--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "raunchydog" <raunchy...@...> wrote: <snip> > Politico had an article yesterday reporting on the > terrific job Hillary has been doing as Secretary of > State, "Hillary Clinton toils in the shadows."
And Politico was not exactly a hotbed of Hillary fandom during the campaign, to say the least. I'm going to quote from the beginning of the piece, because it so thoroughly blows Barry's ugly, arrogant, *incredibly* ignorant rants about Hillary right back up his ass whence they came. Clinton toils in the shadows By: Ben Smith June 23, 2009 04:49 AM EST Back last fall, when Barack Obama sprang his surprise about naming former rival Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, many people assumed she would be the Cabinet's brightest star a celebrity at large on the world stage, the face of American foreign policy while the president was consumed back home by domestic issues and a troubled economy. Few commentators predicted the reality: an era of grindstone leadership at the State Department. But that's exactly what Clinton has fashioned at Foggy Bottom. She has become a disciplined loyalist who jostles for White House influence just like any Cabinet secretary and who has advanced her cause by striking some key internal alliances. Most surprisingly, she has about as low a news -making profile as is possible for someone who is arguably the most famous woman on the planet. When she slipped and broke her elbow last week, it was the most press coverage she had gotten in months. A Nexis database search showed she had fewer mentions last month than any time since she launched her presidential bid in January 2007. It is an arrangement that, by all appearances, seems to suit Clinton and the Obama White House just fine, even as it has contributed to increasing chatter in foreign policy circles about her clout. By some lights, no one should be surprised by the former presidential candidate's latest reinvention. It is an encore performance a revival of the same strategy Clinton used when arriving to a chamber of skeptical colleagues after being elected to the Senate in 2000. Then she brushed aside national publicity and immersed herself on such issues as regional dairy compacts while waiting years for the right moment to re-emerge.... In the reporting for this article, an array of senior officials got on the line including many who do not ordinarily give interviews or do so on background rules for on-the-record singing of her praises. "Her star power has been an enormously effective tool for us," Tom Donilon, the deputy national security adviser with a central role in running foreign policy day to day, told POLITICO, describing the attention she commands abroad and her access to foreign leaders. "She's a pretty tough customer in private negotiations, as you would imagine, and expects partners to behave like partners and expects people to do what they say they're going to do." Donilon and other top officials emphasized how well she has fit in among the "alpha males" as she put it to one of them, Afghanistan and Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke who compose the rest of the foreign policy team.... Clinton's strategy for navigating Obama's councils of power is a reflection of temperament. Hillary Clinton the celebrity has always been balanced by and, in the end, usually subordinate to Clinton the grind, the woman with the self-described "responsibility gene." Bill Clinton was the politician as jazz improvisationalist; she was the linear thinker who believed that self-discipline and applied intelligence is the answer to most challenges.... Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24067.html http://tinyurl.com/ngvx9b
