Washington – Among Barack Obama’s many firsts, we can now add this: He has made Hillary Clinton nearly invisible. Even Bubba never managed that.
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The secretary of state surfaced in Washington the other day for a speech designed to highlight her heavyweight status within the Obama administration. Her appearance did just the opposite, confirming the sense she is being marginalized on foreign policy.
The campaign to puff her up was too obvious. She stacked the room with aides and her team talked up the “muscular” approach she would take toward Iran. To get ready for her closeup, Clinton shed the sling she has worn since breaking her elbow.
All for naught.
The appearance raised fresh questions about her reduced role because the speech was a tired rehash of existing themes and broke no new policy ground. “A damp squib” one disappointed critic called it.
It certainly didn’t help that Obama upstaged her by appearing at about the same time to talk about health care.
That she and Obama are entering a Cold War phase was predictable. I wrote last December that signs of friction would appear within six months of the new team taking the field.
Like clockwork, that’s been happening. It started with Iran, a sore spot from last year’s bitter campaign where Clinton called Obama naive for thinking he could charm the mad mullahs out of nuclear weapons.
Five days after the June 12 elections, as Obama hesitated to condemn Iran for cracking down on protesters, The New York Times, citing anonymous sources, reported that Clinton and others were pushing Obama to get tougher.
Obama finally managed to find his voice on June 23, saying he was “appalled and outraged” at the violence. Within days, another report surfaced from the State Department, saying Clinton hadn’t known in advance when he would follow her advice.
The frost extends to hiring. A testy Clinton grumbled last week about the White House vetting process, saying, “It’s hard to justify not having our full government in place six months after we started.”
She could have been talking about her move to hire Sidney Blumenthal, a partisan Clinton warrior in her husband’s White House. The plan to retain him as an adviser, leaked to a Clinton-friendly Web site, apparently has been rejected by the Obama White House.
Perhaps it had something to do with Blumenthal’s role in Hillary’s campaign, where he specialized in accusations that Obama was weak on foreign policy. You can hardly blame Obama for blackballing him.
But Clinton also was blocked from putting her picks in some ambassadorial jobs and her top aide on Iran, Dennis Ross, was transferred to the White House.
Some of this is amusing, a continuation of their one-for-the-ages battle that Clinton dead-enders still are fighting. Yet despite official assurances from both camps that all is well between them, the overarching sense is that Obama and Clinton have unfinished business.
No doubt they do, but the stakes are now far greater than their personal grudges. Among many hot spots, Iran is Public Enemy No. 1 and we still don’t have a policy to stop its march toward nukes or its sponsorship of terrorism.
Obama’s soft-sell approach was flawed from the start, as Clinton warned, and the repression after the election made him look, well, naive. But there isn’t a Plan B, with Russia and China no more help than they were when George Bush was in the White House.
All of which points to an inescapable fact: Clinton had a more realistic view of Iran. It’s time to bring her in from the cold and let her take charge of building a strong policy and implementing it.
Besides, keeping her busy might keep her from making mischief.
Obama is a big believer in keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer.
Making Hillary invisible may bolster Obama’s image in that there is nothing to take the limelight away from him. But that does not mean that her own input into foreign policy will have no effect. The fact is that both of them love terrorists, and their policies and speeches, as well as the welcoming they give to those who identify with terror as laudable are all alarming. We don’t need Hillary to be come invisible, and neither do we need Obama to become invisible. That would not be enough to allow for world peace. We need for them to become unemployed. Both of them are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps their rivalry of their campaigns will help disunite them for now, but that leaves us with no foreign policy at all, not exactly smart. The alternative is that these two terror lovers work in synergy, and we’re all oif tzuris.
Boy, can we get them both to shrink for the benefit of the country
To #1 He needed Hillary badly to win the election and he used her! Now that he won the election if he thinks that by pushing her aside it’s a good and smart move it happens to be dumb!! He will lose big!! He won the women’s vote because of her and he can lose it just as fast!
maybe obama can appoint her maharat-in-chief
Hillary and Obama don’t disagree on everything. On giving Israel a hard time, they both are in agreement. Bubba left the White House penniless and in debt. Thanks to the Saudi’s he’s now worth north of $200 mil. So they bought off Hillary, and the “Closet Muslim” Obama also does all in his power to weaken Israel, and to divide Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel since King David.