Hillary Clinton

NEW YORK, NY July 27, 2007 —Senator Clinton is currently leading her rivals for Democratic presidential nomination. And her margin is even wider among women than men. Many voters, of course, remain undecided. . . .And among those are a group of women Clinton has always had trouble reaching. WNYC’s Fred Mogul reports on members of what might be called the Hillary Generation – and why some of them are so disenchanted with her.

VOICE: Josephine Cardona? . . .Manuel Santana? Santana, Manuel?

REPORTER: It’s a typical weekday morning at the Morris Heights Health Center in the Bronx. Expecting mothers are getting pre-natal check-ups and kids and grown-ups are attending to various mental and physical health needs.

VOICE: See those letters there? Read them for me . . .

REPORTER: In the past 30 years, Morris Heights Health Center has grown from a small neighborhood clinic into a multi-million-dollar network serving tens of thousands of patients annually. President and CEO Verona Greenland helped found it and has been the architect of that growth. She’s taking a break between meetings with senior staff, job applicants and compliance officers to talk politics. A little reluctantly. With almost 85% of her clients on Medicaid or uninsured, Greenland has been on the front lines of federal healthcare policy for decades. And for the last 15 years, she has closely followed Clinton’s work.

GREENLAND: She’s been a really good fighter for us in terms of community health centers. Usually whatever we ask her to do, she’s been very, very supportive of us.

REPORTER: Greenland admires Clinton and says she’d support her in a general election without a second thought. But for the primary, she hasn’t made up her mind. Many women with similar educational, professional and political backgrounds are saying similar things. They’re awed by her intelligence and charisma -- both of which Greenland has seen up close. And yet she feels that Clinton...

GREENLAND: ...has become maybe a little bit more conservative than I would like her to be. Maybe she deliberates and considers every single word before it’s uttered. When you listen to her speaking, there are times you just wonder whether or not she’s just protecting herself making sure she’s really not just making a mistake, and sometimes it’s really hard to figure where is she: on the right, or the left or the middle? She’s all over the place.

CLINTON: I have seen cases where I honestly believed that the moral choice was very complicated and not so straightforward about what a young woman, her family, her pastor should do...

REPORTER: This perception is not unique to women. It comes up again and again, with men, too. Lots of people believe Clinton is cautious and calculating, poll-tested and focus-grouped. Some women who are contemporaries of Clinton find it especially troubling. They seem to take it personally that one of their own has become such a consummate compromiser. Greenland has mixed feelings.

GREENLAND: If she decided to take her hat off and let her hair down and sometimes say really what she really wants to say, she would not survive. As a society, we push them into a corner, because we’re really very unforgiving. We really don’t want to hear the truth.

REPORTER: One of the things that many women DO want to hear is Clinton disavowing her Senate vote for the Iraq war in 2002.

FENTIMAN: Her unwillingness to say, “Look, I was misled and I wouldn’t do it that way again”— I think it’s very troubling.

REPORTER: Linda Fentiman is another woman who says she feels a kinship with Clinton but has deep ambivalence. The Pace University Law School professor is one year younger than the former first lady and has spent much of her career championing similar causes – especially access to healthcare. Fentiman says she tries not to judge Clinton either more or less harshly because Clinton is a woman. But she feels saddened that the first serious female presidential candidate strikes her as so insincere.

FENTIMAN: I think that refusal to acknowledge that she might have erred -- while it may be reasonable because we know from politics that the opposition is always quick to pick up on any sense of weakness -- but I think that’s why the Obama candidacy and the Edwards candidacy have more appeal. They spin as well, but they seem to be a little more authentic.

REPORTER: Those candidates may have more appeal to Fentiman, but Clinton is still leading Obama and Edwards by double-digit margins in several recent polls. A Washington Post and ABC News survey shows Clinton leading Obama by 45 points to 30 among Democratic-leaning voters, and by 49 votes to 33 specifically among women. Edwards is a very distant third. That still leaves many women *not* backing Clinton’s candidacy, of course, and some are downright opposed to her. In a Mason-Dixon survey, 47 percent of women respondents said they would not vote for Clinton under any circumstances. Pollster Peter Hart thinks on Iraq, Clinton is playing it the only way she can, considering she’s running to be the commander-in-chief in post-911 America.

CLINTON: I do not think that was necessarily a wrong judgment at the time. What is wrong is the way this president misused the authority that some of us here gave him, and that has been a tragedy

HART: By not apologizing she keeps in mind the important thing that people need to see: a woman being tough enough when it comes to national security. And I think that’s something she’s done well. Can she apologize for something? I bet she can. But she’s not going to apologize for national security, because that’s going to put her in a sort of John Kerry quagmire: first you said you’re for it, and now you say you’re against it.

REPORTER: Hart, whose firm conducts polls for NBC and the Wall Street Journal, concurs that many undecideds – and especially many women – find Clinton “highly programmed” and “in-authentic.” For many of them, these traits are infuriating, but Hart says this sort of discipline is part of Clinton’s character – and her success.

HART: It doesn’t allow for that sort of broad, wide-open, good-fellowship kind of personality. I think that essentially she holds everything together very, very tightly and very closely, and I think at some stage she will have to relate better to the electorate as a whole.

REPORTER: Many women who back Clinton say she’s held to a higher standard than male politicians. Carol Bellamy, a former state senator, City Council president and head of UNICEF, thinks Clinton’s discipline and her pragmatism are strengths.

BELLAMY: I hope she is practical. I think politics and government has to be practical. That doesn’t mean lowest common denominator. That doesn’t mean always the ends justify the means. But it does mean you have to be realistic.

REPORTER: Bellamy is strongly in Clinton’s camp, but she also thinks highly of Obama, Edwards and others. She believes her party has several strong candidates who would be “electable” in a general race nation-wide. Polls show her fellow Democrats largely agree and are similarly pleased with their options. And many of them say they’re glad they have many months left to decide on a candidate