Clinton's "35 Years Of Change" Omits Most Of Her Career
To hear Hillary Clinton talk, she's spent her entire career putting her Yale Law School degree to work for the common good.
She routinely tells voters that she's "been working to bring positive change to people's lives for 35 years." She told a voter in New Hampshire: "I've spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector." Speaking in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said his wife "could have taken a job with a firm . . . . Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund."
The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder. The whole story is more complicated -- and less flattering.
Clinton worked at the Children's Defense Fund for less than a year, and that's the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she's ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.
Clinton spent the bulk of her career -- 15 of those 35 years -- at one of Arkansas' most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.
Neither she nor her surrogates, however, ever mention that on the campaign trail. Her campaign Web site biography devotes six paragraphs to her pro bono legal work for the poor but sums up the bulk of her experience in one sentence: "She also continued her legal career as a partner in a law firm."
The full truth doesn't fit into the carefully crafted narrative the campaign has developed about Clinton, said Sally Bedell Smith, the author of "For Love of Politics," a study of the Clintons' partnership.
"She wants to be seen as someone who has devoted her life to public service," Smith said. "I suppose if you say it enough, maybe you can get people to believe it."
Spokesman Phil Singer said the campaign highlights Clinton's side work because it discovered early on that voters didn't know about it.
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McClatchy Newspapers | Matt Stearns | February 3, 2008 04:17 PM