Let's take a further look at Clinton's claims in that debate, they deserve our attention:

CLINTON...you know, words are not actions. And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action.

You know, what we've got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality. I have a long record of doing that, of taking on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the over-due influence that they have in our government.

And, you know, probably nobody up here has been the subject of more incoming fire from the Republicans and the special interests. So I think I know exactly what I'm walking into. And I am prepared to take them on.

SPRADLING: Senator, does that mean that you're further down the road than your opponents in this? Or are you saying that you can do things that these folks can't do, when it comes to being an agent of change?

CLINTON: Absolutely. Because I've been an agent of change. You know, you go back 35 years, you know, I worked to help make the case for the law that, thankfully, required that public schools give an education to children with special needs. I worked to reform education and health care in Arkansas against, you know, some pretty tough odds.

In the White House, I helped to create, you know, health care for kids and, you know, reform a lot of the other programs -- like taking on the drug companies.

SPRADLING: And to be clear, they can't. You're saying they can't.

CLINTON: Well, I'm not saying that -- I'm only making my case, that this is what I have done.

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To call oneself an agent of change is a powerful phrase; it inspires. Unfortunately, within the limited confines of a debate Senator Clinton was not able to fully elaborate when it came to spelling out specifics from that 35 year track record. Since we are taking Senator Clinton's advice and examining the political specifics of her thirty five year record, I will do that now. This will not be an exercise in "gotcha." There is much that is admirable to be found in Senator Clinton's career.

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In May of 1969, now-Senator Clinton (then Hillary Rodham), delivered the first address given by a student at graduation at Wellesley College and received a seven minute standing ovation for a speech widely perceived to have challenged United States Senator Edward Brooke who had preceded her at the podium:

The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade -- years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program -- so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap.

As a young attorney and promising graduate of Yale Law, Hillary Rodham served as a staff attorney for Marion Wright Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund and continued that significant relationship serving on the organization's board in later years. The young Clinton was also a member of the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee in the lead up to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Having married William Jefferson Clinton and moved to Arkansas, where Bill Clinton would serve five terms as Governor, Hillary worked as a partner at the Rose Law Firm, and, largely through that connection, served on the boards of TCBY, Lafarge and Wal-Mart where, per her wikipedia entry, she was the first woman board member and "pushed successfully for the chain to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices, pushed largely unsuccessfully for more women to be added to the company's management, and was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices."

Clinton also did both national and local political work during her time in Arkansas. She was appointed by President Carter to the board of the Legal Services Corporation where she successfully fought President Reagan's budget cuts and mission change. And, in Arkansas, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, served on the Arkansas Rural Health Advisory Committee, chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee and, per her wikipedia entry (citing Bernstein, A Woman in Charge), "Clinton fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association to put mandatory teacher testing as well as state standards for curriculum and classroom size in place."

There is no doubt that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a tireless advocate for children, for families, for education and health services for those who need it most and can defend themselves the least. She could easily have done much less than what she did in Arkansas and her early career and still have been praiseworthy. On this record alone, covering the decades of the 1970s and the 80s, Clinton was clearly "an agent of change" and can rightly make that claim.

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Let's move to some of Clinton's accomplishments as First Lady and examine them. Clinton says that she took "on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the over-due influence that they have in our government" and "in the White House, I helped to create, you know, health care for kids and, you know, reform a lot of the other programs -- like taking on the drug companies."

These claims are not so easily sorted since Senator Clinton's wording is, to put it kindly, pretty unclear. But I think we can break down the accomplishments that Senator Clinton is referring to into two basic categories: first, her role in pushing for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or what we now call SCHIP, and, second, her work leading the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Since we are now entering the period of her public life where she served as First Lady, the public record is more complete, if not, however, also somewhat more complicated.

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Clinton and the 1997 State Children's Health Insurance Program: SCHIP

SCHIP is a 1997 bill by Senator Edward Kennedy and crucially co-sponsored by GOP Senator Orrin Hatch that used a provision of title XXI of the Social Security Act to allow states to expand Health Insurance coverage to children and some whole families not covered by Medicaid. The program, which continues today, covered 6.6 million children and  671,000 adults in fiscal year 2006. Expansion of this program was recently vetoed by President Bush.

SCHIP is certainly what Senator Clinton is referring to by "health care for kids" and using as an example of something "she had done" or "helped to do." Before this became a debate controversy, Beth Fouhy of the Boston Globe did a fact check article on this Clinton claim which contained these two interesting passages:

After the first lady's effort to enact universal health insurance went down to calamitous defeat in late 1994, she and other White House officials began looking for smaller changes that could win bipartisan support. Republicans had taken control of both the House and Senate that year.

