An FT interview with Hillary Clinton (Financial Times 6/11/10)

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An FT interview with Hillary Clinton (Financial Times 6/11/10)	Permalink

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d894c6b2-7432-11df-87f5-00144feabdc0.html This article is waaaaaay long and there are related articles on the same page. I'll just quote a few highlights. (OK, maybe more than a few. ) Today, Clinton’s convoy is snaking through São Paulo, Brazil, not South Hampton, New Hampshire. She herself is no longer an aspirant for the White House, despite what the overnight flights, town hall meetings and strategy sessions that make up her gruelling schedule might suggest. Instead, she is in Latin America to shore up relations with the region and promote a new idea of US leadership, one very much built around herself. She’s had bigger and more ecstatic audiences than the 700-odd students and staff crammed into the hall tonight at Zumbi dos Pradares, an Afro-Brazilian university, but she’s still greeted by a wave of raised arms as the audience snaps away at her with their mobile phones. In the convoy moments before, she was wrapped in a shawl, suffering from a cold and angry at the delays that pushed us into the side streets speckled with box-like bars, warehouses and love hotels while Brazilian motorists sought to cut into our path. There is no sign of that now. With the metabolism of a born politician, she feeds off the energy of her audience and takes questions from students, teachers and local celebrities for an hour. Hillary Clinton never looks happier than when she is centre stage. Most US secretaries of state wouldn’t bother with this sort of event, much less initiate it and arrange for it to be screened on the biggest local channel. Yet this is what Clinton does on almost every foreign trip – and she seems to spend half her life on her official 727, crammed with long-time aides and armed bodyguards. The schedule is backbreaking and constantly shifting. She has notched up more than a quarter of a million miles since taking office. “We now have a case to make and it is not just a case that is made to the president or the prime minister or the foreign minister or an ambassador,” she tells me a few weeks later, as she perches on a sofa in her expansive office, with its view of the Lincoln Memorial. “People now have a voice and an opinion and a vote in many instances on the direction that their own societies take ... I want to model a different kind of leadership that is open and willing to listen but [also] to stand our ground if necessary.” She argues that these trips of hers help to restore the US’s image in the wake of the Bush administration – by making contact with public opinion abroad, and so boosting American power. Her aides say that, as a battle-hardened politician who also happens to be one of the most famous women in the world, she is ideally placed to carry out the task. But the deeper question is whether she is merely implementing the foreign policy crafted by Barack Obama, her boss and former rival, or whether her role – and ambitions – go beyond that. Is she a kind of saleswoman-in-chief for the US, I ask? “Well, I think that is part of the job,” she replies, toying with the napkin underneath her glass of water. “If you are making a case for American values and for American leadership, you have to make it where people now get information … Given the bridges we had to build and some of the repair work we had to do, we had to travel.” As in São Paulo, her system is under strain – “I’ve been fighting this all day,” she says as she masks a cough set off by her allergies (Washington’s cherry blossom trees are shedding their flowers). Life is still hectic – the volcanic ash cloud has just all but paralysed Europe and televisions throughout the State Department are showing the first British election debate. But Clinton remains enthusiastic, affable and unhurried, her speech peppered with exclamations such as “oh my gosh”, even as she discusses issues of state. She politely asks if I have any updates for her about Europe’s airspace shutdown and tells me she’s been talking to Norway’s foreign minister about it. “He said that this dust gets into engines of any size, even Air Force One – it’s chunky! I don’t know how else to describe it,” she says, an odd note of hilarity entering her voice as she pronounces the word “chunky”. Then a law student called Marina asks about abortion – which is illegal in Brazil – and Clinton moves into treacherous terrain. She speaks of the Brazilian hospital she visited in the 1990s that treated not just expectant mothers but women suffering from the consequences of backstreet abortions. “Wealthy women have rights in every country,” she says. “And poor women don’t.” Her strength of feeling can’t be hidden as she denounces “the great toll that illegal abortions take and the denial of women being able to exercise such a fundamental personal right”. Tom Shannon, the US ambassador to Brazil, tells me later: “I understand the possible concern that we might have come close to domestic issues. But she wasn’t laying out a prescription for Brazil. She was sharing her experience as a woman in American politics and as secretary of state.” It’s true: Clinton doesn’t quite cross the line. Onstage, she is controlled without seeming artificial, convivial without appearing over-effusive, what a previous age would call a real trouper. At the podium she looks straight ahead, her lips carefully expressionless. Still, the old competitive instincts haven’t left her. Perhaps it is the lecterns at press conferences, reminiscent of the Democratic presidential debates, but on exiting the podium at a joint appearance with Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández, Clinton makes clear her satisfaction at having had the last word. The expert debater who usually bested Obama has not left the stage. Others say the relationship is more complex, that by dint of her loyalty and unflagging hard work, Clinton has moved closer to the charmed circle and made herself an even more formidable political force than before. “Quite simply, she gives good advice and the president over a year and a half has recognised that,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of the State Department policy planning unit. “The relationship is based on her performance in the job.” By all accounts, it’s a collaborative partnership, though not perhaps a warm one. Clinton boasts a good working relationship with the main players of the administration – and has formed something of an alliance with defence secretary Robert Gates, although on life-and-death issues