Posted on 10/16/2007 12:30:54 PM PDT by MNJohnnie
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton courted female voters on Tuesday with a plan to expand paid family leave, boost child-care funding and fight workplace discrimination against pregnant women.
In a speech peppered with anecdotes from raising her 27-year-old daughter Chelsea, the former first lady who would be America's first woman president said her plan would cost $1.75 billion a year and be paid for by shutting down certain kinds of tax shelters without expanding the deficit.
"The struggle to balance family and work can be simply overwhelming," the New York senator told a gathering of about 250 people at the Young Women's Christian Association offices in Manchester, New Hampshire.
At the heart of her plan is a $1 billion a year federal grant to encourage states to introduce a paid family leave program by 2016. It also called for an expansion of the Family Medical Leave Act to cover an additional 13 million workers.
"We've got to get back to fiscal responsibility but we have got to get back to family responsibility as well," she said.
The initiative is the centerpiece of Clinton's intensifying focus on the female demographic this week in a series of events under the theme of "Women changing America" -- a bid to attract enough women voters to prevail in both the Democratic presidential nomination and the November 2008 election.
Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, released a memo on Monday that said women will be the deciding force in 2008 and their internal polling shows 94 percent of women under 35 say they would be more likely to vote in the November election if the first woman nominee is on the ballot.
On Monday, Clinton showed up on ABC's female-centered talk show "The View," followed by a luncheon where she reminded the audience she faced similar questions in 2000 over whether New York was ready to elect a women senator.
PERSONAL ANECDOTES
Her six-page policy brief includes plans to encourage workplace flexibility, an awards system for "model workplaces" and plans to promote working from home at federal agencies. It also called for more child-care funding and tougher discrimination laws to protect pregnant women.
"I remember one time when I had to be in court as a young lawyer," she said in one of several personal references to raising Chelsea with former President Bill Clinton.
"Chelsea was sick. The baby sitter wasn't there," she said. "It was just a gut-wrenching feeling and I was lucky enough to have a friend who could come over and watch Chelsea as I ran to court and then ran back home."
Clinton's stories as a working mother struck a chord with some of the mostly female audience.
"I found myself identifying with a lot of the circumstances that she described in her personal life," said Robin Cain, 52, a New Hampshire mother of two who has yet to decide which candidate to back.
"I support the whole Democratic field. I haven't winnowed my choice down," she said.
Small business threatens big business and big government. And big business is just big government in disguise.
I wonder if she would pay anyone on her staff to stay home and be pregnant or take care of their baby-I doubt it-The person would be replaced lickity split. She’s never run a business and doesn’t understand that you can’t pay people to be on vacation all the time. Companies would go broke.
Worse. She simply doesn't care in the least what the impact of her program would be. Like most refugees from the 1960s, it is all about immediate ego gratification.
All the Clinton's have ever cared about is the acquiring of power. Not that they have any vision, any notion of how to responsibly use power, they simply desire power over others for powers sake.
Thus she will say, and do, anything to acquire power. The notion that what she does to acquire power may have longer term disastrous consequences for the USA matters to her not at all.
It is Hillary's hideous lust for power, and absolute lack of any notion of ethical or moral restraint on her exercise of power, that makes her utterly unfit to be leader of a free society
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