A similar effort was taking place on Capitol Hill, with Sen. Edward Kennedy playing a lead role. One area he and the Clintons explored involved expanding health insurance coverage to children who had none. On Dec. 9, 1996, senior White House health adviser Chris Jennings sent a memo to the first lady outlining several options -- and recommending ways for her to increase her visibility on the issue. With his wife's backing, President Clinton announced a plan to expand health coverage to as many as 5 million children in his 1997 State of the Union address. Kennedy, meanwhile, introduced legislation based on a Massachusetts model with Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch as the lead Republican co-sponsor.

However the road to passage for SCHIP was not smooth sailing, and First Lady Clinton's involvement proved crucial in interesting ways:

The effort nearly went off the rails when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican, said it violated the balanced budget agreement. President Clinton, eager to preserve the agreement, actually phoned lawmakers to kill the legislation when it came to the Senate floor. Hillary Clinton defended her husband's action at the time. "He had to safeguard the overall budget proposal," she told one audience. But she insisted he would find other ways to provide health coverage for kids.

The effort was revived, with Kennedy, Hatch and a coalition of advocacy groups ranging from the Children's Defense Fund to the Girl Scouts lobbying hard. Kennedy made a special appeal to the first lady, who added her pressure anew. "The children's health program wouldn't be in existence today if we didn't have Hillary pushing for it from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue," Kennedy told The Associated Press.

While not exactly an open and shut case for Clinton's legislative accomplishments, this is perhaps the most balanced assessment I've found. SCHIP was created, in part, as a response to President Clinton's failure with National Health Care Reform. Hillary Clinton worked within the White House to advance and formulate Senator Kennedy's bill, defended her husband for working to kill it, and, yet, subsequently fought to revive it. Senator Kennedy's praise is probably the summary that most would find an acceptable, if nuanced, summation of Hillary Clinton's role in getting SCHIP into law. SCHIP is clearly a feather in Clinton's cap, and, if anything, candidate Senator Clinton should learn how to speak about it more clearly and eloquently going forward.

Hillary Clinton and the Task Force on National Health Care Reform

This is the crux of what we must suspect Senator Clinton is getting at when she says she "took on" and "took fire" from special interests including the drug companies. In  understanding the history of the failure of President Clinton and the Democratic Congress to pass Health Care Reform in 1994, I found these three articles to be essential reading:

Paul Starr, "What Happened to Health Care Reform?" The American Prospect no. 20 (Winter 1995)
Derek Bok, "the Great Health Care Debate of 1993-94" Harvard University 1998
Matthew Holt, "Why HillaryCare Failed," the Health Care Blog, 2005

The 1993-94 effort to pass Health Care Reform is a hugely complex topic involving dynamics between the President, the Congress and the public. It is notable that Starr and Bok do not use the casual, and in my view pejorative term that the later blogger, Holt uses in his title, HillaryCare. Nevertheless, Starr, who worked directly with first lady Clinton, had this to say:

By putting his personal signature on health care reform, moreover, Clinton gave the Republicans an incentive to defeat it and humiliate him rather than compromise. The Clinton label also led to confusion of public feelings about the president as a person with the entire issue of health care reform. The First Lady's role further muddied the issue. There is no logical connection between views on health care reform and, say, gays in the military or the role of women in society. But the identification of the Clintons with the reform of health care became so strong that sentiments crossed over. The Wall Street Journal reported showing the same description of a health reform plan to focus groups with and without the Clinton label. Without the label, the plan won more than 70 percent support; with the label, approval dropped 30 to 40 points. It seems likely, therefore, that when polls asked for opinions about the "Clinton health plan," they tapped general feelings of confidence in President Clinton rather than preferences about the specifics of health policy.

Bok is straightforward:

Another criticism involves the President's use of a task force, headed by his wife, that operated in secret. This process tended to shut out voices that might have helped create a more viable plan--voices of knowledgeable persons in the Administration who feared to criticize the work of the First Lady, voices of critics of a managed competition approach who were excluded from the Task Force, voices of interest groups and politicians (who were consulted, but not much) who might have exposed the political vulnerabilities of the eventual plan. Secret deliberations and exclusion of contrary voices are probably not a viable way of crafting a major reform in an environment in which the President has limited influence over Congress, powerful opponents, and a public distrustful of government and its capabilities.

And Holt, citing the NYT, assesses how the very failure of "HillaryCare" affected how Senator Clinton now approaches policy:

There are lots of versions about what killed the 1993-4 health care reform effort.  Hillary Clinton has now decided that the problem was the lack of incrementalism in her plan. Last week the New York Times said that since becoming a Senator:

"She has deliberately avoided the major mistake she made as first lady, namely trying to sell an ambitious plan to a public with no appetite for radical change. [SNIP]. She summed up her approach in the first floor speech she delivered in the Senate about four years ago, when she unveiled a series of relatively modest health care initiatives. "I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done," she said, referring to the 1994 defeat of her health care plan."

