----------------
What happens when a citizen actually believes a campaigning politician’s idle promises?
At a May 24 Democratic National Committee fund-raiser at the M.C.I. Center in Washington, D.C., Anita Drobny and her 16-year-old daughter, Jessica, found themselves sitting at a table next to Hillary Clinton’s. Jessica Drobny, a high school sophomore from Highland Park, Ill., who had met Mrs. Clinton twice before, took the opportunity to tell the First Lady about a project she was working on for history class; the subject was female genital mutilation (F.G.M.) in Africa. Mrs. Clinton had given speeches about it in the past.
"They had a dialogue for several moments," Anita Drobny said.
"She was really interested," her daughter gushed. Following the exchange, Mrs. Clinton wrote down Jessica’s name and address and promised to send her copies of her notes and speeches on the subject.
By Sunday, June 4, however, the promised material had not arrived. The project was due in three days. So Jessica’s mother, who had contributed $5,000 to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaign, did what any slighted donor would do: She called up the campaign’s Seventh Avenue headquarters to complain. Christopher Fickes, deputy finance director, took the call.
"She was really mad," Jessica later recalled of her mother.
"I can’t imagine that Mrs. Clinton would promise you something and not deliver," Anita Drobny said.
Mr. Fickes passed the problem along to Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s personal assistant at the White House. What followed, according to a source close to the campaign, was "an urgent and worried game of phone tag" between harried underlings.
The staff reacted swiftly to the mounting crisis. A search was ordered for the missing materials and for the staff member responsible for their disappearance. The task of mounting an attack against new Senate campaign opponent Rick Lazio was ever-so-briefly shelved so that Jessica Drobny could get her project in on time.
Eventually, the speeches on F.G.M. were discovered. The campaign staff faxed them to Jessica Drobny. But it was too late. She had finished her project.
A source close to the campaign said that the delay in sending the copies of the speeches occurred because Mrs. Clinton "had told someone on the White House staff, but she thought she had told someone else on the White House staff. It just kept passing from one person to another."
Lissa Muscatine, the First Lady’s press secretary said, "I have a hard time seeing the importance of this, other than that somebody didn’t get information in a timely matter." (That sounds familiar.)
After Jessica had delivered her report, an envelope from the White House containing Mrs. Clinton’s speeches arrived at the Drobny household. It was a poignant reminder of what might have been.
Without the First Lady’s timely help on the project, Jessica failed to get an A. "It’s very hard to get an A in that class," she said.
Leslie Gray Levin, her teacher in the class (World History Since 1500), explained, "The reason why her grade wasn’t an A was she was missing some of the requirements on the requirement sheet." Besides, Mrs. Levin had seen this kind of thing before. "I had a student last year and a student this year who hosted the parties for the Clinton-Gore benefits."
–Jonathan Goldberg