Chelsea Clinton presented her mother, Hillary Clinton, as the best advocate for women’s issues in the 2016 presidential election at a campaign stop at Urban Sprouts Child Development Center in Olivette on Monday, March 14.
Chelsea pointed out that Hillary has been working to increase health coverage and drive down the costs of health care and pharmaceutical drugs since Bill Clinton’s first presidency in the early 1990s. She did not mention Bernie Sanders, Hillary’s rival for the Democratic nomination, or his proposal to push for a single-payer health plan that would undo the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama’s health reform. But she said that Hillary will “protect the work of Barack Obama” on health care.
She pointed to the considerable improvements in American health care under the ACA, saying that in 2015 more American women received “the full complement” of prenatal medical services and delivered their children in medically approved environments than at any other time in history, thanks to the ACA.
“My mom wants to protect the Affordable Care Act, as well as finish the work,” Chelsea said.
She presented her mother as an advocate for offering and extending paid maternity leave. Just as she could point to Hillary’s work on health reform in the early ‘90s, she could point to her mother’s past activism on this issue.
She said when her mother went on maternity leave in 1979, the law firm where she worked had no policy for paid maternity leave since it had never before had someone leave the firm to bear a child and then return to work. So Hillary wrote the firm’s first maternity leave policy. She then pushed Bill Clinton, Arkansas governor at the time, to offer state employees paid maternity leave for the first time.
Chelsea presented her mother as a hardened battler on important issues, who regroups and seeks smaller victories when her more ambitious plans are defeated. She pointed out that Hillary salvaged her failure to enact more sweeping health care reform in the early ‘90s by helping to forge the bipartisan coalition that created the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides health coverage to children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to afford private coverage.
Like many other campaign surrogates for Hillary, including U.S. Senator Cory Booker, Chelsea stressed that the next president will have to work with a Republican majority in one if not both houses of Congress, and Hillary has a better track record than her opponent of accomplishing things in that climate.
“We need a president who has a record of finding common cause,” Chelsea said. “Our children can’t wait for all the stars to align.”
She presented her mother as a political figure who has withstood vicious personal and political attacks for decades. This will be critical in the general election, she said, at a time when the Republican Party is experiencing what she described as “almost a normalization of hate speech.”
“We need a president who knows how to stand her ground,” Chelsea said.
Chelsea, who has graduate degrees from Columbia and Oxford universities and works for the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, mostly stuck to substance in her 15-minute speech. But she did offer a few personal remarks as the candidate’s daughter.
She spoke about her own daughter, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky, and her baby on the way (she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, chose to wait until birth to learn the child’s gender). “I didn’t know I could care more about politics,” she said – but the experience of being a mother made her care about the political process even more. She said that leaving her child at home in New York when she travels to campaign reminds her of Hillary connecting with her as a child when her mother had to travel for work.
“I couldn’t ask for a better grandmother for my children,” Chelsea said of Hillary. “And I couldn’t ask for a better president for all of our children.”
The Missouri presidential preference primary is tomorrow, Tuesday, March 15.
