As long-time readers/commenters at dotCommonwela know I am no Hillary-fan, but I did admire her snap-back at a group of "Black Lives Matter" groupies with whom she met having somehow kept them from disrupting a public appearance somewhere in Campaign Land. What I liked in this "private" but videoed meeting was her listening very carefully to them, and then giving them as good as they gave her. NYTIMES STORY

Mrs. Clinton, after listening and nodding for several minutes, responds calmly that her life’s work has been helping the nation’s poorest children, many of them black, before turning the tables on the much younger man and demanding instead to know how he plans to turn his deeply felt emotions into meaningful, lasting change. “You can get lip service from as many white people you can pack into Yankee Stadium and a million more like it who are going to say: ‘We get it, we get it. We are going to be nicer,’ ” she says. “That’s not enough, at least in my book.”....."I don’t believe you change hearts,” Mrs. Clinton says, summarizing her basic view of social policy movements. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

Her interlocutor [a person who takes part in a conversation or dialogue] from Black Lives Matter, "Mr. [Julius] Jones" in the NYTimes story, spoke and let her speak reminding her that all the battles of the slavery, reconstruction, and the civil rights movements have not resolved many of the issues facing young African-Americans. How was she going to change hearts? He's less than half right about hearts. She is more than half-right ..."change laws...allocation of resources, [and] the way the system operates."

In a country that hardly remembers the last war it started, Mrs. Clinton at least remembers what worked last time (legislation and organizing) and what didn't  (half-assed  rhetoric).

P.S. The Bracketed statements are for the benefit of a critic (the interlocutor's first name was not in the first story I saw; it now is).