Hillary has been saying dumb shit lately. She was “dead broke” when she left the White House, and isn’t really wealthy. She got into a fight with NPR’s Terry Gross about same-sex marriage. Chelsea is getting $600,000 for doing a bad job as a NBC correspondent.
Soooo, what to say about all this? Ezra Klein has some interesting thoughts.
Klein writes, “Clinton’s chances in 2016 are generally overhyped. For now, her competition is unknown and she’s benefitting from a mix of sky-high name recognition, ’90s nostalgia, and distance from partisan politics. The campaign will elevate her competitors while re-politicizing Clinton.” However, Hillary has two years to hone her message. In fact, she’s already doing it by going on an Ironman Marathon of a book tour. She’s getting back in shape.
Maybe.
Apt. 11d 
I find Terry Gross annoying, so wouldn’t listen to the interview itself, but the explanation offered in the linked article sounds possible enough to me for a person of her age and background.
I’m not sure what the relevance of the Chelsea bit is. “Child of powerful people gets job he/she isn’t fully qualified for” is pretty much dog bites man. I don’t watch that stuff so have no personal interest, and think it’s probably better than when she was getting jobs on hedge fund boards or whatever it was she was doing right out of college, despite the lack of any intrinsically relevant skills. It’s a bit unseemly but hard to believe that anyone will be able to get many miles out of it. (I don’t think the Clintons have ever been the sort of Democrats to think this sort of thing is out of bounds- that was part of what made them “new Democrats” in the ’90s, I think, rather than more traditional liberals.)
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Chelsea worked for McKinsey when she graduated, right? I’m guessing it was a job she was fully qualified for. The issue is that she doesn’t want to do the job she’s qualified for because she has too many other commitments.
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Well, insofar as the job was “shmoozing and using connections”, she was surely qualified for it. But, it was nominally in finance, dealing with hedge funds, and if I recall correctly, none of her background suggests she studied fiance, economics, upper-level math, or anything that would typically make one qualified to do non-shmoozing work on hedge funds.
I don’t mean this as an attack on her personally. I don’t think it’s bad of her to take this work if it’s offered to her. She’s certainly no worse in this regard than lots of other people who get less attention and criticism. But surely its undeniable that, like many others, its not her intrinsic skills getting her the job. Why that should be a special problem for the Clintons isn’t clear to me, though.
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As far as I can tell, there’s no job she could have taken where people wouldn’t have complained that she got the job because of her connections. Everything I’ve heard about her suggests that she was a hard committed worker (who was also very privileged to have any opportunity she took). She’s done the standard UMC striver things in her life, from volunteering to NIH, to working at McKinsey, . . . . She’s not Paris Hilton.
“Chelsea is on the board of directors at the School of American Ballet. “Sometimes people join a charitable cause because it promotes them socially,” says Jill Kargman, who with Chelsea was in charge of recruiting the under-35 set. “She doesn’t need that. When she says she’ll do something, she truly will do something. She was working at McKinsey, incredibly long hours, and if she wasn’t in town, she’d call in from some red state. I guess I’m not used to people working that hard, especially high-profile people.”
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“I’m not sure what the relevance of the Chelsea bit is. “Child of powerful people gets job he/she isn’t fully qualified for” is pretty much dog bites man.”
There’s been an explosion of media nepotism/hiring of untalented children of famous people the last ten years or so–it really didn’t used to be like that.
Here’s another spawn-of-actually-famous-people example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Farrow_Daily
“In February 2014, Farrow received the third annual Cronkite Award for Excellence in Exploration and Journalism from Reach the World, in recognition of his work since 2001, including his being a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth in 2001.[2][3] The awarding was critiqued by some media outlets as coming just three days after Ronan Farrow Daily began airing.”
“In March 2014, it was reported that Ronan Farrow Daily suffered from poor ratings after drawing an average of 312,000 total viewers. The Wednesday March 26th show was 708th among all programming ranked by Nielsen for the day.”
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Don’t knock Ronan.
We could also include Luke Russert, Jonah Goldberg, Jenna Bush Hager….
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I will vote for Lyndon LaRouche before I vote for Hillary Clinton. She is a crappy politician and a hideous human being.
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Does that mean you prefer LaRouche as president?
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It means there is no way I will ever vote for Clinton
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Which might have been a better way to say it, since, presumably, you will have an alternative other than LaRouche. I, on the other hand, don’t love Hillary, but can’t imagine a single Republican I would vote for over her.
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I don’t buy the, “she’s practicing!” argument. Sorry. Her primary opponents will have years of her gaffes on tape, ready to splice into commercials.
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Chelsea Clinton did not work for a hedge fund after graduation: she worked for McKinsey. Consulting firms commonly hire grads from top colleges (Stanford and Oxford count) without regard to their academic background. (One of our young friends was a classics major at Brown and got a job with BCG.) As I have said, there is a need for generalists with top-notch analytic skills; the problem is that the Ivy Leagues and their equivalents entirely fill that need.
After three years, she got a job with a hedge fund. Presumably, she learned some finance in her three years at McKinsey, so this move would not be unusual for a Stanford grad without regard to parentage.
In contrast, the job at NBC and the various directorships are clearly payoffs for the Clintons, and rather offensive examples of unearned privilege, and rendered more offensive when Hillary starts talking about how poor and deserving she and her family are.
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Pfui on Ezra Klein! How’s about that Edward Klein?! Clearly, she can’t handle her liquor. Not smart to say that, even among people you think are your friends.
“Hillary Clinton called President Obama “incompetent and feckless” and charged that he had “no hand on the tiller half the time” during a boozy reunion with college pals, a new book claims.
The scathing attacks came as the wine was flowing at a May 2013 dinner at Le Jardin Du Roi, a cozy French bistro near the Clinton family home in Westchester, according to “Blood Feud,” by best-selling author Edward Klein.
The former first lady, months removed from being Obama’s secretary of state, unleashed the verbal assault between sips of vino, sources told the author.
“When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought — really thought — about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all,” Klein wrote.
Clinton ranted, “The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time. That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f–king tiller,” according to the book. . . .
“Obama has turned into a joke,” she went on, according to Klein.
Clinton even cited some of the same Obama administration scandals that so upset conservatives, though naturally she omitted Benghazi:
“The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and [Fox reporter] James Rosen’s e-mails — all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did,” she raged, the book says, adding that she called the president “incompetent and feckless.””
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