Hillary Clinton puts women's rights at center of her agenda
Eight years after shying away from the historic nature of her campaign, Hillary Clinton is putting women at the center of her agenda as she contemplates a second bid to become the nation's first woman president.
In recent weeks, Clinton has trumpeted equal pay for women in speeches and panel discussions across the country.
And this week, she announced a new $600 million effort through the Clinton Global Initiative to help disadvantaged girls attend secondary school.
The effort suggests that if she runs for president, Clinton has decided to take the opposite tack from 2008, when top strategists such as Mark Penn suggested she not emphasize the issue during her first White House bid.
In the post-mortem of that campaign, Clinton aides saw the failure to embrace the historic nature of her bid as a fatal mistake that contributed to her loss in the Democratic primary.
Even worse, they witnessed Barack Obamas campaign use the fact that voters would be electing the first black president to its advantage, making the electorate feel a part of bringing about a change movement.
The fact that it didnt happen last time is indicative of everything that went wrong, said one longtime Hillary ally who worked on the 2008 campaign. Now, shes being more true to herself, doing what shes always done and always believed. Its not about Mark Penn writing a policy memo.
Internal memos leaked to The Atlantic after the2008campaign show Penn wanted to portray Clinton in the mold of Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady and former prime minister of the United Kingdom.
He wanted to cast her as a strong leader regardless of gender, and sought to play down the fact that she was a woman.
Of voters, he wrote in one memo: They do not want someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world. But there is a yearning for a kind of tough single parent someone who can combine the toughness they are used to with the negotiating adeptness they believe a woman would bring to the office.
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Hillary Clinton puts women's rights at center of her agenda