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Hillary Clinton was a failure as the manager of the State Department, America's top diplomat. Sadder still given her inept performance as Secretary of State, people are hoping she will run for president

Hillary Clinton: The Light Princess



Someone who didn't know better, reading Hillary Clinton's interview (Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help the Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS) with Jeffrey Goldberg in the August 2014 edition of The Atlantic would find it hard to believe that she had been the US Secretary of State during President Obama's first term in office. Rather that person would conclude that she had not been involved in the making of US foreign policy, and was now speaking out about the Obama administration's failures on the world stage.
When asked about the President's recent foreign policy remarks, she responded, "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle." She also took a broad swipe at both Obama and George W. Bush saying, "You know, when you're down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you're not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward." Hillary Clinton can try to pretend that she was the lone voice crying in the wilderness, and all of the foreign policy blunders of the past four years were of Obama's and only Obama's making. But she even has the gall to say, "One issue is that we don't even tell our own story very well these days." Who other than the Secretary of State has the primary responsibility for telling America's story to the rest of the world? The story that Hillary Clinton spins about her four years as the top US diplomat reminds me of the poem about the little man who wasn't there. According to her, she was an almost invisible presence in the Obama administration. She was there but she wasn't there. She floated above the fray and wasn't involved in making the hard choices, so she certainly can not be held responsible for the administration's disastrous foreign policy. To hear her tell it, the current mess is all Obama's fault. She would have us believe that she was above it all and therefore is blameless. Last year the National Theatre in London produced a musical entitled The Light Princess. It tells the story of a princess who literally floats in air and cannot be bothered with the mundane affairs of helping to run her kingdom. Given her recent statements and writings, Hillary Clinton might easily be mistaken for a light princess.

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It would of course be churlish to criticize her for her comment that she and Bill were "dead broke" when they left the White House. She apparently forgot the $1.7 million home they had purchased in 1999 in Chappaqua, NY. She also appears to have forgotten the $2.85 million house they purchased in Washington, DC, in December, 2000. They made an $855,000 cash down payment on that house. Of course, leaving the White House had to have been a traumatic time for her, and after all it was a long time ago. Anyone can be excused for forgetting a few insignificant details such as the $8 million advance she received for her first memoir, Living History, and the $2.84 million in royalties she received from Simon and Schuster in 2001. Besides, Mrs. Clinton has acknowledged that her dead broke remark was "an in artful use of words" so naturally the matter is closed. What it is impossible to overlook are her remarks regarding what she did to insure the safety of the personnel assigned to our consulate in Benghazi. Mrs. Clinton has said that she "gave very direct instructions." She then absolved herself of all responsibility by adding, "I'm not equipped to sit and look at blueprints to determine where the blast walls need to be or where the reinforcements need to be. That's why we hire people who have that expertise." Peter Drucker, the father of modern management science, explained that the job of the executive is to be effective: "The executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done." It would seem that Mrs. Clinton, like the light princess in the musical, came down to earth for a brief moment and then floated back up to the clouds thinking that simply saying what needed to be done was all that she needed to do. There is a world of difference between stating the obvious, that all of our diplomatic posts should be secure, and making sure that they are. It might be unfair to compare Hillary Clinton to a light princess were it not for some of the comments in the chapter she wrote about Benghazi in her latest memoir, Hard Choices. Mrs. Clinton writes, "So while there were Marines stationed at our embassy in Tripoli [as it turns out there weren't any there], where nearly all of our diplomats worked and which had the capability to process classified material, because there was no classified processing at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, there were no Marines posted there." Only someone who knows almost nothing about the functioning of our embassies and consulates would make such a statement. That Mrs. Clinton believes that that there would be no classified documents at a consulate, or that marines are stationed at diplomatic posts to protect and if necessary destroy classified materials is astonishing. The marines aren't cleared to handle classified State Department materials. Hasn't Mrs. Clinton seen Argo? The marines are trying to keep the Iranians at bay while the diplomats shred the classified documents. The other explanation is that Mrs. Clinton does know that it is the Foreign Service Officers who are tasked with destroying classified materials when a diplomatic post is in danger of being overrun. If she does, then Hard Choices, like her other books, was ghost written, and that before approving the copy for publication she only gave it a cursory read. After all, a light princess cannot be bothered with petty details. Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State for four years. She traveled nearly one million miles and visited 112 countries. Any Secretary of State who cared about finding out what the facts on the ground were would spend time speaking with the diplomats assigned to the embassies and consulates in the countries she visited. Of course a light princess, who simply wanted to stay as far away from Washington as often and for as long as possible, might be happy to use the treadmill that she carried with her on her trips abroad, meet with dignitaries at the Foreign Ministry or Presidential Palace for photo-ops, let US diplomatic personnel who wanted to have their picture taken with her come to her hotel for a photo shoot, and be seen on the nightly news visiting outstanding tourist attractions such as the Shwedagon Pagoda complex in Yangon. Sadly, given Mrs. Clinton's inability to point to a single significant accomplishment that resulted from all the globe- trotting that she did, it would seem that she is indeed a light princess. While it is sad that Hillary Clinton was a failure as the manager of the State Department and as America's top diplomat, what is even sadder is that given her inept performance as Secretary of State, so many people are hoping she will run for president. The second stanza of the poem about the little man who wasn't there ends with these lines: Go away, go away, don't you come back any more! Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton has no plans to go away.


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Al Kaltman -- Bio and Archives

Al Kaltman is a political science professor who teaches a leadership studies course at George Washington University.  He is the author of Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant.


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