Hillary Clinton: HRC in NYC

For today's episode of Statenback Saturday, I dredge up some more of my old cartoons about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Last week, I posted some cartoons dating from her First Ladyship, and the Sandersnistas among my readers might be forgiven if they criticized me for a pro-Hillary bias. Today's cartoons date from her tenure as the U.S. Senator from the state of New York and were drawn for an LGBT audience -- and posting them again is probably not doing her any favors. (Especially since they criticize her for stuff which somehow failed to make this comprehensive list of all the terrible things she has done.)

Hillary Clinton chose to run for New York's open Senate seat because New York, having many citizens who are from somewhere else, have a history of electing public officials who are from somewhere else, too. Those citizens can be mighty proud of being from somewhere else, or at least that their great-grandparents were from somewhere else. There are also those who are from somewhere else because they aren't accepted for who they are somewhere else, and by golly, now they are proud of how far they've come.

Senator Clinton probably wished she had stayed somewhere else during the collision of ethnic pride and gay pride that New York enjoys every St. Patrick's Day. Running for the senate seat in 2000, she had marched in both the New York City Ancient Order of Hibernians parade, which banned LGBT participation, and also in an earlier "St. Pat's For All" parade in Queens, created as a gay-friendly alternative. Her attempt to please everybody placated nobody.

She skirted the controversy in 2001 by marching in Syracuse's parade upstate instead.

The St. Patrick's Day Parade issue had still not gone away when she was preparing to launch her 2008 presidential campaign.

But there were more substantive LGBT issues on her plate, too, such as Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and marriage equality. My only cartoon depicting her efforts to distance herself from DADT  was when she was running for the Senate in 2000. As for marriage equality, a window of opportunity opened in California in 2008, but neither she nor her rival for the Democratic nomination were inclined to lead on the issue.

I'm skipping right past her tenure at the State Department now, but both Mrs. Clinton and President Obama did come around, eventually.