In a special session at the YearlyKos convention, Hillary Clinton praised left-wing bloggers and promised she would provide universal internet access, full benefits for same-sex couples and pre-kindergarten that caters to children who don’t speak English if elected President.
She began by telling bloggers a secret: “Don’t tell anybody, but I actually read blogs.”
“Don’t share that,” she warned. “And, I find myself, you know, sometimes saying, ‘Oh, c’mon’ and sometimes saying ‘Oh, you know that’s a really good point’ and trying to figure out how to work that into an argument I am making or legislation I am drafting.”
Before appearing on the YearlyKos main stage for a presidential forum with other Democrats seeking the nomination for President, Clinton held a “breakout” session with “Kossack” bloggers of the DailyKos website. When convention participants registered for the conference, they were asked to pick which Democratic presidential candidate’s breakout session they would like to attend. Then, each attendee was given a colored bracelet that would only grant the participant access to the selected candidate’s session.
A YearlyKos organizer said that Barack Obama’s session reached maximum capacity first, then John Edwards and finally Clinton’s. The media was given unlimited access to each of the breakout sessions, but several of them overlapped each other.
The DailyKos community revolted when a scheduling conflict caused her campaign to cancel her breakout session the night before. She previously scheduled to speak to the National Association of Police Organizations Convention that morning.
Upon hearing the news of her cancellation, one diarist posted a blog titled, “Effing Hillary Jilts Kossacks!”
In the end, however, Clinton made time in her schedule to talk to the bloggers. In a 12 p.m. Saturday session at the McCormick Place Convention Center, Clinton lauded DailyKos.
“I only wish that we had this active and fighting a blogosphere about fifteen years ago,” she said. “I think about what if we had the blogosphere in ’93, ’94, when I was working on healthcare and, you know, being hammered.”
After thanking the DailyKos bloggers at length for standing “up against the right-wing noise machine,” Clinton took five questions from the audience. They were about: education, closing Guantanamo Bay, President Bush’s surveillance program, pieces of controversial legislation her husband President Bill Clinton signed, and mass transit.
Surprisingly, no one directly asked her about her 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq, the source of many liberals’ opposition to her candidacy.
Clinton did appear to insulate herself, however, against an attack on her war vote from the bloggers. Appearing next to her in her breakout session was her internet communications director Peter Dauo, who called on questioners, research director of the Center for American Progress Judd Legum and Clinton’s communications director Howard Wolfson.
“They’re here in case anything happens and I have a senior moment,” Clinton said.
One questioner asked Clinton if she would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by her husband in 1996. Clinton said she was “one of the architects of that strategy” and that “I support civil unions and have said many times with full equality and benefits.”
Clinton does oppose a portion of DOMA. “I think part three of DOMA needs to be repealed because part three stands in the way of the full extension of federal benefits and I support that,” she said.
In a lengthy response to a question about President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, Clinton said “the best thing that we can do to close the achievement gap between African Americans and white kids is pre-kindergarten.”
“Quality, four-year-old kindergarten, especially focused on kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, where English is not the first language of life. That would be my highest priority and I would try to get some money from No Child Left Behind to see if we can start doing demonstration projects on that,” Clinton said.
She also said she would like to “move towards national standards for testing” and see the government create “an electronic education record for each child.”
The last question of the session that Clinton took asked what she would do to improve mass transit in the United States.
“I view infrastructure as not only physical, but virtual,” Clinton responded. She said the government needed to invest more money in roads, as well in “universal high-speed broadband access.”
“We are living off of the investments that our parents, grandparents and great grandparents made,” Clinton told the audience. “Especially, if you are in the Northeast, or the Midwest. You know, if you use the “L,” or you use the subway, you are basically taking advantage of what previous Chicagoans or New Yorkers were willing to pay for.”
Before she began her speech and took questions, Clinton’s microphone briefly malfunctioned. While fiddling with the wires, she jokingly blamed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” for her microphone failure, which was greeted with cheers from the audience.
She elaborated shortly after: “You know, when I made that comment about the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” I wasn’t kidding. What I never could have predicted was that it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was wide open and out there for everyone to see and unfortunately, they elected a President and a Vice-President with whom we’ve had to contend the last six and a half years!”
Below is the transcript from Hillary Clinton’s breakout session at the YearlyKos convention, as recorded by Amanda Carpenter who attended the live session Saturday afternoon.
CLINTON: I am delighted to be here and I thank you all for your understanding about working out the time and I’m very grateful to you for that. I thank Peter for the terrific job that he does every single day representing me and I thank Judd [audio gap]
I just lost the microphone. Is it working? Here we go. Is that okay? No, no. I don’t want to shout. Is that work better? Vast right-wing conspiracy.
Well, let me start by saying something that might surprise some of you because I am aware that, you know, not everybody says nice things about me, but - Yeah, I know it’s a burden I have to bear. But, let me start by saying something perhaps a little unexpected and that is “thank you.”
Thank you for caring so much and being so involved in helping us create a modern progressive movement in America and what you have done in a relatively short period of time is really to stand up against the right-wing noise machine, present an alternative with facts that back up what your arguments are, your claims are, and give a lot of support to what is the progressive agenda of the Democratic party. I only wish that we had this active and fighting of a blogosphere about fifteen years ago because we have certainly suffered over the last years from a real imbalance in the political world in our country, but we are righting that balance, or “lefting” that balance, not sure which, but we are certainly better prepared and more focused on you know, taking our arguments and making them effective and disseminating them widely and really putting together a network in the blogosphere and a lot of the new progressive infrastructure, institution that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.