Doubtless, Senator Clinton is accurate in saying that she confronted "drug companies" and "special interests" in her time as First Lady. It is not so clear, however, that she would be able to tell that story so clearly without also having to characterize the failure of Health Care Reform in 1993-94 as the single greatest failure of the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton. She did not allude to that at the Facebook debate.

This raises difficult questions. If, as Starr and Bok suggest, and Holt implies, the personal association by the Clintons of their name with a major domestic policy reform meant that special interests and the GOP had an easier time defeating that very reform, it is hard for Senator Hillary Clinton to claim her service at the head of that Task Force as a feather in her cap. More to the point, the way Hillary Clinton ran that task force is highlighted in a negative light by Starr and Bok. That is not exactly "getting things done" and "taking on special interests." In fact, given that track record and personal association, American voters who desire health care reform might  think twice about electing Senator Clinton as the best path to achieving that goal. Further, it is clear that Senator Clinton now views the 1993-94 failure of Health Care reform as a motivator to pursue "bi-partisan cooperation" and "small steps" to get a bigger job done. That is not exactly what Clinton implied at the debate.

These two legislative battles are not the only work Clinton did as First Lady; she travelled the world, and, most notably, gave a powerful speech at the Beijing Women's Conference in 1995. But if candidate Hillary Clinton wants to point to her record as first lady as one of "getting things done" she will have to be much more explicit about what she means. That would include a full discussion of what went wrong with the 1993-94 effort to implement Health Care Reform and an explanation of exactly why she is the person to take up that challenge a second time.

Finally, the Health Care Reform battle highlights a difficultly in discussing Hillary Clinton's accomplishments against the legacy of Bill Clinton who won five terms as governor and two terms as president. While Bill Clinton famously quipped that voters were getting "Two for One" in casting a vote for him, the failure of that policy reform effort, nevertheless, rests on his shoulders. As President, he selected her, not the other way around. Further, President Clinton made political choices that directly affected the outcome, especially and critically regarding how he communicated (or failed to communicate) how he would pay for it, that Hillary Clinton had no control over.

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Hillary Clinton, of course, since serving as First Lady, has won two terms as United States Senator from New York, winning re-election easily and serving on five committees. Her voting record, as most sources concur, is, outside of her vote on matters relating to Iraq and Iran, a liberal one. Like most early career United States Senators, however, there are few easy and clear cut legislative accomplishments one can point to and say, "Here is where Senator Clinton got something put into law."

Clinton's time in the Senate, from 2001-2007, however, is no small thing. Hillary Clinton has won state-wide elected office twice in a populous state, campaigning and winning support all over the Empire State and serving that state well. That should mean something to voters nationwide.

However, that highlights another side to Clinton's assertions during the New Hampshire Facebook debate implying that she alone, or primarily, of the remaining candidates in the race has a "35 year track record of getting things done."

In fact, Senator Clinton has held elected office for less time than Senator Obama, who won election to the Illinois State Legislature in 1996 and election to the United States Senate in 2004. Senator Clinton is exactly one year into her second term in the United States Senate. Senator Edwards served one term in the Senate and was subsequently chosen to be his party's nominee for the Vice President, running for national office with his name on the ballot in all 50 states, something Hillary Clinton has never, herself, done.

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Has Hillary Clinton, in her life and career, been an agent of change? Undoubtedly so; that is a claim she can rightly make. She has been a tireless advocate for children, health care and education since her early career, she innovated the role of the first lady and advanced the cause of women in many ways, and she has won high approval for her performance as Senator from New York. For all these things, Senator Clinton is guaranteed of high praise for her ongoing life work. Senator Clinton has only recently, however, served as an elected official. She does not have a track record in the Senate, as Senator Kennedy has, of authoring major legislation and moving it successfully through Congress.

Further,when Senator Clinton takes blanket claim for accomplishments (or failures) that should more rightly be associated with her husband's presidency, even SCHIP, she is stretching things.

In particular, when she says she has "taken on" special interests when, unfortunately, the reverse might be more accurately true, that the special interests took her on and won, voters have a right to view with some skepticism her broad characterizations of her time as first lady and what she means, exactly, by her 35 year career.

Finally, there is a reason Senator Clinton is not eager to speak specifically of the Health Care Reform Task Force of 1993-94. That story shows neither she nor President Clinton in their best light. Further, the personal association of the failure of Health Care reform with the Clintons (and, unfairly, in terms of the use of HillaryCare, with Hillary in particular) could be perceived not so much as proving a track record of "getting things done" and great accomplishment, but the opposite. It might be perceived as a liability.

In the second part of this essay, "reality break, part ii" I will explore what the meaning of a Senator Clinton nomination would be.