such as Afghanistan, it is Gates, not her, who has taken the lead. As one official told me, secretaries of state have often either been popular with their own department – Colin Powell comes to mind – or with the rest of the administration – as was Condoleezza Rice – but Clinton has managed to be both. In truth, Clinton’s language remains harder-edged than Obama’s – she recently claimed that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had staged a slow-motion coup – and she has sometimes been more willing than he is to hint at using the military. “She seems to step up with a bit of spine just at the right time,” says Kurt Volker, a US ambassador to Nato under George W. Bush. She has also assumed an ever more prominent role in talking to leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan – apparently because she is trusted both by them and Obama. Meanwhile, she has been careful to keep her husband, the former US president, in the background. Aides say they have barely seen him in the building – though Clinton herself says that behind the scenes Bill Clinton gives her strategic advice. “One of his favourite sayings, that I remind myself of all the time, is a kind of baseball saying,” she says: “Don’t major in the minors; keep your eye on not just the headlines but the trend lines.” During my time with her on the road, the stop in Brazil is the focal point – not surprising given the country’s increased profile as Latin America leader. Clinton is now heading the administration’s push to secure sanctions on Iran, and in Brasilia she tries and fails to win President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to her cause. She employs an almost combative tone at a press conference with Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister. At moments she appears to barely contain her irritation, as she denounces “an Iran that runs to Brazil” as well as other countries such as Turkey and China “telling different things to different people to avoid international sanctions”. Amorim is spiky in his own way – drawing parallels to the 1990s sanctions on Iraq and the claims about weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 war. “Of course, I don’t agree with everything the Secretary said,” he says. It is not a happy experience - indeed this past week both Brazil and Turkey voted against sanctions at the United Nations - yet Hillary Clinton is nowhere near giving up. Years ago, one of Bill Clinton’s biographers described his approach to government as a “permanent campaign”, and it appears to be his wife’s preferred form of existence as well. If there is one constant in Clinton’s life, it is that she never throws in her cards, whether what motivates her is power or public service. “Never, never!” she exclaims, when I ask whether she ever thought of walking off into the wings after the frustrations and indignities of her time at the White House. “I have a very realistic sense of what high-stakes politics requires and it took me a while to get there because it’s shocking when you are in the arena … but once you figure it out, you can take it seriously for purposes of analysis and understanding, but you can’t take it personally.” Such treatment seems to rankle all the same. She’s been listening to coverage ahead of the British debate and is plainly irritated by the coverage of the leaders’ wives. “Whether a woman’s running for office or she’s supporting her husband who’s running for office and she gets criticised for wearing open-toed shoes or for the colour of her coat, there’s just a lot of history that you bear if you are a woman who puts herself out in the political arena,” she says. She may not read the stories about her, but she has boosted her domestic profile still further by talking to American magazines such as Esquire, Vogue and Parade. To what end? Clinton has said she will only serve one four-year term as secretary of state – understandable, given the grind of the job. When I ask whether she expects a woman president in the next decade or so, she responds: “I’d love that, obviously I would love that. I want to be front and centre when it happens.” “Any chance it would be you?” I ask. “No, no, I don’t think that’s in the cards,” Clinton says. She’s given more categoric denials in the past. “I think that there’s a whole generation of young women and not so young, but mature, seasoned women who are earning their stripes and recognising how tough it is out there. It is not for the faint of heart to run for president, and I believe it is harder for women, it just is, and that’s just a fact.” But, says one US official, “all the profiles and all this media treatment undercut the argument that she is finished with electoral politics. Why do all this stuff? She’s already Hillary Clinton. You have to ask: ‘What’s the idea behind raising her domestic profile still further?’” Indeed she is now, by some counts, the most popular politician in America and some in Washington say she could be a good fit for the vice-presidential slot in the 2012 elections. Back in São Paulo, once the town hall meeting is over, Clinton faces a seven-hour flight to Costa Rica. The journey goes on and on, and as saleswoman-in-chief for the US in an unruly world, she faces a long, hard road. Today the US sometimes struggles to assert itself on the world stage. But the obstacles are rather fewer if the product she is pitching is herself. A secretary of state like none before her, Hillary Clinton, long one of the most formidable figures in US politics, is looking stronger than ever. Rise, Hillary, rise! Forget veep and ignore the necessary denials, it's all the way to the top in 2012! __________________ Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!

freespirit

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Date: Jun 12, 2010

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Yes! The VP job would be a huge waste of her talents. Worse, it would put her closer to Obozo's sinking ship.

The drive,energy, determine, and intelligence for which she is known world wide could be put to better use as POTUS. We would have had the benefit of Hillary's many phenomenal talents RIGHT NOW if the DNC and MSM had not stolen the presidency from her.

Never Forget!

Great article Jen. And the speculation about her running in 2012 continues.

__________________

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less. ~Susan B. Anthony

Jen the Michigander

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Yes, I'll be posting another 2012 article in a few minutes. __________________ Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!

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