Mon, 07/13/2009 - 11:09am
As the six-month mark of her tenure approaches and she recovers from a broken elbow, Secretary Clinton is getting her second wind this week as she prepares for a major foreign-policy speech Wednesday and trips to India and Thailand this weekend. It's great that Clinton is now healthy enough to travel overseas after her canceled trips to Russia, Italy, and Greece.
The speech and trips -- which include the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) -- are opportunities to raise her profile after some have said she "toils in the shadows." Clinton "hasn't been the face of America abroad," said Ben Smith, the reporter for the Politico article "Clinton Toils in the Shadows," on National Public Radio this weekend.
Smith said that there was an expectation that Clinton was offered the secretary-of-state job because Obama would be busy trying to fix domestic problems, namely the Great Recession. Instead, however, Obama has been able to travel abroad, and when he does, people go wild with Obamamania. Obama and his identity have been riveting symbols overseas -- think about his speeches in Cairo and Ghana. "I don't think you can upstage Barack Obama," Wendy Chamberlin, a former U.S. ambassador and now head of the Middle East Institute, told Agence France-Presse.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had it easier when it came to her profile overseas. No one liked George W. Bush, so she had the spotlight all to herself. Nevertheless, it now looks like Clinton, with her second wind, is will be emerging into the limelight to make her mark and be another face of America abroad.
Photo (Clinton at NATO summit, April 3, 2009): MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images
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Source:http://hillary.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/13/clinton_getting_her_second_wind
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*Hillary Clinton plans to reassert herself with high-profile speech
By BEN SMITH 7/14/09 4:38 AM EDT
In the first six months of the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brought her star power to the world stage and cemented her position as a serious internal player. Now, according to her aides, she is ready to articulate her own policy agenda, one that focuses in part on strengthening Americans’ capacity for what has been called “smart power.” The speech she is scheduled to give Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations is expected to serve as an explanation and framework of the administration’s foreign policy and a tour of its busy first half-year. But it will sound some themes closely associated with Clinton’s former life as first lady and U.S. senator.1
“She is bringing the concept of ‘it takes a village’ to foreign policy,” said Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott, invoking the title of a well-received book that Clinton wrote while her husband was in the White House.
“She thought it was a good time to try to give a framing speech to take some perspective, talk about what we have been doing, what we plan to do – the administration and her as secretary – and how these issues fit together as part of a larger strategy,” said an administration official familiar with the draft speech, who said it would tour a breakneck half-year’s diplomatic efforts everywhere from Iran to North Korea, Iraq, Pakistan, and the Middle East.
“It’s an opportunity to take a step back and talk about how this all fits together,” the official said.
The speech will include “strong discussion of development and a forward-looking overview of how we think about U.S. relations with [and] management of the great powers in a way that gets more comprehensive than what they are doing on this or that crisis,” said another Democratic foreign policy official.
One official said the speech has been long in the making and has been labored over by Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter — a former academic who has emerged as a key Clinton policy adviser — along with speechwriter Lissa Muscatine.2, 3
But another official suggested an additional motivation: Beating back a persistent perception that Clinton has been kept in the administration’s shadows. Tina Brown wrote on The Daily Beast on Monday that President Barack Obama had confined Clinton to a kind of “wifehood of the Saudi variety” and that it is “time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa.”
Officials at the White House and State Department reject the notion that Clinton has been marginalized — and note that much of the low profile is of Clinton’s choosing. She has made, for instance, just one appearance on a Sunday morning talk show — and none until last month — but they insist that’s an absence as much of her choosing as of the White House’s. The White House press office sought to book her on Sunday shows three times before, an official said, but she declined each time, twice because she was overseas and once because she was in New York for Mother’s Day.
Her visibility was also affected by a broken elbow, which required surgery and extensive physical therapy, and prevented her from accompanying Obama on his most recent foreign trip.
Having established herself within the administration and on the world stage, the logical next step for Clinton is to turn her attention to a domestic audience and explain a foreign policy different in tone and substance from George W. Bush’s administration, according to Clinton watchers such as James Goldgeier, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
“She is so good at explaining things that I would hope that at least part of what she’s doing is explaining to the American people why the administration has the policies that it has,” said Goldgeier.
Clinton appears increasingly comfortable expressing her views. State Department officials have suggested that she’s been a hawkish internal voice, pushing Obama toward more confrontational stances toward adversaries from Iran to Cuba. And she has shown a new willingness in recent days to throw the occasional mild elbow in public — even one directed at the White House.Read more:
At a town hall meeting at the United States Agency for International Development on Monday, Clinton complained about the slow vetting of Harvard public-health crusader Paul Farmer for the job of running the soft-power focused agency.
“The clearance and vetting process is a nightmare, and it takes far longer than any of us would want to see,” Clinton said. “It is frustrating beyond words. I pushed very hard last week when I knew I was coming here to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way and someone will be nominated shortly.”
“I was unable,” she said. “The message came back: ‘We’re not ready.’”
But officials said Clinton would be careful in her speech to avoid any hint of daylight between her and the White House. “It’s a White House-dominated foreign policy,” Goldgeier said. “The president’s clearly in charge.”
But Talbott and others close to Clinton pointed to her remarks at another town-hall-style meeting with State Department employees for a sense of the themes she wants to emphasize as secretary.
“We are prioritizing development along with diplomacy as part of our global agenda,” Clinton said, announcing a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review modeled on the military’s procedures for developing policy. “We’re working to build a world of economic stability and prosperity, clean and affordable energy, health care, housing, and education for our children, an expansion of fundamental rights, tackling the threats of global extremism, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
And she intends to keep making her case domestically after Wednesday, the official familiar with her speech said.
“This is not the end of the conversation,” the official said. “In many ways this is the beginning of the conversation.”
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Source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24893.html
1 HRC consults Brzezinski, Scowcroft
By BEN SMITH 07/14/09 1:41 PM
Greg Sargent has a list of foreign policy thinkers Clinton's been talking to before her speech. Read blog post.
2 Lissa Muscatine
Lissa Muscatine was a speechwriter and the communications director of former First Lady Hillary Clinton. Currently, she is a speechwriter of Senator Clinton's campaign for the presidential nomination, and is one of her closest advisors, a member of Hillaryland.[1]
She is married to Washington Post editor Bradley Graham, and is on the Board of Trustees of the Sidwell Friends School[2].
3 http://www.muckety.com/Lissa-Muscatine/19544.muckety
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