In the few hours between landing after a swing through Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa and taking off again for Berlin, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found time on Friday to stop over in much friendlier territory: a subterranean banquet hall at Washington’s Reagan International Trade Center. There, she addressed the people who tried to make her president of the United States.
The occasion: a “policy conference”—really more of a reunion—put on by a Hillary-centric advocacy group called NoLimits.org, which her staunchest defenders had founded in the wake of the 2008 election. They wanted to preserve the sisterhood that had grown up around her campaign, and the secretary, by being there, was just returning their loyalty. “We have had some extraordinary times,” Hillary said, relaxed and smiling. “There were so many of you here who were there with me on that long, exciting, death-defying journey across our country! You’re the ones who helped put all those cracks in the glass ceiling.”
The conference drew a peculiar mix: well-preserved Hillraisers, mingling and gossiping in their blonde coifs and furs, alongside supporters of a more pedestrian stripe, many of whom came with one friend or sat alone. They had all paid upwards of $175 apiece to listen to speakers like Barney Frank and Obama aide Jim Messina talk about issues of the day. The real draw, though, was Hillary herself.
The crowd (women, mostly) sat spellbound while she narrated her travels. They shook their heads when Hillary told them, in intimate tones, of visiting rape survivors in the Congo. When she finished, they surged forward to touch her hand, catch her eye, or take her picture—flashes of recognition crossed her face as she bent down from the dais to greet them.
This is pretty great.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed doubt Thursday over Pakistan's failure to locate top al-Qaeda leaders in the eight years since they escaped over the border from Afghanistan, telling a group of Pakistani journalists that she found "it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."
After years of stalemate, negotiations over
NYT:
The task was left to Mr. Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who have experienced their own frustration at the polls, and used those scars in dealing with Mr. Karzai.
No, not Dwight Eisenhower (and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles), who thought of his Arabs as the Egyptians. Frankly, in 1956, nobody thought of Palestinians, including especially the Palestinians.
And, no, not even Jimmy Carter, who, while now especially entranced with the Palestinians, including Hamas, was beginning his macabre infatuation with Hafez Assad.
Then there was George Herbert Walker Bush and his sidekick James Baker, who didn't much like the Jews but wanted especially to please the Saudis. The U.S. provided arms to Saddam Hussein, who made the mistake of using them against Kuwait, which, of course, frightened "the kingdom." Hence the first Gulf war. A little simplified? Not much. Oh, yes, Baker gave Tom Friedman the White House telephone number and told him to give it to Yitzhak Shamir, who spoke only to himself. He's still alive and still mute. He once wagged his stubby little finger at me in Blair House.
That's more or less the presidential narrative except for Bill Clinton, who loved the Israelis so much that they loved him back and gave him what he wanted, even color-coding the Old City between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat told him and them to go shove it. Apparently, Bill still loves Israel. (Apparently, he still speaks for the Jews as long as the price is right.) But it's hard to imagine that Hillary loves anyone. Anyway, she's been busy in Ireland (where "the troubles" are beginning again) and in Africa (where the troubles never end) and in China (to whose leaders she said nothing about human rights) and in Russia, where she had a low-level host and visited a low-level state in the Federation and unveiled a statue to Walt Whitman but didn't know he was gay and got into trouble with gay activists who were being beaten up by the present-day version of the Cheka.
And so, back to President Obama, who's been reciting the Palestinian narrative so much that he's got it memorized by heart. Which gives rise to the suspicion that it really comes from his heart. This is difficult for me since I gave a lot of energy (and the maximum amount of money allowed) to his campaign.
The on-going “Tonight Show”/YouTube feud between Conan O’Brien and Newark Mayor Cory Booker will evidently reach its culmination Friday when Booker appears on the NBC broadcast.
In the interim it has spawned a spate of news stories, an “intervention” by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and, earlier this week, was the focus of Bob Herbert’s New York Times op-ed column.
In paraphrasing Conan, Herbert reports that he “threatened to form an alliance with the mayors of nearby municipalities, thus “creating a geographic toilet seat around the city of Newark,” making it possible to flush the city down the figurative bowl.”
The sad thing is, that’s kind of true. This scenario already exists in that the mayors of many nearby municipalities are allied against Newark in the worst possible way. All except the poorest towns--like East Orange--prohibit affordable housing anywhere in their jurisdictions. Despite the state Supreme Court’s famous Mt. Laurel decision, which declared that each town must have its “fair share” of affordable housing, zoning policies have managed to keep New Jersey highly segregated by race and class.
The news surrounding today's meeting between Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is pretty bad. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has taken the opportunity to dump cold water on our hopes for more Iran sanctions and to trumpet a Sino-Russian gas pipeline deal that would weaken our hand in Central Asia. But, despite all that, it's worth keeping in mind that the "New START" treaty that Hillary is in Moscow to negotiate is a solid one.
AFP quotes the traveling Secretary of State on what might be the most important national security question of all, and one we should re-examine in the wake of this weekend's Taliban attack on Pakistani Army HQ:
"Yesterday was another reminder that extremists ... are increasingly threatening the authority of the state," Clinton said at a press conference with British Foreign Secretary David Milliband.
