill Clinton became governor in 1979 he appointed
Hillary to head the Arkansas Rural Health Advisory
Committee, a group that would strive to expand access to
health care among the rural population.
During those early days she also joined the board of the
Arkansas Children’s Hospital where she helped establish
Arkansas’s first neonatal nursery and she served on the
board of the Children’s Defense Fund during her Arkansas
first lady years.
Next, she brought to her adopted state a program called Home
Instruction for Parents for Preschool Youngsters – HIPPY –
which trains parents of at-risk children in early education
methods. HIPPY eventually served as a model for other states
and expanded to 146 sites in 26 states and the District of
Columbia.
She also served on the board of corporate firms – TCBY,
Lafarge and, most notably, Wal-Mart. As Wal-Mart’s first
female board member she pushed the company to adopt
non-discriminatory hiring practices.
Then came the most important task that Hillary would
undertake during those first lady years in the 1980’s –
reforming the state’s education system. Prior to her work in
this area, the Arkansas public education system was
consistently ranked near the bottom of all 50 states in
every education category by any measure.
Clinton traveled the state, meeting with teachers and
parents, collecting ideas and selling her own to the
citizens as chairman of the Arkansas Educational Standards
Committee.
In the end, under Hillary’s guidance, the committee put
together a reform package which included boosting course
offerings, reducing class sizes and introducing testing
requirements for teachers and students.
Her committee’s efforts helped to greatly improve the
state’s educational standards. Arkansas had been ranked as
high as fifth in the nation (Education Week) in the ensuing
years but has slipped to as low as 42th in other
rankings. Never has it fallen to its pre-Clinton depths
during which residents would routinely murmur “thank
goodness for Mississippi.”
During her time in Little Rock, Clinton was recognized
repeatedly for her work by being named Arkansas Woman of the
Year in 1983; Young Mother of the Year in 1984 and twice
(1988 and 1991) named one of the 100 most influential
lawyers in the country by the National Law Journal.
Her achievements – those of a northern-born, Ivy
League-educated female, lacking perhaps the genteel manner
of a typical Arkansas woman – rankled many in the state much
as she would later rankle many in the nation as first lady
of the United States. But the Arkansas Advocates program,
HIPPY, the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library and the
Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport are symbols of her
years in Arkansas and her legacy in that state.
“By contrast, Clinton has been tested. She has demonstrated
balance, calm and an even temperament. She has an
unparalleled knowledge of foreign and economic policy; she
has run complex organizations such as the State Department.
Over the years, she has demonstrated that she can take
criticism and work with even her most strident political
opponents. Like other leaders, including myself, she has
made mistakes. I believe she has learned from those
mistakes. In my opinion, she is ready to be commander in
chief on Day One.”
Daniel Akerson, lifelong Republican and former CEO and
chairman of GM
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