You know, we are beginning to match what I have said for years was the advantage of the other side. You know, when I made that comment about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” I wasn’t kidding. What I never could have predicted was that it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was wide open and out there for everyone to see and unfortunately, they elected a President and a Vice-President with whom we’ve had to contend the last six and a half years. But, the fact is that they were better organized, more mission driven and better prepared to take on the political battles of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
So, I really do appreciate the individual and the collective effort that all of you are putting into being part of this front-line of the progressive movement.
The second thing I want to say is that I think it makes those of us who run for and hold office, you know, a little sharper, a little more kind of focused ourselves and on our, you know, toes when it comes to putting out our positions, defending our positions, fighting for our positions, something that I haven’t had any trouble doing in my life, but it’s nice to have some accountability and some new ideas coming in.
Don’t tell anybody, but I actually read blogs. Don’t share that. And, I find myself, you know, sometimes saying “Oh, c’mon.” and sometimes saying, “Oh, you know, that’s a really good point,” and trying to figure out how to work that into an argument I am making or legislation I am drafting. So, I really appreciate not just the fighting words and the standing up and the being pounded but the substance that comes through a lot of the blogging that you do.
Thirdly, I think that you know, our lives have changed, so our politics has to change. We are, you know, living in a 24/7 media world. It is not always easy as you might guess but it is the reality. So, part of what you help to do is create a space where that in 24/7 world you can really stand up and be heard on what we’re trying to do who are out in the political arena. You know, running for office, holding office, is more challenging in some respects because of that 24/7 world. So, therefore, you know, having people who share our overall goals even if we disagree on tactics or strategy, but understanding where we are trying to take our country is really helpful because then it’s not just one voice or a couple of voices, it’s millions of voices -- and you know I doubt you know that we can’t go back and rewrite history certainly, you know, -- but I think about what if we had the blogosphere in ‘93, ‘94 when I was working on healthcare and you know being hammered and they were raising $300 million dollars and distorting everything we were trying to do and we made our own mistakes but a lot of it was you know, trying to do something that was worth doing which we will get done when I am President finally.
[audio gap]
To intimidate people and bully people into not coming to Chicago, a great city that I was born in and love dearly. Cubs, not Sox. I still have a t-shirt that says “No Lights on Wrigley Field.” I mean, I go way back!
But, you know, I was very proud of my campaign, standing up and really calling [Bill] O’Reilly out and saying “Oh, c’mon.” Look, there are things on DailyKos that I don’t agree with and sometimes you know, look people do go over the line, but hello? For Bill O’Reilly to be --- [inaudible] --- people that listen and you know watch him, I thought Howard [Wolfson] did a terrific job going into the lion’s den.
So, with that, let me throw it open and I’d love it, Peter can you call on people? But, also I love the ideas of people introducing themselves. It gives me an idea of where you are from.
[audio gap. First question from a YearlyKos participant asked Clinton what she would do as President to reform the education system]
CLINTON: Education is such an important issue, but if you follow the debates that we’ve had up until now, it rarely gets a question. It got one question in the YouTube/CNN debate, but it doesn’t get the emphasis it deserves because of the role that it plays in all of our lives and the future of our country.
Specifically, with respect to No Child Left Behind, here is what I have said and what I hope to do in the upcoming hearings and work about reauthorizing No Child Left Behind.
First of all, I think we’ve got to admit that No Child Left Behind became an unfunded mandate. It was unfair because new expectations and standards and rules were imposed upon our schools without the resources that the Bush administration had promised so that was a real breach of the bargain that many of us thought we were entering into. Secondly, the Department of Education in the Bush administration has been less---
[audio gap]
---- I think you should own your medical records. They should be your property and if we had electronic medical records system [applause] the Rand Corporation says we save, you know, about $80 billion dollars a year, which we could then plow back into healthcare.
Well, I think we should have an electronic education record for each child, because what happens now is especially kids who are low-income, or poor, or homeless, or migrant, who move a lot, you lose them completely. And, by the time a child is in the third grade they’re behind, they’re on the path to dropping out and a child drops out every 29 seconds. So, let’s try to figure out how we can marry technology -- and any of you who know a lot about technology and which many of you do, think about this for me. Think about the plusses and the minuses because I am trying to think of a way to focus where we focus on the individual child. So a growth model. Not the testing every year that is in the aggregate and then people draw conclusions from it.
However, there is one aspect of the testing that is currently going on that I don’t want to lose and that is up until No Child Left Behind, which is one of the attributes of it, if you were a minority kid in a district where it was mostly you know, affluent or white, you were lost. You were a special education kid, if you were a non- English speaker. So, we’ve got to keep track of groups of kids, but I’d like the emphasis to be on individual accountability.
Secondly, we have got to move towards national standards for testing because the other thing that the Bush administration did after opposing all these tests as states began to say, well you know, “our kids aren’t doing very well,” the Bush administration basically blinked and said just lower the standards. Well, that’s really helpful. We are in global competition and we’ve got to try to bring out the potential of every child. It doesn’t help if we turn around and wink, wink and say you know, “you’re kids aren’t doing very well, drop the standards, make the tests easier.”
So, I would like to see us move towards something like NATE, which is the National, what is it?
[audio gap]
….school districts - the federal government has to step up to the plate with resources. You cannot impose an unfunded mandate.
Fourthly, look. Reading and math are important, but so is history, so is science, so are the arts --- [inaudible] --- their imaginations and their intelligence are ignited. And we are eliminating so many of the so-called extras that made a difference. You know, I was born in Chicago, I was raised in Park Ridge, I mean, I remember my field trips a whole lot more than I remember a lot of the other things that I did. I had a great public school education, but going to the Field Museum made a lasting impression on me, so we’ve got to get back to a diverse, broad curriculum. Continued... |