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38 When a young man at a town-hall meeting in Kyrgyzstan asks Hillary which designers she wears, she answers immediately: “Would you ever ask a man that question?” The crowd of young people laughed and applauded. Hillary and Bill like to vacation at Oscar de la Renta’s Punta Cana resort, in the Dominican Republic, but she wasn’t about to mention that, or venture that Vera Wang designed Chelsea’s wedding dress. Like Albright and Rice, Hillary wants women’s issues to be substantive. “AI the young men on our staff don’t seem to think they’re important,” Hillary remarked archly one day in 2009, an early sign of the schisms to come. To reinforce the message she named Verveer, her former chief of staff in the White House, to be the first ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. Even amid the Sturm und Drang of the Middle East and North Africa, she’s liable to leave her imprint in the same areas that brought her into public life in the first place—helping women and children and strengthening civil society. It’s a straight line from the Children’s Defense Fund, where she worked as a young law-school graduate, to Foggy Bottom. From micro-credit to food assistance to education, Hillary knows that women in underdeveloped villages usually spend aid money on their families, while men more often spend it on themselves, which is a polite way of saying on liquor and prostitutes. Seemingly minor changes can yield huge benefits. “As we meet ... as many as three billion people are gathering around open fires or old and inefficient stoves in small kitchens in poorly ventilated houses,” Hillary tells a New York philanthropic audience. “As the women cook, smoke fills their lungs and toxins begin poisoning them and their children,” she explains before noting that the World Health Organization estimates that nearly two million people a year—half of them children—die from pneumonia and other ailments that are likely connected to this problem, more than twice the number of deaths from malaria. She has been involved in this cause for years, but now HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024995