Hillary Clinton was once a young person too

Secretary Clinton’s remarks on “Meet the Press” yesterday about uninformed young people who don’t do their research got me thinking.

She was one of those “young people” long ago, who seized the opportunity in her 1969 Wellesley graduation speech to speak out against the establishment. The college, that had never had a valedictorian or student speaker, allowed her to respond to the moderate Republican politician who also spoke that day, the black, pro-choice senator from Massachusetts, Edward Brooke. Her careful words back then, meant to evoke her generation’s disillusion with Washington politics-as-usual landed her in Life Magazine.

She has, in one way or another, been running for the title of first woman president of the United States ever since, even as she has become one of the middle-of-the-road politicians she once said young people had had enough of.