Confronted with the most acute foreign policy crisis of his administration, President Barack Obama is increasingly relying on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her advice and connections — including a 20-year friendship with the family of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that has drawn fire from human rights advocates.
It was Clinton who came up with the idea of sending Frank Wisner, U.S. ambassador to Egypt in the 1980’s, to Cairo to deliver Obama’s pointed request that Mubarak not seek a new term as the country’s leader, an administration official told POLITICO.
And it was Clinton who Obama dispatched to appear on five Sunday morning shows to send a not-so-subtle message to the tottering dictator that the time had come for a “peaceful transition to real democracy,” not Mubarak’s “faux democracy.”
As a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, Clinton aired the famous “3 a.m.” commercial, with its image of a White House phone ringing with news of an international crisis, to question Obama’s foreign policy experience. But in the past week, Clinton has been at the center of Obama’s frantic attempt to keep pace with spiraling events — including a critical meeting in the Oval Office last Saturday when Obama deputized Clinton to clarify the administration’s confused response to the crisis.