This is what they actually believe

One problem one runs into when one gets into these "progressive cred" arguments with Hillary Democrats is how quick they are to point to her Linked In page. A lifetime of social climbing among "left leaning" policy elites has padded her resume with a bullet point reference to meet whatever criticism one might offer. 

But for someone like Hillary, those bullet point credentials are just that.  A wonk's resume is really just a history of their career in networking with other wonks. It's a mistake to assume it tells us anything about her actual policy preferences. Not in the way she's is trying to sell it anyway. Take, for example, her brandishing of her work with the Children's Defense Fund as a talisman against criticism of her support for welfare reform.

When the welfare reform bill was being debated in the 1990s, Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman pleaded with the President not to sign the bill in the pages of the Washington Post. Edelman argued that the bill was “morally and practically indefensible” and a “fatally flawed, callous, anti-child assault” that would “eviscerate the moral compact between the nation and its children and its poor.” Unmoved by this appeal, Bill Clinton, with Hillary’s open support, signed the welfare bill in 1996. Shortly thereafter, Peter Edelman, Marian’s husband, resigned from the Clinton administration in protest and Marian clarified in 2008 that she no longer viewed Hillary as a political friend.

Clinton’s suggestion that her prior institutional affiliations are reliable indicators of deep political commitments is simply not true. Clinton abandoned both the poor and the CDF in the 1990s and even doubled down on that decision in a 2002 interview when she celebrated that those pushed off the dole by welfare reform were “no longer deadbeats.”

The secret, though, is anyone who knows Hillary's record well enough to throw her resume up as a defense in these cases, also knows here well enough to... well to know better.  What's really going on with these Hillary surrogates and wannabes is they actually believe this stuff.  Striving yuppies really do believe the poor are "deadbeats" on the dole. It's how they rationalize their own cutthroat ambition as virtue by comparison  The reason Hillary is a champion to such people is she gives them a respectable way of avoiding have to say that out loud.