Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton lectured at Iowa State University tonight, praising the work of pioneering women in law and politics, and talking of her own struggles as a young lawyer. Clinton told the crowd in Ames that a colleague once told her she couldn’t be a courtroom lawyer because she didn’t have a wife.
"He asked me: ‘When you are in trial and you’re busy, who will make sure you have clean socks for court?" Clinton told the crowd, which laughed. "Well, I had honestly never thought about that because I’d always washed my own socks."
Clinton was this year’s guest lecturer at ISU’s Carrie Chapman Catt Center, named after one of the women who worked to get women the right to vote.
"We still have a long way to go. If we truly want to finish what Catt and her colleagues started, then it’s time that we did more than just talking about family values," Clinton said. "We need to adopt policies that truly value families."
Clinton took questions from the crowd and Chen Ru Zheng, a senior from Cedar Rapids, asked Clinton about campaign contributions.
"You know there’s been (talk) about how you take money from, you know, special interests and large corporations," Zheng asked. "So I was just wondered what your justification for that was."
Clinton told the crowd it’s a politician’s voting record that matter, not their fundraising. She also said taking money from lobbyists is no different from taking money from the people who run the corporations who hire the lobbyists.