Hillary isn't ‘calculating’ or risk-averse. I watched her take a huge gamble, and it paid off. (HRC)
Lissa Muscatine, former chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton:
As our plane descended into Beijing in the middle of a late summer night in 1995, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was waiting to see the final version of the next day’s speech. She had been invited by the United Nations secretary general to deliver the keynote address to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women. As her speechwriter at the time, I raced to make last-minute edits before we landed. When I finished, I handed her the draft. She looked at me and said, “I just want to push the envelope as far as I can on women’s rights and human rights.”
Now, 20 years later, Clinton is running for president amid critiques that she is calculating, always scripted and risk-averse. But those of us who worked with her on the Beijing speech saw a woman who, under intense scrutiny and pressure, was willing to gamble for a cause and principle she cared about. In the end, Beijing laid the groundwork not only for her advocacy of women’s rights as senator and secretary of state, but also for the global women’s movement. It never would have happened if she hadn’t overruled the counsel of senior administration advisers, stood up to Democratic and Republican opponents in Congress and trusted her own judgment over the optics. She took big risks – and they paid off.
* * *
For months before Clinton’s trip, administration officials and politicians in both parties had warned her that going to Beijing for a global women’s conference simply put too much at stake – the administration’s domestic political agenda, public opinion, our country’s diplomatic relationship with China and internal White House politics....
That left Clinton’s staff, women’s rights activists, the president and a few stray allies in the administration, as the only ones who wanted her to go.
Clinton herself, though, was undeterred. At one point she even told us she would travel to Beijing on a commercial airliner as a private citizen – a comical thought to everyone but her. Growing up, she’d listened to her mother’s stories about her difficult childhood and her lack of opportunities. As a law student and young lawyer, as a children and family’s advocate, and as first lady of Arkansas, she had witnessed disparities and inequities and had worked for expanding women’s legal protections, economic empowerment, health care and education. Now she wanted to use her platform as first lady – as one of the most visible women in the world – to speak out for millions who couldn’t speak out for themselves....
The 20-minute speech instantly reverberated around the world. Clinton’s line that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all” is still a mantra today. And her graphic litany of abuses that women and girls in many countries were regularly subjected to was as forceful as any language ever used to talk about women’s rights....
By the end of the conference, delegates from 189 countries had adopted the Platform for Action, spurring measurable progress for women in the years since. A report released in March by the No Ceilings initiative at the Clinton Foundation — based on the most exhaustive collection of data on women globally over two decades – cited areas where progress has been slow but also several positive trends since Beijing: the global rate of maternal mortality has dropped by 42 percent; the gender gap in access to primary education has virtually closed globally; by 2013, 76 of 100 countries had passed legislation outlawing domestic violence, up from 13 in 1995; and almost twice as many women hold political office today compared with 20 years ago (though they are still very much a minority, holding less than one-quarter of seats in national legislatures).
Most people remember Beijing as Clinton’s first major step in a long career spent advocating for women and girls. But I remember mostly her intrepidness – her willingness to take personal and political risks — to achieve something she believed in....
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/25/hillary-clinton-is-not-calculating-or-risk-averse-i-watched-her-take-a-huge-gamble-and-it-paid-off/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=20150903beijing20
= new reply since forum marked as read
