WhatFinger

If Hillary doesn't own Obama's foreign policy, how can she own her tenure as Secretary of State?

By Dan Calabrese ——--August 11, 2014

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I understand that when you analyze what Hillary Clinton does, it's very much beside the point to look at it in terms of substance or intellectual honesty. It's all about how shrewdly she positions herself to run for president, and if sufficient shrewdness is detected, you're supposed to marvel at her political skills and just leave it at that.
But just because that's how the game is played doesn't mean it should be. So we now assess her entirely predictable "distancing" of herself from Obama's disastrous foreign policy, which CNN explains:
Since releasing her new memoir in June, Clinton has slowly taken steps away from her former boss’s positions. The tactic appears to be intentional: Obama's poll numbers are slipping and Clinton, who is widely considered the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, needs to separate herself from the negative numbers.
The first split with Obama came during the Syria chapter of her book "Hard Choices," where Clinton articulates that she and the President disagreed on how to handle the "wicked problem" of arming Syrian rebels. The “risks of both action and inaction were high. Both choices would bring unintended consequences. The President's inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels," she wrote. "No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the President's call and I respected his deliberations and decision." In her interview with The Atlantic, Clinton went further than she does in her book and called the inaction in Syria a "failure." "The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad - there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle - the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Clinton said.
So since Hillary now refuses to own Obama's foreign policy, and wants us to know that she lost these debates internally, here's my very simple question: If Hillary doesn't want to own Obama's foreign policy for the purposes of running for president, how can she also try to own her tenure as his Secretary of State? The Secretary of State, after all, is the nation's chief diplomat and the president's number one deputy with respect to implementing his foreign policy. If the foreign policy put in place while Hillary was at State is not to her liking - either because she backed the wrong policies or because she was ineffective in advocating the right ones - what exactly is it about her tenure as Secretary of State that would recommend her for the presidency? Can someone explain that please?

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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