Hillary Clinton is hiring!

Senator Hillary Clinton whined to the annual U.S. Chamber of Commerce convention in Washington Thursday that kids today "think work is a four-letter word."

She complained that kids "think they're entitled to go right to the top with $50,000 or $75,000 jobs when they have not done anything to earn their way up."

The senator theorized that a culture of instant gratification "argues against hard work." She blamed cable TV, high-speed Internet, cell phones and iPods. She told the audience that when she was young, her family had only one television set, and it only had three channels, and she learned valuable negotiating skills by debating which channel the family was going to watch.

This can only mean she's trying to hire a campaign staff. Only a person who was hiring would think high salary demands marked the end of civilization. Anybody else would be happy that kids coming out of college can get jobs at all, especially jobs that pay enough to cover their student loan payments.

No doubt the senator would like to keep campaign costs down by hiring ambitious, young newcomers to the work force. No doubt she expected them to be lined up outside her offices, ready and eager to "earn their way up" by working long hours for low salaries, just to gain valuable experience and invaluable contacts.

Well, to quote Gomer Pyle, "Surprise, surprise, surprise!"

If she was planning to run for president by declaring that President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress have wrecked the economy, she'd better get rewrite on the phone.

She might also want to consider, as long as she's rewriting, that when she declares a whole generation to be lazy, spoiled brats, she sounds like a woman who does not have even a single acquaintance whose kids go to a community college or state university. She sounds like someone who doesn't know anybody whose kids didn't at least apply to Harvard, even if they ultimately were forced to go to Stanford.

It's hard to imagine her husband making a mistake like that.

Copyright 2006

.