Bernstein: For Hillary, ‘the Acts of Christ’ Animate Her Passion for ‘Social Justice’

Religion one of ‘the most important things in Hillary Clinton’s life’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
CUOMO: "She gets very defensive. But you argue, there's good reason for her to be defensive. She doesn't get the benefit of that very often. Explain." 
BERNSTEIN: "Well, again, I think she's subject to a kind of scrutiny and enemies committed to her and her husband's destruction. It's real. The vast right-wing conspiracy, you can understand her positing that formulation, given who was after her and them. And at the same time, her and their actions contributed to that pursuit. And that's going to be ongoing. And that's what we're going to see through this. Look, the Republican party, I wrote in the book, in 2000, when she ran for the Senate, the Republican party existed to defeat and obliterate clintonism for all time. And yet, clintonism is back. And it goes on. And it stands for something. It's not the term of derision. It's about a Progressive kind of politics. It's about economic justice as you said, and a way of getting there. It's a vision of America as she and Bill Clinton have developed over the years. This is serious business, she's a serious woman. And the real issue that she is going to try and make this election about, the things she talked about yesterday, was the Republicans." 
CUOMO: "Republicans, as you know, have depicted herb as somebody who believes the truth is kind of a moving target and you wrote about that in your book about her relationship with the truth. Let me read a little excerpt from it. Since her Arkansas years Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth. It is an understatement by now that she has been known to apprehend truths about herself and the advance of her life that others do not exactly share. What do you mean?" 
BERNSTEIN: "Well I think if you go to the incident on the tarmac when she said she came under fire, I think that's indicative of it. There is a lot of obfuscation. There is a lot of opaqueness. There is a lot of forgetting. Whether it's purposeful or not, I think some of it is. And it's -- I keep coming back, though, to the equation that needs to be looked at. If you read this biography, and you understand her life, you understand her family, how she grew up, her father, a misanthrope, abusive towards her mother, you understand her marriage, and what she has been called upon to do to save her husband's career, which she has done time after time after time, then you begin to understand the obfuscation, and its purpose, and where it comes from. It's very interesting. Three most important things in Hillary Clinton's life are religion, which she does not wear on her sleeve. Has been since she's a teenager. A Wesleyen Methodist who believes in John Wesley's social message of social change combined with the acts of Christ, the idea of Christ's teachings. The basis for social change. Family. And service. She really believes that. Now she'll be attacked for some of that. Her notion of service. But she believes it. So she's not the person that she's caricatured to be."

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