Was it pure accident that over the same weekend, The Atlantic published Jeffrey Goldberg's interview of Hillary Clinton (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2014/08/jeffrey-goldberg-hillary-clinton.html), in which she all but branded the president a nincompoop? We are left to wonder whether Hillary's declaration that "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don’t do stupid shit' is not an organizing principle" interfered in any way with Obama's putting. Probably not. After all, Obama wasn't willing to allow a few beheadings and crucifixions by ISIL, or ten thousand Yazidis dying of thirst on a mountain, to stand in the way of his vacation.
Today, in a New York Times op-ed entitled "Hillary Clinton, Barbed and Bellicose" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/opinion/hillary-clinton-barbed-and-bellicose.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0), Frank Bruni begins by acknowledging that Hillary is running for president, but this has never been the question. Rather, the real issue is whether we can believe anything that she says.
Well on his way to writing himself into the history books as one of America's worst presidents, Obama appears, from his beloved links, to be indifferent to his fate. Hillary, on the other hand, must decide when and to what extent to distance herself from the disaster being wrecked upon the United States by the first invertebrate ever to occupy the Oval Office. As Bruni cleverly portrays Hillary's dilemma:
"The question is whether she can belittle Barack Obama as much as she must in order to win, but not so much that it plays as an act of sheer betrayal."
What's the poor woman to do? Her paid political advisers obviously made up their minds long ago. But how will voters ultimately respond to this carefully calculated ambush of her former boss? Again, as stated by Bruni:
"If decisions made while she was still the secretary of state were flawed, is she blameless? Sure, her job, like any appointee’s, was to implement the chief executive’s vision, to follow his lead. But it was also to lobby and leave an imprint. Is she conceding that she didn’t do that effectively enough?"
Indeed, Hillary spent four years accumulating frequent flyer miles and accomplished . . . nothing. My guess is that she miscalculated. Disloyalty will not win her approval.
And in a world that is more concerned with appearance than substance, how might Hillary fare against a youthful Marco Rubio in another two years? Of course, she could consider the dermal fillers and Botox route blazed by John Kerry (now making himself scarce on a seven-day trip to Afghanistan, Burma, Australia, the Solomon Islands and Hawaii, after a disastrous attempt to mediate Israel's conflict with Hamas), or she might attempt to exercise down the size of her pant suits, but the years are inevitably cruel to all of us.
Bottom line: "Vote for Granny!" just isn't going to cut it.
[See also: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2014/08/david-brooks-clinton-obama-and-iraq.html]
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