Hillary Clinton
Related: About this forumGloria Steinem: Why the White House needs Hillary Clinton: (book extract) (Hillary Group)
I know Hillary Clinton mostly in the way we all do, as a public figure in good times and bad, one who became part of our lives and even our dreams. I once introduced her to a thousand women in a hotel ballroom. Standing behind her as she spoke, I could see the binder on the lectern with her speech carefully laid out and also that she wasnt reading from it. Instead, she was responding to people who had spoken before her, addressing activists and leaders she saw in the audience, and putting their work in a national and global context all in such clear and graceful sentences that no one would have guessed she hadnt written them in advance. It was an on-the-spot tour de force, perhaps the best Ive ever heard.
But what clinched it for me was listening to her speak after a performance of Eve Enslers play Necessary Targets, based on interviews with women in one of the camps set up to treat women who had endured unspeakable suffering, humiliation, and torture in the ethnic wars within the former Yugoslavia. To speak to an audience that had just heard these heartbreaking horrors seemed impossible for anyone, and Hillary had the added burden of representing the Clinton administration, which had been criticised for slowness in stopping this genocide. Nonetheless, she rose in the silence, with no possibility of preparing, and began to speak quietly about suffering, about the importance of serving as witnesses to suffering. Most crucial of all, she admitted this countrys slowness in intervening. By the time she sat down, she had brought the audience together and given us all a shared meeting place: the simple truth....
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/gloria-steinem-hillary-clinton-white-house?CMP=share_btn_tw via The Guardian
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)Rose Siding
(32,623 posts)had I done them, I'd consider them to be a singularly life-defining moment. What an incredible person. We're really lucky.
riversedge
(70,242 posts)Hekate
(90,714 posts)DeepModem Mom
(38,402 posts)by so many. This is someone who truly cares about people -- and is smart enough and quick enough to toss off prepared remarks and respond to things she's just heard. I remember being apprehensive for her before a recent Debate. No prob! She won it!