Portrait of the statist as a young lady
Paul Mirengoff
MSNBC has a report on Hillary Clinton's senior thesis -- the one she wrote in 1969 as a 21 year old Wellesley student about radical activist Saul Alinski. Over at the AOL blog, I contend that, while the story is an intersting one to an aging ex-radical like me, it isn't likely to mean anything in the 2008 election.
Why, you might ask, did the Clintons block access to the thesis for many years? Because they are the Clintons. ...
Clinton White House Suppressed Hillary's Senior Thesis
Ed Morrissey
The Hillary Clinton campaign will have a few more questions to answer about her husband's tenure in office after MS-NBC reported this morning that his administration demanded the suppression of her senior thesis at Wellesley:
"I got a call from someone at the White House — I don't remember who — shortly after the inauguration, saying the Clintons had decided not to release her thesis," professor Alan H. Schechter told MSNBC.com.
"I said, 'Why? It's a good thesis.' I got some mumbo jumbo about how they were beginning to work on health care and she had criticized Sen. Moynihan in the thesis, and didn't want to alienate him.'"
In fact, the thesis from 1969 contains not a negative word about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, and Schechter allows that the real source of fear must have been the subject of the academic paper: Chicago radical organizer Saul Alinsky. ...
On one hand, trying to determine someone's political views by reading a thesis written four decades earlier is silly. Ronald Reagan was an FDR Democrat until middle age, as were several Republican politicians. Hillary herself flirted with the College Republicans at one time in her career. People grow out of some nonsense, especially during their college years, when they have a lot of pressure to try out some of the sillier political positions on the spectrum.
However, the thesis isn't really the story. What's news is the Clinton effort to hide the thesis, proving once again that the coverup is worse than the crime. The Clintons had no problem extorting Wellesley into hiding Hillary's thesis, which makes one wonder what else the Clintons managed to bury during their two terms in the White House.
