The Big Answer

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Clinton has written probably the best book ever written by a first lady. Having done this in the middle of all the investigations into her husband and herself (investigations choreographed by the Right-Wing Conspiracy, according to her—who can say how much truth there is in such an allegation?) says a lot about her strength and courage, and the book itself shows how wise and caring she is. We can be proud to have had such a first lady.

Hillary Clinton

Most of the book is right on and most of it supports her theme: that it takes more than just an isolated family to raise kids in the 90s and into the 21st century. It takes community, social support systems, etc.

The only real fault with her work is that it assumes that since there are no villages to speak of and communities contain more isolated, disconnected and alienated people than their opposite, governments must make up for what “villages” no longer do. And of course that means programs, etc. That leap is made a bit too quickly. People are still people; they still care about their families and communities. They still yearn for community. Why not use the information we have to help make communities work better so that we needn’t resort to the infamous tax-and-spend solutions so hated by conservatives, and so unpopular in the population in general since the turn of the millenium?

Perhaps tax-and-spend liberalism has had its day and we need a better idea (MCs)

MCs would cost no tax money whatsoever—in fact they’d save it. They’d be much more effective than all the programs put together. And people would be very happy with them because they would create communities that worked even better than they did in the “good old days.” And good character would be the backbone of successful communities, not programs. Money cannot buy us a better country. The strengthening of character can and will help us evolve a better country, however. See Why Register for an MC?.

Registering for MC search and match

The Tofflers and Newt Gingrich strongly advocate the new, ecological-holistic paradigm replacing the old, reductionistic-mechanistic paradigm

We need to—as Toffler and Newt Gingrich remind us—adopt the values and attitudes appropriate to the Third Wave and—as countless authors keep reminding us—shift to the new, ecological-holistic paradigm. We need to transcend the overuse of power via wealth and coercion (low-quality power) and adopt the habit of experiencing high-quality power in the form of knowledge and the caring that evolves from the wisdom the knowledge bestows upon us. With this in mind, we need to try to refrain from thinking that lower-quality money power is somehow going to make up for our lack of higher-quality information power. (If the whole world had all the MC wisdom that exists—as of tomorrow—and began acting on it soon, we’d soon have—for free and with no taxes, programs, social engineering, funding, or politics involved—a world that works.)

Politicians attempt to use money to try to make up for the lack of good parenting which causes endless symptoms. Lots of social symptoms? Throw money 'at 'em! (It never works but they keep doing it anyway!)

Politicians attempt to use money to try to make up for the lack of good parenting knowledge or good parenting education, dealing with the symptoms of misparenting by throwing money at them. Instead of being content to fund putting bandages on the omnipresent social symptoms, politicians should somehow insist that the use of the money accomplishes getting good authoritative parenting information out there and in use. The tragic statistics about the well-being of children in this country show that this isn’t happening. One hopes Hillary Clinton will drop political goals in the future—which are all accomplished by the use of the act of money allocation—and replace these with goals that are about spreading the needed wisdom to actually help parenting in the U.S. be a wonderfully successful endeavor, not a frustrating exercise in trial-and-error. There are signs that she’s already starting to think in these directions. This book is a start. (But it’s framed in a political context that needs to be replaced by an MC context.)

We'd have loved it had she won the primary in the 2008 presidential race rather than Obama, and then gone on to be president. Obama has blown it since day one. She is simply a better—and wiser—person than Obama or Bush will ever be and we hope (it's 2014) she runs for president in 2016. Besides, Obama has told so many fibs that his nose has grown longer than a giant's tallywhacker.

Obama turning into Pinocchio due to fibbing