What title could Hillary Clinton add to her resume that would make her even more appealing to voters than those she already has on her resume? That question was answered recently when Chelsea announced that she and husband Marc Mezvinsky were expecting. In the eyes of much of the world, grandmothers can do no wrong.
Hillary will soon have one more person to consider when deciding whether to run for president. There will be one more generation in the Clinton family to benefit from the good she can accomplish in the world by running and breaking that last "glass ceiling" and taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017. I have no doubt that Americans will stand with her and finally make the statement that women are truly equal. A statement they weren't ready to make in the 1970s when the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution failed to pass.
Last weekend there was a column in the Washington Post by Dan Balz, "Clinton, Warren, and a tale of two book titles." Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) chose the title A Fighting Chance and Hillary's forthcoming book is titled Hard Choices. Each in their own way says something about America and where we should be headed. Balz says, "Warren's deeply personal book speaks directly to the widespread feelings of so many Americans -- across Party lines -- that the deck is stacked against them." I think that is a sentiment Hillary Clinton shares.
Warren is a gutsy academic who, until 1994, was a Republican who then turned independent and finally Democratic when she realized it was the party that best represented her views even if it wasn't perfect. Clinton became a Democrat much earlier and has toiled in the vineyards to move the party forward all her adult life. She has shared her thoughts in the book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us and wrote of her work in the book Living History. Her new book will be about her time at the State Department and how she sees the world today.
Balz wrote about what someone told him about Clinton's philosophy and then quoted the lines Hillary herself spoke in her keynote to the United Methodist Women Assembly in Louisville last Saturday. They are words attributed to John Wesley, "Do all the good you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can."
When I hear Hillary say those words, I am more convinced than ever that she believes she can still do more good and will continue to do it for as long as she can.
Hillary will not give up the fight to see that women receive equal pay for equal work. I pity the person that suggests that when elected president she should take a salary cut from $400,000 to $280,000 because she is a woman. That is about the percentage less that many women make for the same jobs men do.
I recently saw the one-woman play Golda's Balcony, a tour de force with Tovah Feldshuh, in Theater J at the Jewish Community Center. It is the story of Golda Meir's role in fighting to bring into existence the State of Israel from when she emigrated from Milwaukee to Palestine in 1921. She lived through three wars in which Israel's neighbors tried to wipe them off the map and was Prime Minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
It is the story of her humanity, her family, children and grandchildren, and the difficulty she had in balancing both along with her devotion and responsibility to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. It is the story of having her finger on the nuclear button, a capability that we now know Israel has since the French helped them build the Dimona nuclear reactor in 1964.
A discussion I had with friends about Hillary after seeing the play revolved around what it would mean to have her with responsibility for both domestic and foreign policy and she being the one with her finger on the nuclear button. We compared her to everyone else who has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2016 in this complicated and dangerous world in which we live. We all came to the conclusion that we would sleep better if she is the person in the White House.
This column was first published in the Washington Blade.