BY HILLARY CLINTON
What does it take to lead a country? What does it take to get into the number one-ranked (and never pathetically tied) law school in the country? We think there’s a pretty obvious constant: experience.
When we entered Yale Law in the 1970s, we’d cleaned up environmental catastrophes in Alaska, studied as Rhodes Scholars, and had already given commencement addresses.
And, yes, we did it all together, just like we’ve weathered scandal after scandal, conspiracy after conspiracy. Just like we brought peace to Northern Ireland-together. And set tea in the East Wing-together.
We’re fighters.
But that isn’t why we got into Yale. We’re also visionaries – and not just dreamers floating on a wing and a prayer, unlike some in this campaign. We’re concrete. We’re down to earth. We proposed a plan for universal health care. No, it wasn’t 250 words. It was less.
Now, we have nothing against Barack Obama – he’s a talented, sincere young man. And Harvard, we hear, is a pretty decent law school, if, you know, you want to write wills or that sort of basic thing. We just don’t think Barack Obama has the sort of ruthlessness in him that this country needs in order to stamp out a decade of Republican power politics. Let us explain.
We’ve all heard the stories about how baby Barack soothed the waters at Harvard Law Review during that whole Beirut-on-the-Charles period. Pish-posh; can we talk about who has experience ending real international crises? But more to the point – all that bipartisan feel-good nonsense his law school years emanate suggest something terribly wrong. They suggest he can pull it off again. We know that’s not the case.
Had Barack come to Yale, he would have been truly coddled, as we were. Within our cloistered little medieval fortress, our most difficult task was typically finding the center of the Tootsie Roll pops handed out by Guido Calabresi at recess. The point is, we came out of the gate na’ve and clueless, the prince and the princess facing the peasants and their pitchforks. Down came our healthcare plan, down went our hopes for controlling Congress.
Now, thankfully, we’d had all that idle time at Yale to think – meaning, basically, we played foosball and, well, being wannabe-intellectuals, read Machiavelli. We soon became masters of strategy. Gingrich and co. were corralled before the first term was done.
Barry knows that being taken alive by hordes of Republican philistines would have been the best way to hone his skills while scheming to use the battle plans any Yalie worth his salt hatches during a marathon Dungeons and Dragons game with Dean Koh.
But Obama didn’t make it in. He was shipped off to Cambridge, where the FedSoc played nice, and he gone all soft.
So here’s the deal, America. You’re a sinking ship, kinda like, we’ll admit it, Yale. Our Alma Mater hasn’t been able to make a hiring coup in years, and you’re all SOL on the job front, too. Wait, that doesn’t really add up. But neither does Barry Sunbeam’s claim to have gotten into YLS.
How do we know for sure? Okay, we pulled a bit of a Ken Starr ourselves. We checked his 250 – and they’re the 250 longest words possible. And there’s really no room in the vault for something like that, at least, not while we’re still keeping all of John Kerry’s Vietnam memorabilia, all our secret Whitewater files, and all that Inca gold.
Senator Hillary Rodham and fomer President William Jefferson Clinton are 1973 graduates of Yale Law School. Hillary briefly dated an M.I.T. student while attending Wellesley and after learning the nickname of the Wellesley-Cambridge bus swore that neither she nor her children would ever attend a school in Cambridge, MA.