HRC wants to talk with you about love & kindness [View all]

[Her Sister]

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http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/hillary-clinton-wants-to-talk-to-you-about-love-and-kindness?utm_term=.qgEb9vwlA#.mtZ7MOaGn
(long interview/article)

In the early days of her husband’s administration, Hillary Clinton tried to start a national conversation about basic human decency, only to be mocked. In the midst of the most mean-spirited presidential campaign in memory, she talks with BuzzFeed News about the unchanged way she sees herself — and if she’ll ever be able to communicate it.

Here is Hillary Clinton as seen by many: calculating, lacking principle, lacking conviction, driven by power and ambition. After eight years in the White House, two Senate races, and a term as secretary of state, she is followed by the popular image of a candidate willing to do whatever or be whoever, so long as the polls say she should.
Here is how Hillary Clinton sees herself: radically consistent, motivated by a core philosophy — voiced now through two words rarely associated with her. “Love and kindness.” If this sounds unlikely, she knows it. For 50 years, she’s struggled to explain the values that motivate her — in public life, as a candidate, as a person. The one time she really tried to, in the early 1990s, she was brutally mocked. In the view of some of her closest aides, Clinton never fully recovered from the critical backlash.
Now, Clinton doesn’t talk about this much, not like she did then. On this particular day, after a routine campaign event at a college in Manchester, New Hampshire — after taking photos and giving a speech, after getting a question from the audience about the women who’ve alleged they were sexually assaulted by her husband and answering it without hesitation or alarm, after moving onto the noise and chaos of a crowded rope line —Clinton is shepherded away to the quiet of an available room: the building’s industrial-style kitchen. And it’s in this setting, seated in a fold-out chair at a small table, that Clinton seems almost surprised by the most basic line of questioning: why she runs.