BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.comJanuary 24, 2008
From 2008, when Hillary Clinton was first trying to run for President:
Among those who ardently and eloquently opposed the Clinton "welfare reform" bill was Marian Wright Edelman. Her husband, Peter Edelman, quit his high-level job at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest when Bill Clinton signed the bill. He was deeply upset about what the legislation would do to helpless children.
In a July 2007 interview with Amy Goodman, Marian Wright Edelman had this to say about the "welfare reform bill" and Hillary Clinton:
AMY GOODMAN: Marian Wright Edelman, we just heard Hillary Rodham Clinton. She used to be the head of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, of the organization that you founded. But you were extremely critical of the Clintons. I mean, when President Clinton signed off on the, well, so-called welfare reform bill, you said, “His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” So what are your hopes right now for these Democrats? And what are your thoughts about Hillary Rodham Clinton?
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics. We have to build a constituency, and you don’t—and we profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we need health care, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.
And yet, you know, many years after that, when many people are pronouncing welfare reform a great success, you know, we’ve got growing child poverty, we have more children in poverty and in extreme poverty over the last six years than we had earlier in the year. When an economy is down, and the real test of welfare reform is what happens to the poor when the economy is not booming. Well, the poor are suffering, the gap between rich and poor widening. We have what I consider one of—a growing national catastrophe of what we call the cradle-to-prison pipeline. A black boy today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, a black girl a one-in-seventeen chance. A Latino boy who’s born in 2001 has a one-in-six chance of going to prison. We are seeing more and more children go into our child welfare systems, go dropping out of school, going into juvenile justice detention facilities. Many children are sitting up—15,000, according to a recent congressional GAO study—are sitting up in juvenile institutions solely because their parents could not get mental health and health care in their community. This is an abomination.
Does one's gender make one immune from betraying helpless children and the poor?
Just ask Marian Wright Edelman and Peter Edelman. If you think Edelman's quotation was taken out of context, read the full interview here.
And to those who might think that BuzzFlash is being fed information by the Obama or Edwards camp, you are dreaming. We are disillusioned, to say the least, that the Obama camp appears so deficient in being able to bring Hillary's checkered record on progressive issues out as a campaign issue. We don't know who they have working in their opposition research department, but you can find this stuff on Google, for Christ's sake. The Clinton campaign can run circles around the Obama and Edwards campaigns when it comes to opposition research.
