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Posted: July 30, 2007 5:25 PM
Clinton Talks to Young Democrats; Cleavage Gets Notice
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Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., got mixed reactions at a College Democrats of America convention held at the University of South Carolina in Columbia on Saturday.

Emily Hawkins, the campaign’s national youth outreach director, wrote that “the audience was incredibly energized throughout her speech, and the feedback I heard from students afterwards was overwhelmingly positive. I think she both connected with them on a personal level and provided concrete examples of what she will do to bring about the changes they are out there organizing for.”

The State’s Roddie Burris wrote that a protester who approached the stage displaying a placard reading, “She doesn’t care. All she wants is power,” was shouted down by the crowd and removed by staff. Clinton told the audience, “One of the things I love about politics is, you never know what another day will bring.”

Clinton spoke to Beaufort County Democrats in Beaufort, S.C., later in the day, then finished out the weekend at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Monday night, Clinton plans to hold a fund raiser in Bergen County, New Jersey. She expects to be in Washington, D.C., with no public campaign events for the rest of the week. Next weekend, she is scheduled to travel back to New York for a series of fund raisers with her husband former President Clinton in the Hamptons.

Clinton’s cleavage, meanwhile, was the subject of much political chatter last week. It all started July 17, when Clinton donned a moderately low-cut blouse and spoke about higher education on the Senate floor. Two days later, Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan analyzed her attire, saying, “there was the sense that you were catching a surreptitious glimpse at something private. … Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. … To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres is a provocation. It requires that a woman be utterly at ease in her skin, coolly confident about her appearance, unflinching about her sense of style.”

The campaign’s response was to turn the situation into a fund-raising opportunity, by sending a July 27 letter to potential donors decrying the “insulting” story as “grossly inappropriate.”

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz gave his fellow columnist her say the following day: “Givhan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism last year, said she disagreed ‘that there was anything in the column that was coarse, insulting or belittling. It was a piece about a public person’s appearance on the Senate floor that was surprising because of the location and because of the person.’” Kurtz goes on to note, “Stories about the physical appearance of candidates, from Al Gore’s earth-tone wardrobe to John Edwards’ $400 haircut to a bathing suit shot of Barack Obama in a People spread on ‘Beach Babes,’ have long been an entertaining sideshow. But since no journalist has plunged into this particular territory, given the predominantly male nature of past White House contests, Givhan’s Style column has sparked plenty of reaction, much of it negative.”

On a decidedly different note, the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich describes four years of correspondence between Clinton and college pen pal John Peavoy. The letters, “written in a tight, flowing script with near-impeccable spelling and punctuation,” depict a pensive, motivated, self-analytical, and somewhat withdrawn and melancholy Wellesley student. She is critical of her classmates, yet thoughtful: “Freshman year, she divulges that a junior in her dorm had been caught at a boyfriend’s apartment in Cambridge at 3:15 a.m. ‘I don’t condone her actions,’ Ms. Rodham declares, ‘but I’ll defend to expulsion her right to do as she pleases — an improvement on Voltaire.” Her last letter to Peavoy is dated March 25, 1969. A senior headed for law school, she writes, “‘I’m sitting here at a stolen table in a pair of dirty denim bell-bottoms, a never-ironed work shirt and a beautiful purple felt hat with a purple polka-dotted scarf streaming off it.’ … ‘I’m really tired of people slamming doors and screaming obscenities at poor old life.’”

Peavoy shared the letters, which he kept and had previously shown biographer Gail Sheehy in the late 1990s, to the New York Times upon request. The two lost touch after college, and Peavoy told the Times, “‘For all I know she’s mad at me for keeping the letters.’” The letters do not appear to contain anything potentially damaging to Clinton’s run for president.