It looks like she was trying to "find herself", as they said back then.
She supported McCarthy and Nelson Rockefeller in the same year. OK, Rockefeller wasn't so bad, and if I had been of voting age then, I probably would have voted for his brother, Winthrop, for governor of Arkansas.
She worked for McGovern's campaign in 1972, I'll give her that. But 5 years later, she was a corporate lawyer working for a high-power corporate law firm, the "legal arm of the powerful" in Arkansas. One of her first cases was defending electric power companies against residential ratepayers. She helped to overturn a ballot initiative that could have eventually helped utility customers throughout the state, including my family.
Now granted, in the '70s, she was appointed by President Carter to serve on a board that was designed to support women and children. But just a year or so after her victory over residential ratepayers, she became a partner in the law firm, a law firm that specialized in defending corporations against, well, little people.
In her early days with the firm, she used her maiden name. You might think, OK, she was a liberated woman. But at that same time, her husband, who was a rising star in the Arkansas Democratic Party, had just become the state's attorney general. You know, the guy who is supposed to represent the citizens of the state, aka, the public, aka the little people. If Hillary had adopted Bill's last name then, more people might have made the connection between the lawyer who represented the interests of corporations over the people, and the man who was supposed to be representing the interests of the people in the state government.
Hillary left the women-and-children board in 1979 or thereabouts, when her husband had become governor, and she had just recently become a partner in the corporate law firm. A year later, her husband lost his re-election bid to a wacky Republican named Frank White. Two years later, the Clintons were back in the governor's mansion, but, as the Arkansas Gazette (then the state's largest liberal newspaper) noted at the time,they were decidedly more conservative than they had been in the '70s.
Throughout that decade, and into the early '90s, Hillary remained a partner in the law firm. During much of that time, she also served on an educational committee that brought a lot of changes to the state's education system-- essentially robbing Peter (like my school district) to pay Paul. She also introduced a form of No Child Left Behind that really ticked off my former high school history teacher to no end, a die-hard yellow dog Arkansas Democrat. "Hillary's meddling", he called it, as the new rules really cramped his teaching style of using archive materials and on-the-scene accounts of historical events, rather than relying solely on a textbook and having standardized, varnished tests.
In the late '80s, when Hillary was both a partner in her "legal arm of the powerful" law firm and a Wal-Mart board member, I was both a student at the University of Arkansas and a temporary worker at a Bentonville Wal-Mart warehouse. I could tell there was quite a bit of friction between full-time workers and management, just by looking at the notices in the break room. There was a movement to unionize workers there, and Hillary, according to some accounts, didn't express any support for the movement.
Also at that time, nearly all of my professors were liberal, and several had connections with the state's political circiles. When Hillary was on the Wal-Mart board, some of those professors said that serving on the Wal-Mart board was "the best of both worlds. Hillary gets to rub shoulders with America's Richest Man, and Sam Walton has a nearly direct line with the Governor."
I would also like to mention that in 1992, Hillary helped to secure funding for her husband's presidential campaign from at least three of the state's richest Republicans-- Sam Walton, Don Tyson, and Jackson Stephens.
So no, I do not buy the story that she has been a Democrat for 40 years. More like a "Democrat".
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