I confess to reading people on the right. Sometimes with utter dismay. Oftentimes with respect. Among the people I read regularly is Peter Wehner who actually writes for Commentary's website, Contentious, with other conservative intellectuals. And very contentious they are. Wehner actually was one of George Bush's speechwriters. Since I thought some of Bush's speeches quite alright--and even better--this fact is not a disqualifier.
Indeed, Wehner is one smart guy ... and a stylish writer besides. What's more, he knows his history. Today, he's dug into the history of the Cold War, an era not so strategically remote from our own. Except that the enemy is militarily far weaker than we are but stronger in the fact that it hides behind civilians--committed to it and utterly indifferent to it--which, given our scruples, provides enormous advantages to our foe.
This is the circumstance that permits the Goldstone panel, installed by the oh, so impartial Human Rights Council, to accuse Israel of war crimes. Moreover, it is the setting for charging the United States and NATO in Afghanistan also with war crimes.
With apologies to Winston Churchill, President Obama may not have presided over the beginning of the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last week in New York, but he seems finally to have marked the end of an embarrassing beginning to his Middle East diplomacy.
Via Ben Smith, I see that John McCain is hosting a fundraiser for Mitt Romney in Phoenix next week. Back in January of 2008, this would have seemed more unlikely than Obama picking Hillary as his Secretary of State.
This morning I'm inside the UN Security Council chamber for the special session, chaired by president Obama, on nuclear nonproliferation. Still not sure what to expect, as it's not clear whether anything unexpected might happen and, not unrelated, whether Moamar Qaddafi, whose country is currently a non-permanent Security Council member, will be here. For entertainment's sake, I certainly hope so. Stay tuned.
Look, everything I know about the top U.S.
Tensions are rising across South America this month as Venezuela signed three oil deals with Iran and a 2-billion-dollar arms deal with Russia, causing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to speculate about a possible arms race.
Yesterday, facing public discontent over the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held a private meeting with one of Washington's venerable "wise men"--former Secretary of State Colin Powell. In doing so, Obama was participating in an age-old tradition. Click through this slideshow to see some notable "wise men" who have been summoned to the Oval Office.
Yesterday, facing public discontent over the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held a private meeting with one of Washington's venerable "wise men"--former Secretary of State Colin Powell. In doing so, Obama was participating in an age-old tradition. Click through this slideshow to see some notable "wise men" who have been summoned to the Oval Office.
During her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband Bill promised the electorate that it would get "two for the price of one" if she was elected. She didn't demur, at least not in public.
But she also wasn't elected. She was appointed secretary of state by the winning candidate Barack Obama.
Tuesday's Boston Globe had in it an Associated Press dispatch that speculates about her feeling crowded by the president's frequent flyer international travel, by vice president Joe Biden's foreign assignments and what must be a nightmare for her, the designation of independent and high-powered individuals as special envoys to the most combustible areas in the world. Like Richard Holbrooke to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Truly high-powered. And George Mitchell. OK, not so high-powered. He will enter the history books as a failure, twice over. But that's another story.
As the AP put it, even on her visit to Africa, Hillary "couldn't escape his outsized shadow." By which it meant her husband and his visit with Kim Jung Il in Pyongyang. A university student had asked what Bill thought about some big Chinese loan to the Democratic Republic of Congo (which, by the way, is neither democratic nor a republic.). She was not cool in response: "My husband is not secretary of state, I am." AP says "she snapped." And then went on: "You want me to tell you what me husband thinks? If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channelling my husband." She was a bit irritable, don't you think?
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Treasury Secretary Geithner--and Secretary of State Clinton--meet with a high-level Chinese delegation.
According to official previews (i.e., the apparent contents of background briefings given to wire services), the economic topics are China's concerns about the value of the dollar (i.e., their investments in the U.S.) and the amount of debt that the U.S. will issue this year.
This is absurd.
China has arrived ... again. Beijing is growing confident enough in its own power and position in the world that it is increasingly and actively influencing world events. It can choose--and has chosen, in many cases--to play a helpful role in tackling shared threats. But China has also been standing its ground on disagreements with the United States.
As President Obama prepares for his historic speech in Cairo next week, he faces a dual challenge--not only to redefine the troubled relations between the United States and the Muslim world, but also to clarify the place of democracy and human rights in his administration's foreign policy. The former would have been the centerpiece of his first speech in an Islamic nation no matter where he had chosen to deliver it. But it was the selection of Egypt as his venue that made the latter unavoidable.
What a difference a Democratic primary makes. During the 1990s, the Right treated Hillary Clinton like she was, if not the locus of all evil, something just next to it. Now that she's on track to be Obama's Secretary of State, Newt Gingrich is singing her praises and the Weekly Standard is calling her "The Great Right Hope."
With Hillary Clinton likely to be appointed as Secretary of State in the coming days, what happens to the $22 million in debt she accrued during her run for president? One of her best options for whittling down the debt was rolling it over to her 2012 Senate reelection campaign--an option that would seem to be off the table if she accepts the cabinet post.
