So I understood the frustration of the Black Lives Matter activists, and I respected their conviction. I knew they spoke from a lifetime of being ignored and disrespected by authority figures. But I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the question of how to develop and advance a concrete agenda on racial justice.
“There has to be some positive vision and plan that you can move people toward,” I said. “The consciousness raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical. But now all I’m suggesting is—even for us sinners—find some common ground on agendas that can make a difference right here and now in people’s lives.”
We went round and round awhile longer on these questions, but it felt like we were talking past one another. I don’t think any of us left the conversation very satisfied.
I took seriously the policies some of the Black Lives Matter activists later put forward to reform the criminal justice system and invest in communities of color. I asked Maya and our team to work closely with them. We incorporated the best of their ideas into our plans, along with input from civil rights organizations that had been in the trenches for decades. In October 2015, my friend Alexis Herman, the former Secretary of Labor, hosted a meeting in Washington for me with another group of activists. We had an engaging discussion about how to improve policing, build trust, and create a sense of security and opportunity in black neighborhoods. They spoke about feeling not only like outsiders in America but intruders—like someone no one wants, no one values. As one woman put it, “If you look like me, your life doesn’t have worth.” It was wrenching to hear a young American say that.
Finding the right balance between principle and pragmatism isn’t easy. One example of how hard that was for me was the effort to reform welfare in the nineties—another tough compromise that remains controversial. Bill and I both believed that change was needed to help more people get the tools and support to transition from welfare to work, including assistance with health care and childcare. But Republicans in Congress were determined to rip up the social safety net. They wanted to slash funding and guarantees for welfare, Medicaid, school lunches, and food stamps; deny all benefits even to documented immigrants; and send children born out of wedlock to teen mothers to orphanages—all while offering little support to people who wanted to find work. It was cold-blooded. I encouraged Bill to veto the Republican plan, which he did. They passed it again with only minimal changes. So he vetoed it again. Then Congress passed a compromise plan. It was still flawed but on balance seemed like it would help more than it hurt.
It was a hard call. Bill and I lay awake at night talking it over. The new plan no longer block granted Medicaid and food stamps and instead put more money into them, along with childcare, housing, and transportation for people moving from welfare to work. We hoped Bill’s administration would be able to fix some of the legislation’s problems in a second term and keep pressing to do more to help Americans lift themselves out of poverty. Ultimately, he decided to accept the bad with the good and sign the legislation into law.
Two of the loudest voices opposing the compromise plan belonged to Marian Wright Edelman and her husband, Peter, who was an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Marian wrote an impassioned op-ed in the Washington Post calling this the “defining moral litmus test” of Bill’s presidency. Peter resigned in protest. I respected Marian’s and Peter’s position—in fact, I expected no less from them—but it was painful to see one of the defining relationships of my life become strained.
There was never a full breach, and eventually we were drawn back together by the same shared passions that made us such close friends in the first place. Marian and I both threw ourselves into the fight to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which emerged out of the ashes of the Clinton administration’s failure to pass universal health care reform in 1993–1994. I learned a lot of lessons about what it takes to get things done in Congress, including how to work across the aisle and lean more effectively on outside allies like Marian. Those lessons paid off when CHIP became a bipartisan success story that continues to provide health care to millions of kids every year. Now Donald Trump proposes dismantling the program, which would be tragic.
In 1999, when I paid a visit to the Children’s Defense Fund’s farm in Tennessee for the dedication of a library in honor of the writer Langston Hughes, Marian and I went for a long walk around the grounds. It felt good to be back by her side. The next year, I watched with great pride as Bill awarded Marian the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of advocacy.
Looking back, our disagreement over welfare reform was a testament to how deeply we both cared about policy—and to how different it is to be an advocate on the outside as opposed to a policy maker on the inside. What didn’t change, though, and what ultimately brought us back together, was the passion we shared for children.
For me, it always comes back to children. The one core belief I’ve articulated more often and more fervently than any other in all my years in public life is that every child deserves the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. I’ve said that line so many times, I’ve lost count. But the idea remains as powerful and motivating for me as ever. I continue to believe that a society should be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable among us, especially children, and that the measure of our success should be how many kids climb out of poverty, get a good education, and receive the love and support they deserve.
This has been a consistent through-line of my career, starting with my days with Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund, and my work as a law student on early childhood development at the Yale Child Study Center and on child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital. Maybe it goes back even further, to the lessons I learned from my mother about her own painful childhood. She went out of her way to help girls in our town who were in trouble, in need, or just looking for a friend, because she believed that every child deserves a chance and a champion. I came to believe that too, and in every job I’ve ever held, I’ve tried to be that champion. It’s a big part of why I ran for President and what I’d hoped to accomplish if I won.
I’m sure that in our hypercynical age, this sounds like just a lot of happy talk—the kind of thing politicians say when they’re trying to show their softer side. After all, who doesn’t love kids? Everybody professes to, even when their policies would actually hurt children. But I mean it. This is real for me.
Nothing makes me more furious than seeing kids get taken advantage of or mistreated—or not getting the opportunity, the support, the encouragement, and the security they need to succeed. You’ve already read about how hard it is for women in politics to express anger the way men do, and how I’ve struggled with the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t double bind that presents. But for me, there’s always been an exception when it comes to children. I have zero patience for adults who hurt or neglect kids. My temper just boils over. That’s what sparked many of the big battles I’ve taken on in my career.
For example, I fought so hard for health care reform in the nineties in part because of some children I met at a hospital in Cleveland. The kids all had preexisting conditions, so their families couldn’t get insurance. One father of two little girls with cystic fibrosis told me the insurance company said, “Sorry, we don’t insure burning houses.” He pointed to his girls with tears in his eyes and said, “They called my little girls burning houses.” His words nearly knocked the wind out of me. And the thought of those kids kept me going through every stumble and setback, until we finally convinced Congress to pass CHIP.