Hillary Clinton: What’s happening to the American Dream? --- As Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke Friday about reviving the American Dream, about what it will take to restore what she called the “basic bargain” that hard work, effort and drive will lead to future success, I couldn’t stop thinking about a young woman named Contessa Allen-Starks. -- Clinton spoke at the New America Foundation’s annual conference on “Big Ideas” held at the Newseum, in the heart of the Washington, D.C.’s gleaming federal city. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a fellow at the nonpartisan at New America fellow and spoke at the conference about my book on time pressure and our vanished leisure.) -- Allen-Starks lives barely 15 minutes away by car, but her poor and troubled neighborhood across the Anacostia River might as well be a world away. -- I met Allen-Starks when I reported about Rapid Rehousing, a new effort to help poor families move out of homeless shelters, become self-sufficient and break long cycles of generational poverty. -- Allen-Starks was trying to do everything right. I spent the day with her, as she was up before dawn to get ready for an “externship” in a doctor’s office, in which she was paying thousands of dollars through a for-profit company that would result in a “certificate” that she hoped would mean something. She arranged for her two sons’ meals and child care, then boarded a bus, transferred to the Metro, and boarded another bus to get to that externship, her hope for a better and more stable job. -- After a long day there, a long commute home, and a walk to a nearby grocery store, she put on a white lab coat and went to work at the pharmacy at a nearby grocery store. Although she loves the job, she has been stuck with low-paying, part-time hours for years. -- She was working and studying seven days a week. And still, she was nowhere close to being able to pay the nearly $1,000 monthly rent on her small, two-bedroom apartment. (She later told me she fled the neighborhood with her boys after a shooting outside her front door.) -- At the conference, Clinton said that history, civics and economics tell the story that the country thrives when the middle class is working and thriving and when those at the bottom believe they can move up — when all people have faith in a better future. -- That, Clinton said, “is at the heart of the basic bargain of America. That everyone can have an opportunity to build a good life.” -- Clinton, in her speech, rattled off a list of worrisome statistics: - More, Brigid Schulte, Washingtonpost, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/05/16/hillary-clinton-whats-happening-to-the-american-dream/