Hillary Clinton has a dilemma on her hands. She wants to be President. A lot.
Unfortunately for her, as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State for four years, she is, to a considerable extent, the face of Obama’s foreign policy. Her fingerprints are all over it. She set in motion many of the foreign policy scenarios which are now imploding. And as they say, the chickens are coming home to roost.
For example, the Obama Administration thought George Bush was a cowboy who had badly handled Russia. They thought Bush had been too tough with Putin, and the United States just needed to be friendlier, and Putin would respond with goodwill.
Hillary famously used a reset button prop to illustrate that Bush’s unnecessary toughness with Putin would be replaced with Obama’s friendship and reason. Putin took the Obama Administration’s naiveté as weakness, and responded by undermining U.S. interests around the globe at every opportunity, particularly in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe.
The Obama Administration used air power to help overthrow Muammar al-Gaddafi. After Gaddiafi was gone, nothing was done to secure the peace. Our ambassador and three other brave Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi, and the cover-up of the truth there continues to this day.
In Syria, there was a lot of jawboning about how bad Bashar al-Assad was, and that he had to go. However nothing was done to support the moderate anti-Assad forces, so the really bad guys (like ISIS) became more powerful and have spilled over from Syria to Iraq, where they’ve now taken over half of that country too.
As a result of the accumulation of all these foreign policy failures, the American people’s confidence in Barack Obama has collapsed. He’s down at 35% when people are asked if they approve of Obama’s handling of foreign policy. Hillary is attempting to distance herself from this mess. That’s tough to do since she was Obama’s Secretary of State, for four years. But she’s trying.
She’s quoted in the Atlantic recently blaming the rise of ISIS on the Obama White House’s “failure” to support ISIS’s rivals which “left a big vacuum, which the Jihadists have now filled.” She further criticized Obama’s foreign policy, saying that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
Hillary apparently felt that maybe she’d gone too far, and decided to “hug it out” with Obama when they’d both be attending a – you guessed it – fundraiser, in Taxachusettes, I mean Massachusetts.
Poor Hillary. Her challenge is to distance herself from the failures of the Obama Administration, both foreign and domestic (and there are many), but not so far that she risks alienating the 40% or so of Americans who still think that Barack Obama is not only not the worst President in American history, but maybe the best. And if Hillary separates herself from Obama too much, she could get a challenge in the Democratic Primary from her left. Senator Elizabeth Warren for example.
Will she succeed? I don’t know. But it will be fun to watch.