Millionaire Clinton spotlights middle-class roots
FORT PIERCE, Florida -- Hillary Clinton is a former First Lady, a former senator, and a former secretary of state. She is the Democratic nominee for president.
But on Thursday, Clinton also gave herself another title: “a mom who works.”
“I loved what I did,” Clinton wrote about her job as a lawyer in an op-ed. “And it was important to me to contribute to my family’s finances, especially now that we were having a baby.”
Clinton recounted learning that the law firm where she worked before her daughter Chelsea was born didn’t have a maternity leave policy. Clinton “decided to take matters into [her] own hands” and, before her due date, was granted four months of paid leave.
“It meant a lot that I could have that time with my new daughter, knowing that my job would be waiting for me when I came back,” Clinton wrote.
The op-ed, published on Fortune’s website Thursday morning, is just one way that Clinton has given voters glimpses into her life before politics this week, as she has campaigned in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa and Florida.
She has spoken about her father’s business, the salary she made at one of her first jobs and how her mother-in-law pull together ends meet to support a future president, painting a picture of the middle class family life that Clinton’s campaign promises to defend.
“I am going to close this campaign the way I started my career, decades ago, fighting for kids and families,” she said at an outdoor rally at a park in Des Moines later Thursday. “Because it’s been the cause of my life. It will be the mission of my presidency. Because I know from my own experience that strong families are the base of a strong America.”
Clinton’s focus on “kitchen table” economics serves to amplify the message that Clinton sent to voters during the first presidential debate on Monday night. Her goal in the debate, according to aides, was to speak directly to the American electorate about her plans and her vision — and not about Donald Trump. Bill Clinton tweeted before it started that he was “looking forward” to viewers getting to “see the Hillary Clinton I’ve known for over 40 years.”
And while Clinton did spend considerable time during the debate taking down her opponent’s business record and his “trumped-up trickle-down” policies, she also devoted precious airtime to telling her own story.
“My father was a small-businessman,” she said. “He worked really hard. He printed drapery fabrics on long tables, where he pulled out those fabrics and he went down with a silkscreen and dumped the paint in and took the squeegee and kept going.”
“Squeegee” isn’t exactly a word voters might expect to hear at a presidential debate. It’s been a centerpiece of Clinton’s stump speech since earlier this summer, but Monday night was undoubtedly the first time that many Americans heard her make such a specific and memorable reference to her early life. The anecdote stood in sharp contrast to image that Trump pushed repeatedly over the course of 95 minutes — that Clinton is nothing but a career politician.
To be fair, Clinton has been in the national political spotlight for decades. Life as she knows it now is far removed from the life that she lived as a girl in suburban Chicago, where her father provided her family with what she calls a “solid” middle class lifestyle. Her family spent summers visiting a cottage near Lake Winola in Northeastern Pennsylvania, near where Clinton’s father grew up and where she learned to shoot a gun.
But this summer, in the middle of her second bid for the Oval Office, Clinton shuttled between East Coast vacation spots for the wealthy -- Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, East Hampton -- to raise money for her campaign. And in mid-August, she and Bill Clinton bought the house next door to their home in Chappaqua, New York for $1.16 million.
“Bill and I have been blessed,” Clinton said the day after the debate, at a rally in Raleigh. “We didn’t come from millionaire families. My husband’s father, his biological father, died before he was born. His mother went to nursing school in order to support him. They struggled. They worked hard.”
At an event at the University of New Hampshire in Durham on Wednesday, Clinton and her former rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, discussed how to make college more affordable. At one point, Clinton asked people in the crowd with student debt to raise their hands.
“Look at all those hands,” Clinton said.
She continued: “I decided to go to law school, and my dad said, ‘Well, I can’t help you. That, we’re done. We can’t help you.’ So I kept working. I got a small scholarship, but then I took out loans. And I paid those loans back.”
Clinton’s plan encourages students who borrow to sign up for “income-based repayment plans,” like the one she was on. The program made it possible for her to take a job at the Children’s Defense Fund, where she made $14,000 a year, she said.
That’s very different than the $28.3 million that the Clintons reported earning in 2014, before Clinton’s campaign was underway, thanks in part to a schedule of paid speeches to various groups and companies, including Deutsche Bank. In 2013, according to a list released by her campaign, Clinton earned $225,000 for each of three speeches she made to the Goldman Sachs Group. Her wealth and her connections have contributed to voters’ skepticism about her and, in this cycle, Clinton has at times struggled to make voters feel that she shares their values. Polling has consistently shown that a significant number of voters have negative feelings toward her, as they do toward Trump. A Monmouth University poll released ahead of Monday’sdebate showed that 36 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of Clinton, while 54 percent have an unfavorable view of her.
In turn, Clinton has acknowledged her need to address voters’ doubts and earn their trust. Asked about how she can do that, Clinton and her aides point to her record of producing results for the people that she has represented. That became one of the themes at the Democratic National Convention, where Betsy Ebeling, Clinton’s lifelong friend, cast the votes for Clinton from Illinois during the roll call.
Ebeling has known Clinton since 1958. She grew emotional as she spoke into the microphone and referred to Clinton by two other titles: “sweet friend” and “Dorothy and Hugh’s daughter.”
, ahead of a campaign event in Fort Pierce where Clinton spoke about her commitment to service, the campaign released a new web video featuring Ebeling.
“She wants to give voice to the voiceless,” Ebeling said in the video. “I know it sounds so cheesy, but she truly does. That’s how she lives her life and I think maybe in some ways that’s why people attack her. They just can’t believe that she’s real.”