Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Husband’s welfare law still haunts Clinton
Hillary Clinton’s trouble with the Democratic base reaches back to the moment her longtime mentor, Marian Wright Edelman, blasted Clinton’s husband for cutting a deal with Republicans ahead of his 1996 reelection and signing a welfare overhaul law that she said “makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”
Edelman’s husband, Peter Edelman, quit his Clinton administration job in protest over the 1996 bill, and the tensions lingered for years — with Marian Wright Edelman telling an interviewer during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign that the Clintons were “not friends in politics.”
Today, many who have followed the strained political history between these two leading women of the left are perplexed about where they stand with each other.
Clinton, who is expected to clinch the Democratic nomination next week, has put her connection to Edelman at the center of her outreach to liberals who view her with suspicion in part due to her support for the welfare overhaul legislation. She regularly tells audiences about her job with the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s, as she did at a recent NAACP gathering in Detroit when she said that standing up against injustice has “always been my North Star, ever since I went to work for Marian Wright Edelman.”
Edelman, 76, seemed to signal that the two had come to terms when she appeared in a campaign video last year, recalling Clinton as a “caring, young, bright, creative student who cared about children and those left behind.”
“It’s confusing, totally confusing,” said Ben Jealous, a former NAACP president who interned for the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1990s and backs Clinton’s challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Marian was our hero. Peter is a saint — there’s no other way to put it,” Jealous said.
The connection to the first lady was “a point of pride,” he said. But the Clintons have allowed political calculations to triumph too often, he added.
“As progressives, you were given a conscience for a reason, and it should guide your policy.”
The relationship between Clinton and Edelman underscores one of the central challenges facing the Democratic candidate as she shapes her general-election strategy: how to deal with the complicated politics surrounding her husband’s economic record. With the welfare bill, Bill Clinton was willing to anger liberals to pursue a centrist image that was part of his 1996 reelection strategy.