At least Hillary Can Speak English!!!

April 20, 2007, 4:53 pm

Clinton Slams Bush Before Sharpton’s Group

By Patrick Healy

Appealing for black and female votes this afternoon in remarks to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s political organization, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was full of personal touches: Using housecleaning imagery to swipe at President Bush, criticizing Don Imus’s “demeaning treatment” of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, and adopting the southern-fried lilt of a preacher at times.

Mrs. Clinton assailed President Bush at several points, particularly over Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts and over Iraq, referring to the latter as “this war that he deliberately started.”
But she mostly calibrated her political message to ask, in personal terms, for support from the audience of the National Action Network – one day before one of her main rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, was to address the group.

“When I walk into the Oval Office in 2009 I’m afraid I’m going to lift up the rug and I’m going to see so much stuff under there,” she told a few hundred people in a midtown Manhattan hotel banquet room. “You know, what is it about us always having to clean up after people?”

“But this is not just going to be picking up socks off the floor. This is going to be cleaning up the government,” she said, drawing applause from the audience.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have been competing aggressively to win over various blocs of the black vote: Intellectuals, the wealthy and the lower income, southern blacks, blue-collar workers, and now those associated with Mr. Sharpton, who are some of the more liberal members of the black community.

Other candidates have also appeared at the group’s ninth annual convention this week, including former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Mrs. Clinton said she met earlier today with C. Vivian Stringer, coach of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, the Scarlet Knights, who together spoke out against remarks deemed racist and sexist that were made by Don Imus, who was fired for the comments.

Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Sharpton’s group that “we owe that extraordinary woman a debt of gratitude.”

“She and her young players taught us all a lesson,” Mrs. Clinton said. She noted that she, Mr. Sharpton, and Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also attended the conference, have been attacked for years, and after a while political figures begin to tune out such criticism.

“It took these extraordinary young women to say enough is enough, and we need to stand with them and be clear that as women we will not put up with the degradation and demeaning treatment that is too often put upon young women,” Mrs. Clinton said.

At times today, Mrs. Clinton’s slight, flat Midwestern accent dissolved in a cadence-laden speaking style that is more associated with a Southern Baptist minister (or her husband) than with her. Sometimes it was the “g” at the end of a gerund that disappeared, like “runnin’” instead of running. Sometimes her voice went soft at the end of sentences.

She has spoken like this to black audiences before, most memorably at a black church in Selma, Alabama, this winter when both she and Mr. Obama were in the town to commemorate a civil rights anniversary. Mr. Obama, who usually speaks without an accent, sometimes displays a similar lilt as well, and Mr. Edwards’s North Carolina accent sometimes sounds much sharper than at other moments.

After Mrs. Clinton’s remarks, a reporter asked Mr. Sharpton if he thought she was pandering for black votes by sounding like she did.

“No,” he said, “people kind of relate to audiences. I don’t know if I heard as much differences as people said.”


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.