Another softball interview by the sycophantic press. Why expect anything different.
Posted on 10/25/2007 4:42:20 AM PDT by fweingart
Full Transcript of Interview with Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton knows who she won't get a 60th birthday gift from - her arch-nemesis Rudy Giuliani.
Once she stopped laughing at the question, the Democrats' presidential front-runner said she wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the leading Republican candidate's gift list, regardless of their New York connection.
"Well, ya know, I think somehow on Rudy's list, I would not be in the top, oh, 1,000," Clinton joked as she talked exclusively to the Daily News about life, health, family, dreams and the milestone birthday she hits tomorrow.
Asked how she has changed as she gets older, the hard-charging Clinton sounded almost Zen-like.
"Like a lot of people, I have gotten more patient, I have a better sense of what's really important in life. I'm not as, shall we say, workaholic, even though I work hard, it's not all-consuming. I just feel like I have a much more balanced view of life."
Not a workaholic? This from a woman who on Monday was in California, Tuesday in Washington State for a fund-raising breakfast and visit to the Microsoft campus, and on to Colorado for a rally, then back to Washington to cast a Senate vote Wednesday before flying to Iowa. She is due back in New York for a star-studded birthday party/fund-raiser tonight at the Beacon Theatre.
She approaches her seventh decade with what any 60-year-old wants most - good health - but Clinton recalled a potentially fatal scare in 1998.
It came while she was campaigning on behalf of Chuck Schumer's New York Senate bid and a swollen right foot caused her terrible pain. She thought she just needed to slow down from constant flying.
A White House doctor told her to rush to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where doctors diagnosed a large blood clot behind her right knee.
"That was scary because you have to treat it immediately - you don't want to take the risk that it will break lose and travel to your brain, or your heart or your lungs. That was the most significant health scare I've ever had."
Clinton said she no longer takes blood thinners and otherwise has enjoyed good health while zig-zagging across the country for the past nine months, keeping a schedule that exhausts aides half her age.
"I'm lucky that I've got a good stamina," said Clinton, who admits to getting tired sometimes. "I try to take care of myself. It's much harder on the road [since] there's too much junk food and temptation around. I don't exercise as much as I did before I got into the real heat of the presidential campaign, but I try to get out and walk."
Although she recently joked at an AARP convention that "60 is the new 50," she also spoke about the inevitability of aging.
"I do lose friends all the time," she told The News. "I realize that is a part of my growing older along with them." Her dearest Arkansas friend, Diane Blair, died of lung cancer in 2000 at age 61.
"I am someone who believes that death is part of life," Clinton went on. "I don't have any fear of it, I don't have any anxiety about it. I just want to live every day to the best that I can."
Clinton said she and daughter Chelsea are in touch "all the time," either by phone every few days or e-mail. "We try to see each other often - I'm so happy she is in New York, that makes it easier. But she's got a very busy life, and I respect that."
And though Chelsea is now a successful 27-year-old - she works at a Manhattan hedge fund and has her own apartment and a boyfriend - "I don't think a mother ever stops worrying," Clinton said.
"The real trick is not to be too obvious about the worrying when they get to be adults, because ya know, that's a little too much of a burden to impose on them." Does she dream about a White House wedding for Chelsea and grandkids in the Oval Office?
"I really don't," Clinton said. "I want to respect her choices like my mother respected my choices. I'm going to let her life unfold at her pace."
While many women see their 60s as an opportunity to wind down their work life and perhaps take up new hobbies, Clinton's Act 3 "project" is running the free world. "I'm so grateful that I have a project like running for President that I believe in so strongly," she said. "It's a good time in my life."
Asked what she would be doing if she hadn't entered politics on her own, the former First Lady replied, "maybe teaching, and writing, and working in philanthropic endeavors on behalf of kids here at home and around the world."
Given all the personal and political turbulence she experienced in her marriage and the White House, Clinton sounded remarkably at peace. "I feel like I've had a very lucky life," she said.
So what will the woman who wants to make history in 2008 as the first female President be wishing when she closes her eyes and blows out the candles tomorrow?
"I really have everything that I could ever hope for," she said. "I feel very fortunate. I'm thrilled to be making this race for President.
"Obviously I hope and expect that I will win. But I know it doesn't come from wishing, it comes from hard work. And I am going to do everything between now and then to make that happen."
She uses her hideous laughter to fill in the airspace....less opportunity for tough questions.
Who is the talk radio guy who’s been playing that cackle in the background a lot lately? I don’t get to listen to talk radio much and I forget which show I heard this on, about a week ago. He was having great fun playing the Hillary Holloween Cackle. Right out of a fun-house, I tell you. Right smack out of an old fashion fat-lady-cackling fun-house.
Another softball interview by the sycophantic press. Why expect anything different.
They used up next year's entire supply of softballs for the nation's evening slow-pitch leagues...
It think that was Sean Hannity - he has been playing it so much that the callers are begging him to stop.
I agree - she is so grating.
Must be from all that carpet munching.
I think a good Republican Ad in the general election would be a 30 second clip of a North Korean missile parade with no sound other than the Hillary Cackle loud and clear. Maybe interspersed with a moment or two of some hundred dollar bills being counted out into an outstretched hand. And a one second blip of a New Yorker jumping out the window of a burning World Trade Center tower.
Does that match her perpetually swollen ankles and thighs ?
This article should have been titled:'My Life As A Dog.'
She talks like a teenager who is trying to sound grown up.
I predict that we will mobilize against her like no other mobilization against an opponent candidate in US presidential history. I predict a vast upwilling of anti-Hillary sentiment in the 2008 election. And I plan on being right there. In my own little corner of it. Doing everything I can to make sure that that evil skank does not become our lord and master.
Good observation, but even more telling is the fact that Dick Morris was questioned about her frequent use of laughter and he said that she has been trained to laugh when she becomes angry at a question. It is her natural personality trait when angry to say something really snotty like "What do you want me to do, stay at home and back cookies"; or worse yet, Hillary starts cursing. She has even been known to become violent when angry. Hillary is being trained by her handlers how to appear more mainstream. So that's why her laughter seems so strange and exaggerated. Body language experts said on Bill O that her laughter is not genuine. She is just using to hide her very inappropriate personality traits, at least for a leader of the free-world. Her personality would have been just fine had she turned 60 in World War 2 Germany, but for the United States of America, it is completely inappropriate and out of line. So she is be trained by her handlers to hide it, just like she uses plastic surgery to make herself appear more mainstream. Without her plastic surgery, she would look like a complete goon, kind in the way Hitler looked like a goon.
Kent Brockman reporting-- "I never had sex with that woman!" repeated... 
Bill Clinton today in a brief press conference. Come in Diane Sawyer.
When told the question referred to his wife, Hillary... 
the Ex-President replied, "No comment."
Film... 
at 11!
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