This may bring it back around a bit for you, ~Susan.

I don't do this for just anyone, but I heard a radio interview with a local author last week, whose next project is a book for young adults about Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have been "out there" working on these things. I transcribed a few minutes of the interview, to give a view of Hillary's background for insight into the issues that will be important to her:

KarenB: There's a fascinating person in our history right, the leading Democratic contender right now, a woman who has done an unbelievable number of things. Many of them quite fascinating, from being the first commencement speaker at Wellesley and getting her picture in Life Magazine for the sharp words she used to Senator Ed Brook, to serving as Secretary of State, and a lot of things in between. So it's turned out to be a very big and complex project, cause she's a pretty complex person.

KrysB: What did you learn about Hillary Clinton the child? What kind of kid was she?

KarenB: She was a lot of what you'd expect an oldest girl to be. She was very driven from an early age, she was a good student, she was interested in politics from a very young age. Her father was a stout Republican and so she was a republican too. She campaigned for Barry Goldwater. She had a hat or shirt that said "Au H2O" the chemical symbols for "gold water," she had a little Goldwater cowboy get up, she was very concerned, like her father, about Republican issues, as a young kid, and she doesn't actually shift politics until she's in college at Wellesley in the heart of the Anti-war movement and in the Civil Rights movement. Some of the things I learned about her that were quite fascinating (40:20) that we don't know so much is that she's a person of very deep faith, she grew up in the Methodist church, she was very involved in her youth group, and there they had a youth group leader not just to issues of faith but to art and culture and poetry, so even 20 years later she's quoting e.e. cummings at something they talked about in these youth group meetings.

She had a strong social bend and as a kid babysat for children of migrant workers who came to her suburb of Chicago when it was still agricultural, before they even built the OHare airport. There are a lot of pieces of her that still show up, including that little Republican streak you see sometimes where she is probably more centerist than people think she is.

Krys: Why was it decided that Bill Clinton would be the first in that relationship to run for office?

Karen: Bill started out wanting to run for office. When they met at Yale, the Law School in the early 1970s, one of the first things he told her was "I've got to go back to Arkansas and run for office, cause that's what I want to do, that's who I am." Her attitude was "I'm not sure exactly what direction I want to go, but you have a pretty clear direction" and for a while they weren't sure it was going to work. She went to work for the Children's Defense Fund, then she gets an opportunity to work on the judiciary committee investigating Richard Nixon. So one of the things I was totally struck by, was this woman has had a front row seat in every significant moment in American history in the last 50 years. As a young person this youth group leader took her and her group to hear Martin Luther King speak in Chicago, she's there at Yale when there's a huge anti-war rallies, and the trial of the Black Panthers, she's on the Nixon Judiciary Committee team, she is involved with all of the things that happened in the 90s from the First Lady's role, but going back to your question, Bill knew from the beginning that he wanted to run for office, and that wasn't waht she thought she wanted to do. She just knew she wanted to do something good in the world.

Krys: What do you expect her primary issues to be:

Karen: This email thing is so consistent for her. She is distrustful of the media, she always has been, she has never really been able to work out a relationship with the media that makes the media feel good about it. They're not quickly receptive, they don't correct issues, certain details that people would just like to clarify or are hard to get corrected by her team and so do things to the letter of the law that to the rest of us might seem impractical.

She's never been as strong a campaigner as Bill. Bill was probably one of the best campaigners of our times. He had a natural ability to speak, he had a natural ability to win confidence in a group. Mario Cuomo one said "you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose" and I think in a lot of ways she's better at the prose than she is at the poetry.

You're stumbling on parts of a complex person, Ake, but when it comes down to it, the Clintons are still in the right place at the right time.