Author Topic: Hammering Obama: Hillary has only begun By John Podhoretz  (Read 336 times)

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Hammering Obama: Hillary has only begun By John Podhoretz
« on: August 13, 2014, 07:37:02 pm »
http://nypost.com/2014/08/13/hammering-obama-hillary-has-only-begun/

Hammering Obama: Hillary has only begun

By John Podhoretz

August 13, 2014 | 5:57am


Memo to President Obama: You should have made Hillary your vice president back in 2008.

She was the obvious choice. But you believed you were strong enough without her, and worried that Bill would be impossible to control.

Big mistake.

If Hillary were veep, she’d be inside the tent even now, biting her lip. Instead, she took her leave, wrote her book and is now taking aim — at you.

Hillary Clinton was and is your enemy. She says she’s your friend, but that’s what Iago told Othello.

In 2008, with blithe self-assurance, you took away from her the thing she most wanted — and as you did so, you allowed as how she was “likable enough.”

If she doesn’t still hate you for saying that in front of tens of millions of people on national TV, she’d be a better person than 95 percent of the people on Earth.

And she’s not.

What’s more, when she was working for you, you refused to give her the reins of US foreign policy and centralized all the power in the White House.

Fair is fair. You took Michael Corleone’s advice: You sought to keep this enemy close. But you didn’t keep her close enough. And now you shall pay. She has made you start paying already.

Hillary Clinton is the most popular politician in America now — more popular than you, if you haven’t noticed. And she has decided, for all intents and purposes, to go into opposition.

That was the meaning of the extraordinary interview she granted Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic over the weekend. It was the annunciation of her separation from you and your legacy.

Though filled with qualifications and words of praise for Obama here and there, the interview is a rare assault against a sitting president by his former secretary of state.

The key sentence is this: “Great nations need organizing principles,” Hillary told Goldberg, “and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

According to Mark Landler in the May 28 New York Times, it was Obama himself who reportedly boiled down his foreign policy to “a saltier variation of the phrase, ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ — brushing aside as reckless those who say the United States should consider enforcing a no-fly zone in Syria or supplying arms to Ukrainian troops.”

As it happens, Hillary used the Goldberg interview to make it clear she supported more aggressive actions against the Syrian regime but was shot down — and clearly intimated she’d support more aggressive efforts to support Ukraine against Russia’s depradations than Obama is willing to do.

She also took pains to separate herself from the administration’s disdainful treatment of Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas.

She refused to take Goldberg’s bait and say Israel had acted recklessly or irresponsibly.

“I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets,” she said. “And there is the surprising number and complexity of the tunnels, and Hamas has consistently, not just in this conflict, but in the past, been less than protective of their civilians.”

Rather than tasking Israel with the responsibility to “do more” to protect the civilians beneath whose legs Hamas was hiding its missiles and tunnels, she said,

“I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are — and I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position — that hasn’t made errors.”

Some read this as Hillary’s reemergence as a hawk, but I think it makes more sense to read it as part and parcel of her new determination to serve as an outside critic of the Obama administration’s approach — a critic more in sorrow than in anger, a seemingly friendly critic, who’s neither a Republican pol nor a neocon pundit.

Last year, when it looked like Obama might maintain his popularity, Hillary was ready to run as his confidant, adviser and friend.

Now, as the world comes crashing down upon him, along with his poll numbers and the increasingly disastrous prospects for his party in the November midterms, Mrs. Clinton has laid a bet.

She is betting she has two years to set herself up not as Obama’s natural successor but as his sadder-but-wiser replacement — the one who saw it go wrong, the one who watched as the mistakes were being made, the one who sought to mitigate or reverse those blunders to no effect, the one best able to take inspiration from a more successful, more centrist Democratic presidency.

Mrs. Clinton’s political judgment is not to be trusted. She allowed Obama to eat her lunch in 2008 in part because she was overconfident and tacked too far to the center too early. She may well be doing it again.

But she has made her choice. If Obama stumbles, she’ll be there — with her ankle turned out, to trip him up still further and then, with a sad smile, claim credit for having known that the obstacle had been there in his path all along.

Hillary called Obama yesterday to assure him nothing in the interview was meant to be critical of him. Well said, Iago.
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