“I strongly argued that we had to change the [welfare] system…I didn’t think it was fair that one single mother improvised to find child care and got up early every day to get to work while another stayed home and relied on welfare…The third bill passed by Congress cut off most benefits to legal immigrants, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits, and maintained the status quo on monthly benefit limits, leaving the states free to set benefit limits…I agreed that he [Bill] should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage…Weeks after Bill signed the law, Peter Edelman and Mary Jo Bane, another friend and Assistant Secretary at HHS who had worked on welfare reform, resigned in protest.” – Hillary Clinton in her 2003 memoir Hard Choices.
Not liking Hillary has nothing to do with her being a woman. It has everything to do with the hypermasculine values she espouses.
Hillary is that rare combination, even in our grotesque political landscape, of a smooth-talking neoliberal with the worst tendencies of a warrior-neoconservative. You couldn’t say that about Bill to the same extent, but there isn’t a regime change opportunity, a chemical or conventional arms deal, an escalated aerial (or lately drone) war, or an authoritarian friend in need, that Hillary hasn’t liked. If we get her, we will only be setting back feminism by decades, because her policies—like welfare “reform”—have always come packaged under the false rubric of caring for women and children. It’s like George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” the rhetorical cover she needs to enact policies, time after time, that erode women’s and children’s standing even as she claims to be their steadfast advocate.