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Edited on Thu Dec-27-07 10:21 AM by Perry Logan
HILLARY'S EXPERIENCE ON THE WORLD STAGE:
Her historic speech at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 not only galvanized women around the world, it helped spawn a movement that led to advances politically, legally, economically, and socially for women in many countries over the next decade. Among other initiatives, she spearheaded the Clinton Administration's efforts to combat the global crisis of human trafficking. She persuaded the First Ladies of the Americas to use their collective power to eradicate measles and improve girls' education throughout the western Hemisphere. And she is widely credited with helping women in Kuwait finally win the right to vote.
As First Lady and now as a two-term senator who represents the most ethnically diverse state in the nation and who sits on the Armed Services Committee, Hillary Clinton has become a fixture on international issues over the past 15 years. She has traveled to more than 80 countries, going from barrios to rural villages to meetings with heads of state. She has consulted with dozens of world leaders - Nelson Mandela, King Abdullah, Tony Blair among them -- on matters as diverse as America and NATO's roles in Kosovo, eradicating poverty in the Third World, and the plight of women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Today, she is one of the most influential voices in the world on human rights, democracy, and the promotion of a "new internationalism" in foreign affairs that calls for a balanced use of military force, diplomacy, and social development to strengthen American interests and security globally.
While American First Ladies historically have made great (and often overlooked) contributions to our nation, Hillary Clinton's wide-ranging experience on international issues as First Lady is unprecedented. Indeed, she is the only First Lady to have delivered foreign policy addresses at major gatherings of the United Nations, the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Economic Forum.
Hillary Clinton has been fighting for the rights of children for special needs for decades. In her first job out of law school working for the Children's Defense Fund, she conducted research that led to Congress passing the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the landmark bill mandating that all children with disabilities be educated in the public school system. later, she helped improve the education of children with special needs by working to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. In 2005, she sponsored an amendment to increase funding for the act by $4 billion dollars. She also cosponsored the Personal Excellence for Children with Disabilities Act, a bill that promised to help schools recruit and retain new special education teachers, and better prepare general education teachers and staff to work with children with special needs.
Most recently, she has called for greatly expanded funding to the National Institute for Health to investigate treatments for children with disabilities. And she has put forth a comprehensive and detailed plan to help children and families affected by autism, with numerous elements that correspond very closely to what families in the autism community have been demanding for years.
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