Hillarysworld

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hillary-clinton-she-stoops-to-conquer-1954092.html#

For a brief moment, you imagined that history had taken a different course.

There was Hillary Clinton, stepping up to the rostrum in the White House press room one day last month, to expound on the virtues of the new nuclear arms limitation treaty between the US and Russia. She performed with her customary authority and command of the facts, as well as the sense of humour, often overlooked, that is another of her trademarks. Might there be problems over ratification in the Duma, the Moscow parliament, a reporter asked. Well, she replied with a giggle, the US had offered to send White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel over to use his legendary (and foul-mouthed) powers of persuasion on recalcitrant Russian legislators. "If President Medvedev wants to take us up on it, we're ready."

Hillary, in other words, looked a president. But as we all know, she wasn't one. Rahm Emanuel was not her man, he was Barack Obama's. Hers was no more than a supporting act, filling in the details after the man who defeated her in that epic battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination had made the big announcement himself, before leaving the room without taking a single question. Yet in a way, it was remarkable she was there at all.

The article goes on to explain how Hillary came to be Secretary of State, a story we all know pretty well. Then there's this:

The walls of Hillaryland are less forbidding these days. Unusually, she did demand the right to pick her own people for the 200-odd political appointments at State, as a condition for taking the job. In reality, far from cloistering herself off, she has opened her doors to senior career officials and become deeply involved in internal management.

She has set out to rebuild the State Department from within, boosting its budget and expanding its staff in an effort to recapture the clout lost to the Pentagon under George W Bush. The only hint of discord has been reports that her deputy, Jim Steinberg, whose ambition was to be Obama's National Security Adviser at the White House, wants out.

In fact, Hillary has been the model team player, in a team bristling with foreign policy heavyweights. These "competitors" include Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before becoming Vice President, as well as his successor as chairman, John Kerry, the Democrats' 2004 White House candidate, not to mention the Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, a top national security adviser to the first President Bush and the sole holdover from the administration of the second.

Then there are two special envoys, either of whom would have made a plausible Secretary of State: Richard Holbrooke, the former UN ambassador, for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and George Mitchell, former Senate majority leader and Northern Ireland peace-broker, working on the Middle East.

Many wondered how much influence Hillary wielded, especially during her first six months, when she kept a low profile. Interestingly, in its August 2009 survey of the world's most powerful women, Forbes magazine ranked her only 36th, compared with the fourth and seventh places occupied by her predecessor Condoleezza Rice in 2007 and 2008. But that has always been Hillary's way. In the Senate too, she made a quiet start. Where Bill was the improviser who left everything to the last minute, she has always been disciplined and formidably prepared – the lawyer who wanted first to master her brief before holding forth in court.

Now she is visibly more assertive, but few signs of infighting have emerged. As anyone who has seen them testify together on Capitol Hill can confirm, she and Gates get on splendidly, while Biden is an old friend from Senate days. As for Mitchell and Holbrooke, Hillary maintains that so many and so complicated are the claims on her attention that even a Kissinger or a modern Bismarck could not keep abreast of every twist in Afghanistan and the Middle East, on a day-to-day basis. Instead she operates, in the words of one top official, "as a closer" with the envoys.

Most important of all, though, are Hillary's relations with her boss. Plainly, they get on well, if only from a mutual respect born of the shared trial of the 2008 campaign. Clearly Obama and Clinton do not share the bonds of affection and long co- operation that existed between The first President Bush and his old retainer James Baker, or between the younger Bush and Rice.

That last line kinda made me chuckle

And whatever her power, her popularity is indisputable – her approval ratings are better than Obama's. One reason, of course, is that her job keeps her at a safe distance from the President's bitterly contested domestic agenda, and from a polarised, staggeringly unpopular Congress. Another is that Democrats and Republicans are basically agreed on key foreign policy issues. Take it from none other than Chavez, Venezuela's President and a constant thorn in Washington's flesh, who recently described Hillary as "a blonde Condoleezza Rice".

The next several paragraphs sum up Hillary's term so far as Secretary of State.

Ultimately though, the success or failure of America's foreign policy is ascribed to a president. Only rarely does a secretary of state leave a lasting individual mark: Henry Kissinger, certainly, in the Seventies, and before that George Marshall and Dean Acheson under Harry Truman, but who else? Hillary, moreover, must toil in the shadow of the biggest global superstar in the White House since John F Kennedy.

But she too is not short of star wattage. She may be a diplomat now, but remains a politician too – a very accomplished one. Unlike her predecessors, with the possible exception of Powell, Hillary has a global name recognition that enables her to speak not just to her peers in the chancelleries, but the population at large.

In fact an informal "Clinton Doctrine" is discernable. She is the ideal exponent of "smart power", of the US leading by the example of what is most attractive about that country, not because of its military might. The fight against poverty, the struggle for human rights and in particular women's rights, are Hillary issues. Her fame and gender put her in an extraordinarily strong position to promote these issues, which may prove her most enduring legacy.

Now we get to the 2012/2016 speculation:

One day, of course, Hillary will no longer be Secretary of State. So what then? The surprising answer may be: not a great deal. Political disclaimers should normally be taken with a generous pinch of salt. But in Hillary's case there is no reason to disbelieve her when she insists she will not run for president again – and when she says she does not see herself sticking in her present job beyond the end Obama's first term.

Naturally those words have been taken by the irredeemably conspiracy-minded as leaving the door open to a challenge to Obama in 2012, should his presidency unravel. But that now looks a good deal less likely, after his victory over healthcare and the arms treaty with Moscow. And Hillary the student of presidential politics knows that a primary challenge to a sitting President results in two things: the defeat of the challenger in the primaries, and the subsequent electoral defeat of his or her party.

By the time election day 2016 rolls around, she will be 69; only Ronald Reagan was as old when he took office. She maintains that she plans a future of writing and teaching. Enoch Powell once said all political careers end in failure. But in Hillary Clinton's case the observation is true only in that she failed to crack America's ultimate glass ceiling. As for the rest: high-powered lawyer, First Lady, senator, Secretary of State – if that's failure, who needs success?

The Independent is a UK newspaper, and I don't think the Brits really understand just how dissatisfied the American people are with Obama's health care plan. Only the hardcore obots view it as a "success." On the right, the Tea Party people and the rest of the Repubs hate the very ides of government interference in health care. More importantly, a lot of Hillary's Democratic base aren't happy with Obamacare because of the Stupak amendment and because of the mandate with no public option. Obama's overall approval ratings keep dropping and I honestly don't see anything that will bring them back up, short of a miraculous economic recovery.