What her Wellesley classmates remember about Hillary’s first term—in 1968.
.. She had just spent much of her summer in Washington, interning on Capitol Hill. At a historic juncture of acute anti-establishment fervor, she told them to trust the system. Progress at Wellesley, she explained, “often results through action taken by the Senate of the College Government Association.”
.. During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration.
“Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.
.. centrist, cautious, respectful of authority, progressive but never at the expense of maintaining access to the seats of power.
.. “She knew how to temper things.”
.. The graduation speech offered a largely progressive message, but she delivered it in language that was far from incendiary, more of a manifesto of moderation than a revolutionary’s battle cry.
.. The thrust of the thesis was what Rodham viewed as the inherent limits of radical activism
.. by the spring of her freshman year, his daughter was the gung-ho head of Wellesley’s Young Republicans organization.
.. “If we get this going, maybe we’ll see a change before we graduate,” she announced, according to the next day’s Boston Globe—one of the first public signals of her patient, incrementalist disposition.
.. In a letter to a friend from high school, she said she was an “agnostic intellectual liberal” but “an emotional conservative.”
.. “Can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”
.. Her platform, such as it was, characteristically leaned heavily on a faith in Robert’s Rules of Order.
.. Black students who had founded a civil rights group called Ethos threatened a hunger strike if the administration of the college wouldn’t agree to their demands for more black students and more black professors. All of them considered Rodham a friend.
“Hillary was always supportive of the African-American students,” Karen Williamson, one of the most active Ethos members, told me. “I know she signed the petitions.”
.. Rodham helped put together—she stood up to an economics professor who suggested students not going to class was “a know-nothing attitude” and not much of a sacrifice.
.. the typed-out minutes of the meetings Rodham ran as college government president show an interesting, unmistakable pattern: Rodham is mentioned actually relatively infrequently. She opens the meetings, and she usually closes them. The rest of the time, it’s almost always other people doing the talking.
.. She was a capable orator, many of them told me, but was much more comfortable as a listener.
.. she stressed that this wasn’t just a vehicle for student demands. “The committee,” she explained, “will include nine students, four faculty members and the president of the college …”
.. “Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote. “Catharsis has a way of perpetuating itself so that it becomes an end in itself.”
Get Ready for the ‘Real’ Donald Trump
All year, Trump has spoken to virtually all-white audiences, but now we are told that will change. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Trump would actually set foot in “churches, charter schools and small businesses in black and Latino communities.”
.. And, according to Carson, Trump is now getting ready for his big adventure — “prepping the ground” for talking to minorities by talking to white people about minorities.
.. That’s his deep-felt feeling? African-Americans have it so bad that they might as well vote for Trump, even if they think he’s a racist?
.. after a record of “insulting and ignoring our community,” Trump has decided to “finally reach out.”
.. “he is not talking to us, he is talking at us.”
Donald Trump’s Description of Black America Is Offending Those Living in It
Dogged by suggestions that he is running a racist campaign, Mr. Trump has been speaking about and expressing concern for black voters more in the past week than at any other point in his presidential run.
But he has been doing so in front of nearly all-white audiences.
.. some African-Americans who have been listening say the picture Mr. Trump has been painting of black America — a nightmare of poverty, death and danger, brought about by failed Democratic policies and leadership — is unrecognizable.
.. “You could go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting, and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities,” Mr. Trump said in Akron.
.. His sales pitch can also sound bluntly dismissive.
“What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?” he asked a crowd in Virginia on Saturday. “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”
.. His credibility problems with blacks stem in part from his role in leading the so-called birther movement that questioned President Obama’s birthplace, an attempt to delegitimize Mr. Obama’s presidency that offended great numbers of African-Americans.
.. Mr. Morial, of the Urban League, noted that the group had invited Mr. Trump to attend briefings on its policy concerns, but that he had declined.
Why Blacks Loathe Trump
This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report:
“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”
.. “The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.”
.. approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American. Indeed, the Muslim faith has deep roots in the black community because many Africans brought to this country as slaves were Muslims.