The First Lady Picks Her Battles
Hillary Rodham Clinton
On a sunny Friday morning earlier this month, Hillary Rodham Clinton took her seat at a conference table in the White House Map Room. On the wall behind her, a battle map marked the positions of the Allied and Axis armies in Europe during World War II. For two hours, the first lady, eyeglasses balanced on her nose, guided the discussion, entertaining ideas from leaders of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and others on ways to help families adopt kids trapped in the child-welfare system.
Hillary Clinton still wields great power in her husband's administration, but she has learned to lower her profile, pick her fights and be more effective. As a result of her meeting on adoption, the president will announce in the next few weeks new actions to make it easier for families to adopt. "She's taken the first step to bring attention to the issue, to take common-sense steps, to ensure that children find families," says Jann Heffner, director of the Dave Thomas Foundation. "She knows the issue; she can have a good impact on it."
Typecast as a liberal ideologue, Hillary Clinton now concentrates on what is practical, focusing on politics and children's issues. She is orchestrating the Clinton campaign's effort to attract women voters, she will take a star turn at this week's Democratic convention in Chicago and she backed the plan to open the convention by celebrating the 76th anniversary of women's suffrage. Mrs. Clinton also will have headlined eight receptions since February for the Women's Leadership Forum, an arm of the Democratic National Committee, raising $5 million, a historic high for women. She plans to attend 10 more this fall.
Since 1995, the first lady has led the administration's efforts to improve children's television programming, to find homes for children trapped in the foster-care system, to salvage public television and to temper the effects of welfare reform. Her handiwork, however, is not always obvious. Last week, the president signed a law hiking the minimum wage. It contains a little-noticed provision offering a $5,000 tax credit to families willing to adopt--$6,000 if the child has special needs. The first lady signaled her strong support of the credit to the Department of Health and Human Services, and that, along with leadership from key Republicans in Congress, helped make it law.
Veto power. Although apparently acquiescing in her husband's decision to sign a welfare-reform bill that many predict will land another 1 million children in poverty, she tried to temper some provisions of the bill. The original Republican welfare plan, for example, would have turned federal aid for foster care and an adoption subsidy over to the states with no guarantee of continued funding. Hillary Clinton objected and both measures were dropped.
Earlier, when Republicans sought to end the federal guarantees of both welfare and Medicaid, the first lady urged her husband to veto that package deal. She also pushed a White House plan, to be unveiled this week, to lure jobs to distressed areas so people leaving welfare can find work. She works on other matters under the political radar screen, holding the line, for example, on funding for the Public Broadcasting Service and the Legal Services Corp.
"Hillary understands that when she says something, people pay attention," says Peggy Charren, an advocate of better children's TV programming. The first lady nudged the president to get networks to air three hours of children's programming a week. "Otherwise," says Charren, "that deal would never have been struck." Hillary Clinton also pushed the president to endorse the V-chip in a speech in Nashville. "Without question, it was the intention of the first lady to highlight and turn the Nashville summit into a conference on television violence," says Democratic Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, sponsor of the V-chip measure. On the night it passed, Markey got a congratulatory phone call at home from Mrs. Clinton, who had been following the debate all day.
Election strategy. Now, she is working to help re-elect her husband. Every Friday, in a White House conference room next to her office, a small group of women, including her chief of staff, Margaret Williams, meet to plot strategy. Mrs. Clinton occasionally joins this "Women's Outreach" team, which planned this week's celebration of women's suffrage and is working with the group Emily's List to turn out more women voters.
The first lady's office says that in 1994, when the Democrats lost the Congress, 54 million women voters stayed home. This year, Hillary Clinton intends to be the one who stays home, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, for four more years.
This story appears in the September 2, 1996 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.