Jaw-Boning, Vomiting, Silent Treatment
NYT cocks an eye at Hillary’s co-presidential experience claim:
As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.
But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.
And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.
Read on. Sounds like her experience largely involves being married to the president of the United States. A somewhat distracted president with a spotty foreign policy record.
Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics, describing her strategic roles on trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, India, Africa and Latin America.
Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. “There are a lot of them,” she said. “The whole unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven’t done what we’ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives — it’s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.”
There were times, though, when Mrs. Clinton did not appear deeply involved in some of Mr. Clinton’s hardest moments on national security. He faced a major one in 1998 — the bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and subsequently whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan. Just days after he acknowledged to his wife, the public and a grand jury that he had had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on targets suspected to be a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons factory in Sudan.
“It was the height of Monica, and they were barely talking to each other, if at all,” said one senior national security official who spoke with both Clintons during that time.
Asked if she talked to the president about the military choices or advised him, regardless of their personal problems, Mrs. Clinton was elliptical.
“I was very proud of him, he did what he thought he was supposed to do as president based on the best intelligence he had,” she said. “And he was well aware that there would be those that would certainly criticize him for it.”
Friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she acted as adviser, analyst, devil’s advocate, problem-solver and gut check for her husband, and that she has an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be. What is clear, she and others say, is that Mr. Clinton often consulted her, and that Mrs. Clinton gained experience that Mr. Obama, John Edwards and every other candidate lack — indeed, that most incoming presidents did not have.
“In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision,” said Mickey Kantor, a close Clinton friend who served as trade representative and commerce secretary. “I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on.” (Mr. Clinton declined an interview request.)
But other administration officials, as well as opponents of Mrs. Clinton, are skeptical that the couple’s conversations and her 79 trips add up to unique experience that voters should reward. She was not independently judging intelligence, for the most part, or mediating the data, egos and agendas of a national security team. And, in the end, she did not feel or process the weight of responsibility.
That’s a good line. Almost sounds like it could describe Bill and his Osama/Saddam revisionism. What the heck is he doing declining interview requests, anyway? He hasn’t exactly had a cork in it lately.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:16 am Comments (6) on Wednesday, December 26, 2007
6 Responses to “Jaw-Boning, Vomiting, Silent Treatment”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Yes Jules, but she has your “universal health care” and your “stem cell parts house for self absorbed boomers” and your “bring the troops home” presents all wrapped up and waiting for you under the Holiday tree. And you don’t have to pay a dime for them!
If you’re ready for change (which is all you are going to have left from your paycheck by the way), she’s ready to lead! So quit being a hater.
December 26th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Look, Bill and Hillary were the most traveled co-presidents ever during the 8 years of their reign.
I remember reading of a red carpeted 3 a.m. arrival in London, which “the Brits” took months to prepare for.
America’s King and Queen went all over the planet, which, as a taxpayer, I found to be both outrageously expensive and well outside the job description.
December 26th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
If just being there qualifies you, then Berry Ford should have run for president.
December 26th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Heh, good one PA….
“Being There”, wasn’t that a Kosinski book about a barely literate gardiner whose statements on weighty matters were considered profound by people who had no idea he was just repeating what he had heard in other contexts?
Pretty good analogy for Hillary’s executive “experience”…
December 27th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Sorry “gardener”.
Speaking of barely literate…
December 28th, 2007 at 1:50 am
… and his name was Chancey.
Cheers