Tornado Alley (PROG)

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shtsqsh, For Hillary Clinton at 50, Yet Another Beginning

.. lol, snagged this since my first reply, and even more now i'm wondering who you are that believes you have the person to be so negative
and calculatingly dismissive of a lady who has worked so hard all her life to bring betterment for women and children throughout the world ..

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: October 26, 1997

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25— There was a certain unintended twist in the setting for Hillary Rodham Clinton's meeting with journalists and child care experts this week. She gathered the group in the White House Map Room, a locale immortalized in the recently discovered videotapes of her husband's glad-handing coffees with big-money Democratic donors.

But if she was aware of it, she did not let on. Wasting no time on formalities, she plunged into her subject, Thursday's conference on child care policy, another of the Clintons' continuing earnest forums on national needs. Sitting beneath a World War II map of the ''Estimated German Situation, 1 May 1945,'' Mrs. Clinton opened a thick black briefing book and dived right into what she called ''a frontier issue.'' In the ensuing hour she stayed strictly on task, not letting the fact-filled discussion stray to other subjects.

So this is the ''reborn'' Hillary Clinton, famously turning 50 on Sunday, a policy diva in a baby-blue tailored suit and a frosted-blond pageboy. She is very much the same Hillary Clinton who has been the object of public affection, fascination and fury over the past five years: enigmatic, clever, frustrating and remarkably composed.

But her return to the spotlight marks a carefully plotted repositioning, after a period of low visibility that began with the unprecedented appearance of a First Lady before a Federal criminal grand jury.

The White House years have left her a bit chastened, perhaps, and her tactics have changed -- she will no longer direct a gigantic policy-making enterprise like the failed health care task force of the first term. But her starring role in the child care conference this week demonstrated that she will continue to be a central policy voice in the Administration.

It is no coincidence that the child care symposium came the same week as Mrs. Clinton's birthday, which is being treated as an unofficial coming-out party for the second-term First Lady.

And it is no accident that the birthday is being celebrated with a policy-making forum. This was how Mrs. Clinton wanted it, despite her friends' efforts to mark the occasion with a nostalgic trip down Hillary Lane. Friends and staff members have been presenting her with a gift a day for the 50 days leading to her birthday. More than a hundred pals are preparing a commemorative book of letters and reminiscences that will be presented to her on Sunday. On Monday, the City of Chicago will put on a day and night of festivities that will include visits to many of her childhood haunts, an occasion one friend described as ''all the stations of the cross.'' And on Tuesday, she does ''Oprah.''

Although reaching the half-century mark is a traumatic passage for many people, Mrs. Clinton is little given to introspection or self-doubt, her friends say. She is obsessed not with her identity, but with her calling. Her mission, as she sees it, is to advance the status of women and the fortunes of her husband.

''This is a person, as long as I've known her, that has this strong sense of responsibility, a very moral sense that you should do whatever you can do,'' said Ann F. Lewis, a longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton's and now the White House director of communications. ''She has always felt that way and she thinks of that as her role in the White House, too.''

Mrs. Clinton is struck by how little time she has remaining on the global stage as First Lady and has begun to think about how she can carry on her good works after leaving the White House 39 months from now, said close friends who have spoken with her recently.

Her thoughts have turned to the best platform from which to address her lifelong concerns, whether a political office, a foundation or a university chair, friends say. But she is also consumed by such mundane matters as finding and furnishing a home, after having spent almost all of her married life in public housing.

''The really fun thing about thinking about her future is that nobody knows,'' said Mary Steenburgen, an actress and longtime Arkansas friend of the Clintons. ''This is a time when both of them have literally the world open to them at a relatively young age. It's exciting to them, and scary, too.''

For today, however, Mrs. Clinton seems energized by her husband's re-election, freed for now of the crippling scrutiny that preoccupied her during much of the first term and liberated by her daughter's departure for college. Mrs. Clinton has assumed again an ambitious and visible role in promoting her husband's agenda, and her own.

She is enjoying record approval ratings and hopes to translate her current public esteem into concrete accomplishments across a canvas of policy interests, from improving the state of the nation's child care to fostering women-run business ventures around the world.

In just the past 10 days, Mrs. Clinton has given a major speech on domestic violence and family planning in Argentina, appeared in a public service television spot urging women to get mammograms, presided over the child care conference and unveiled a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe that will hang at the White House.

Later this month she will travel to England and Ireland; November will take her for 10 days to Siberia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Her busy schedule and narrowed agenda represent a public reanimation of Mrs. Clinton. They come after 18 months of near-invisibility that began at one of the lowest points of the first Clinton term -- her appearance before a Federal criminal grand jury in January 1996, when she strode into a Federal courthouse in a military-style greatcoat to answer questions about the mysterious loss and rediscovery of her law firm billing records.

Since then, Mrs. Clinton's tight-knit circle of aides has painstakingly plotted her return to the spotlight.

''This has been a disciplined and focused comeback, the result of a series of very careful choices,'' said a senior White House aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ''Instead of doing 50 things, she's chosen a few high-profile projects and foreign trips with children and women's issues as the central theme. They have picked their spots carefully. And it's worked. They have done a really good job of repositioning her.''

This official said the public persona of the second-term Mrs. Clinton is very different from that of the first. ''No longer is she the co-President and the co-Vice President of 1993,'' this official said. ''But she's not Barbara Bush, tea and cookies, either.''

Mrs. Clinton has traveled widely in her years in the post-health care wilderness, visiting Africa, China, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. On all her trips, she concentrates on promoting the health, welfare and economic advancement of women and children. She took on the Chinese Communist Government in Beijing over child labor and women's rights and the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina over birth control and violence against women.

She is more outspoken, it seems, abroad than at home. But the rapturous reception she has received around the globe appears to have emboldened her to take a more visible role at home.

''She has taken more interest in international policy since Beijing, the agenda of educating girls, small business loans for women,'' Ms. Lewis said. ''She will be doing more foreign travel. She can really make a difference when she goes into a country; she puts those issues higher on the agenda.''

Although Mrs. Clinton has been subjected to some ridicule over her advocacy of a ''politics of meaning'' and her consultation with personal-growth gurus, she continues to believe that public and private life must be grounded in spiritual principles. She has broadened her thinking to embrace the concept of a ''civil society'' based on shared faith and mutual respect.

The Czech writer and President, Vaclav Havel, has been an inspiration and an adviser for that concept, Mrs. Clinton's associates say, and his influence can begin to be seen in her speeches. Mrs. Clinton and a small circle of aides are beginning to plan a yearlong global celebration of the arrival of the millennium, one that will center on more closely knitting together the human family.

''We cannot leave the raising of our children, the inculcating of values to the mass media and the consumer culture,'' Mrs. Clinton said in a speech in Buenos Aires 10 days ago. ''We have to do a better job through our churches, our families, our civic associations. We have to build up civil society to reach out to all young people to help them understand why so many of you have fought so long and so hard for the values, the rights and the privileges that now in my country can be too easily taken for granted.''

Photo: Hillary Rodham Clinton, during a presentation of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting on Friday in the East Room of the White House. (Carol T. Powers for The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/26/us/for-hillary-clinton-at-50-yet-another-beginning.html?pagewanted=all