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Circulation of the above-quoted e-mail, attributed to political commentator Dick Morris, has escalated sharply as the 2016 presidential election draws nearer, but this item began making the online rounds several years ago. Often titled Bill Clinton's Loving Wife or The Truth About Hillary Clinton, this piece has circulated in a number of forms since at least as far back as August 2007. The text has remained mostly constant across iterations. As the message's introduction section frequently states, Dick Morris worked closely with the Clinton White House as a consultant and strategist through much of Bill Clinton's presidency. By the mid-2000s, Morris had became openly critical of both Clintons, and the item reproduced in the example field is similar in tone to his other Clinton-related commentaries. The bulk of the e-mail's content was published under the title DICK MORRIS' '08 PLAY-BY-PLAY ANALYSIS Vol 1, #11 on 25 May 2007 and was framed as a point-by-point rebuttal by Morris of statements Bill Clinton made about Hillary as captured in a 2007 video: An archived copy of this video reveals that Morris often misrepresented what Bill Clinton had actually said in the video and therefore ended up rebutting claims that hadn't been made in the first place. Determining exactly what Hillary Clinton's political aspirations might have been in the 1970s, or the 1990s, is rather difficult and subjective. However, determining what Bill Clinton actually said in the video is simple and doesn't match what Morris asserted: In other words, Bill Clinton said that when he first met Hillary, back when both of them were law school students in the 1970s, Hillary's aspirations at that time didn't include eventual election to public office. He didn't say, as Morris misleadingly implied, that Hillary never changed her viewpoint on that subject at any time in the ensuing decades. Bill Clinton's specific words were: In law school, [Hillary] worked for legal services for poor people, a statement not very different from Morris' paraphrasing. But Bill Clinton additionally stated that Hillary worked at the Yale Child Study Center during her law school years, an assertion matched by information found in sources such as a biography of Hillary Clinton hosted at the The National First Ladies' Library: Morris' claim that Hillary's main extra-curricular activity in law school was helping the Black Panthers, on trial in Connecticut for torturing and killing a federal agent is partly true and partly an exaggeration. As noted in our lengthy article on this topic, Hillary was one of a number of Yale students who played a minor, tangential role in the trial of several Black Panthers (accused of murdering an informant) by organizing volunteers to monitor the legal proceedings for civil rights violations. This activity was far from Hillary's main extra-curricular activity, however: during her time at Yale, Hillary also worked at the Yale Child Study Center, took on cases of child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital, volunteered at New Haven Legal Services, served on Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, worked on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, and interned at the Oakland law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. This claim is a misleading non-sequitur. Hillary both interned with a law firm that included Robert Treuhaft among its name partners while she was a Yale law student, and she performed a year of postgraduate study at the Yale Child Study Center after receiving her law degree. Morris deceptively makes it sounds as if these activities took place at the same time and were therefore mutually exclusive. Morris' emphasis on Robert Treuhaft's former Communist connections is somewhat incongruent with what he stated in his 2004 book about Hillary Clinton, Rewriting History: Morris' column continued by stating: Again, this is a subject covered in a separate article on this site which notes that Hillary indeed failed the Washington D.C. bar exam on her first attempt at it in 1973, but the circumstances were more complicated than suggested: Morris also deceptively reversed the nature of events to make it sound as if Hillary had no job prospects and was only able to obtain work in Arkansas due to the influence of her husband. In fact, Hillary had significant prospects in Washington, D.C., but she passed them up in order to move to Arkansas and remain close to her beau, Bill Clinton: Morris maintained: Morris' claim here is anachronistic: Hillary Rodham's appointment (along with four others) to the Legal Services Board of Directors by President Jimmy Carter was announced on 12 December 1977, while Ted Kennedy didn't officially enter the 1980 presidential race until nearly two years later, in November 1979. Certainly there were earlier indicators that Kennedy was mulling a White House bid against the incumbent President Carter, but at time of Hillary's appointment in December 1977 Carter had been in office less than a year and was almost certainly not planning for a largely unthinkable challenge from within his own party for an election three years in the future. Here again Morris deceptively presents a Yeah, but ... argument that jumps from one item to another, falsely suggesting that two referenced activities (which took place several years apart) were somehow related and/or mutually exclusive. Hillary Clinton was appointed to both the boards of both the Arkansas Children's Hospital (in 1979) and the giant Walmart retail chain (in 1986): Walmart board members who served alongside Clinton suggested she selected her battles strategically: Morris' column went on to say: Again, Morris has misquoted what Bill Clinton said about Hillary Clinton: the former didn't claim his wife created the Children's health Insurance Program; what he he said was that as First Lady she kept working, first to expand healthcare coverage to children ... It is true in a strictly literal sense that Hillary Clinton did not create the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), since she held no elective office at the time of its passage and therefore had no power to enact it. However, contrary to Morris' assertion of Hillary's non-involvement with CHIP's 1997 creation, contemporaneous news accounts reported that CHIP was based on a plan Hillary Clinton had originated four years earlier: A September 2015 Washington Post article also quoted the late Senator Ted Kennedy saying that as First Lady, Hillary Clinton's lobbying efforts with her husband were invaluable in bringing CHIP to fruition: Morris' next claim stated: This is another misquote on Morris' part. In the video clip from which this statement was taken, Bill Clinton actually said only that his wife went to 82 other countries representing the United States, not that she was the face of America all over the world. In any case, since First Ladies hold no elective office, cabinet position, or official diplomatic post, and thus have no power to enact or enforce legislation or policy, their solo visits to other countries are typically about goodwill gestures and publicity, not substantive diplomatic efforts. The motive assigned by Morris for Hillary's travels abroad — that her husband sought to get her out of the way to avoid negative press in the U.S. — is a subjective one for which Morris presented no evidence. Hillary Clinton was elected as U.S. senator representing the state of New York in 2000 and served in that capacity for eight years, from 3 January 2001 until 21 January 2009. A full track record of her legislative tenure is available on Congress.gov and shows that she sponsored only three bills that became law, all of them relatively minor: A bill to establish the Kate Mullany National Historic Site in the State of New York, a bill to name a post office the Major George Quamo Post Office Building, and a bill to designate a highway in New York as the Timothy J. Russert highway. Whether Hillary Clinton's achievements in that elective office were more substantive or meaningless is a primarily subjective judgment, as sponsoring bills that become law is only one metric by which the effectiveness of legislators might be measured. Members of Congress might also be measured by their efforts in introducing and sponsoring bills that fail (but prompt the subsequent passage of similar legislation), by co-sponsoring successful bills (which Senator Clinton did 74 times), by introducing amendments to bills, by lobbying colleagues to vote in favor of pieces of legislation, by rallying public support in favor of particular policies, and other means. In general, although some of the claims made here by Dick Morris were rooted in truth, many of them were straw man arguments made in response to points no one had raised, were exaggerated or misrepresented, were juxtaposed with irrelevant information, or were misleadingly truncated to what could generously be described as half-truths.
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