Democrats have been using their convention speeches this week to make Hillary Clinton look like a can-do politician. On Tuesday, Bill Clinton flatly declared, “She’s a natural leader, she’s a good organizer, and she’s the best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life.” We heard speech after speech about how Hillary cares about the children, about her innovative ability to solve problems. But there is a reason the speeches lack specific examples. Hillary wasn’t much of a change-maker in the U.S. Senate. Sure, being president is different from being a senator, but both jobs require making deals.
Both offices require drawing up proposals and winning the support of others. Given all of the insight she must have gained as first lady, one might have expected her to be better at pushing legislation. She intimately knew all of the players, had Bill by her side, and had access to the tremendous wealth of the Clinton Foundation.
Yet, Hillary’s Senate career is defined by safe, noncontroversial bills, most of which were essentially pure fluff and yet she couldn’t get them passed. In her eight years in the Senate, just one of Hillary’s bills got enacted into law. This bill designated the U.S. courthouse at 40 Centre Street in New York City as the “Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse.”