By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 31, 2018
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I actually don't think this makes the top 20 of Hillary's most egregious actions, if only because that's an exceedingly difficult list to crack. During her 2008 campaign, she had a "faith advisor" named Burns Strider who I guess would send her Bible passages. (We could go in a whole direction here for sure, but let's stay on point.) It turned out that Strider also liked to lavish unwanted attention on the ladies, and was quite obnoxious about it, to the point where one of them complained to the campaign and Hillary had to make a decision of what to do about Strider.
She did not fire him. She demoted him, and he later left to take a job with David Brock's Clinton-bootlicking organization called Correct the Record, where Strider repeated the same behavior. Yesterday Hillary took to Facebook to defend her decision in detail. This is just an excerpt:In 2007, a woman working on my campaign came forward with a complaint about her supervisor behaving inappropriately toward her. She and her complaint were taken seriously. Senior campaign staff and legal counsel spoke to both her and the offender. They determined that he had in fact engaged in inappropriate behavior. My then-campaign manager presented me with her findings. She recommended that he be fired. I asked for steps that could be taken short of termination. In the end, I decided to demote him, docking his pay; separate him from the woman; assign her to work directly for my then-deputy-campaign manager; put in place technical barriers to his emailing her; and require that he seek counseling. He would also be warned that any subsequent harassment of any kind toward anyone would result in immediate termination. I did this because I didn’t think firing him was the best solution to the problem. He needed to be punished, change his behavior, and understand why his actions were wrong. The young woman needed to be able to thrive and feel safe. I thought both could happen without him losing his job. I believed the punishment was severe and the message to him unambiguous. I also believe in second chances. I’ve been given second chances and I have given them to others. I want to continue to believe in them. But sometimes they’re squandered. In this case, while there were no further complaints against him for the duration of the campaign, several years after working for me he was terminated from another job for inappropriate behavior. That reoccurrence troubles me greatly, and it alone makes clear that the lesson I hoped he had learned while working for me went unheeded. Would he have done better – been better – if I had fired him? Would he have gotten that next job? There is no way I can go back 10 years and know the answers. But you can bet I’m asking myself these questions right now.
Over the years, I have made, directly and indirectly, thousands of personnel decisions – everything from hiring to promoting to disciplining to firing. Most of these decisions worked out well. But I’ve gotten some wrong: I’ve hired the wrong people for the wrong jobs; I’ve come down on people too hard at times. Through it all, I’ve always taken firing very seriously. Taking away someone’s livelihood is perhaps the most serious thing an employer can do. When faced with a situation like this, if I think it’s possible to avoid termination while still doing right by everyone involved, I am inclined in that direction. I do not put this forward as a virtue or a vice – just as a fact about how I view these matters.Now honestly, and I say this with my credentials well established as one of the biggest Hillary critics on the planet, this is not an unreasonable defense of her decision at the time. In 2007, sexual misconduct of the kind Strider engaged in was the automatic career-ender is has become since the Harvey Weinstein story broke just a few months ago. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been. Employers writ large seem to have determined belatedly that it should be, but almost none were there in 2007 when Strider did the things he did. For as long as women have been in the work force, men who work with them have been attracted to them, and some have been quite ham-handed and over-the-top in their pursuits. I met my wife at work (23 years ago yesterday as it happens), and while our story was nothing like this one, I wouldn't live in a world where you couldn't fall in love with someone you work with. It's a headache for employers because a) work relationships can go sour and create whole new problems within the work force; and b) sometimes the woman isn't interested in the pursuing man, who either won't stop, doesn't recognize that he needs to or doesn't know how to. Employers sometimes have to step in to such situations, and it's always messy, and almost never ends well.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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