CGP
08-08-2009, 12:49 PM
READ IN FULL @ THE AGE (http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-week-that-was-the-clinton-show-20090808-edmm.html)
IT'S BEEN 17 years since Bill and Hillary Clinton offered themselves up to American voters as a two-for-one package deal, and began adjusting notions of the role of the personal and the political in public life.
But in all those years - his scandals, her pillorying by the right, his jet-setting for the Clinton Global Initiative, her slog as a presidential candidate - it's hard to think of a week when the partnership worked as expertly as it did in the rescue of two journalists from North Korea.
Here was Hillary Clinton, embarking on a tour of Africa as Secretary of State, while her husband, the former president, successfully carried off an ultra-sensitive mission to one of the world's most recalcitrant regimes. It's an even more impressive piece of choreography given the other outsize political figures - each with their own personal histories with the Clintons - involved in last week's homecoming of the journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
There was Barack Obama, of course, who had brawled with both Clintons during the Democratic primaries. Mr Obama also had to weigh Mr Clinton's history of difficulties in sticking to a script, knowing that a mis-step from the former president could expose him to attack from the right, which is opposed to dealings with North Korea.
Then there was Al Gore, the journalists' employer as head of Current TV, who had to bury his resentments that Mr Clinton's affairs in the White House may have cost him the presidency.
For many, the seemingly flawless execution of the plan to free the two journalists, who had been sentenced to 12 years' jail for straying into North Korean territory, demolished the notion that, in choosing his former rival as secretary of state, Mr Obama was getting not so much a ''twofer'' as trouble.
In the conventional wisdom of six months ago, the former president would not be able to resist meddling at the State Department or the White House, and his network of contacts at the Clinton Global Initiative could potentially embarrass Mr Obama.
''This is a very effective rejoinder to anyone who still had questions about the wisdom and absolute authority of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State,'' said Ann Lewis, an adviser to Mrs Clinton during her run for the White House.
Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation agreed: ''The Obama people always saw Bill as more of a threat than Hillary,'' he said. ''But now if I were Obama I'd say: great, let's use Bill for other things.''
Not everyone was convinced. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd saw the episode as one more instance of Mr Clinton hogging the spotlight, shoving aside Mr Obama and his own wife. ''Just as Hillary muscled her way back into the spotlight, moving past her broken elbow and grabbing the focus from her bevy of peacock envoys, she was blown off the radar screen again by an even more powerful envoy: the one she lives with,'' Dowd wrote.
But she conceded that Mr Clinton turned in a fine performance. The man accused of damaging his wife's run for the White House by indulging in angry rants against Mr Obama and the media, in public at least kept his personal views in check.
The week's events also confounded those who suggest Mrs Clinton had been shunted aside at the State Department - shut out of Mr Obama's inner circle because of lingering animosities and a new management structure that hived off hotspots such as the Middle East and Afghanistan to special envoys who report to the President as well as the Secretary of State.
Behind the scenes, Mrs Clinton was busy building relationships at the State Department and the White House. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, she ventured regularly out of her seventh-floor offices to meet desk officers. She has weekly one-on-one meetings with Mr Obama, though there are still reports of leftover animosities between their personal staff.
She also began to put out her own foreign policy message, often playing the bad cop to Mr Obama's more conciliatory statements. She waded into a spat with North Korea, saying its leadership was behaving like ''small children and unruly teenagers''.
North Korea issued a statement saying: ''Sometimes she looks like a primary school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.''
Mrs Clinton apparently set aside those exchanges to authorise her husband's mission. Last week's triumph could now give her a chance to put her own stamp on foreign policy.
IT'S BEEN 17 years since Bill and Hillary Clinton offered themselves up to American voters as a two-for-one package deal, and began adjusting notions of the role of the personal and the political in public life.
But in all those years - his scandals, her pillorying by the right, his jet-setting for the Clinton Global Initiative, her slog as a presidential candidate - it's hard to think of a week when the partnership worked as expertly as it did in the rescue of two journalists from North Korea.
Here was Hillary Clinton, embarking on a tour of Africa as Secretary of State, while her husband, the former president, successfully carried off an ultra-sensitive mission to one of the world's most recalcitrant regimes. It's an even more impressive piece of choreography given the other outsize political figures - each with their own personal histories with the Clintons - involved in last week's homecoming of the journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
There was Barack Obama, of course, who had brawled with both Clintons during the Democratic primaries. Mr Obama also had to weigh Mr Clinton's history of difficulties in sticking to a script, knowing that a mis-step from the former president could expose him to attack from the right, which is opposed to dealings with North Korea.
Then there was Al Gore, the journalists' employer as head of Current TV, who had to bury his resentments that Mr Clinton's affairs in the White House may have cost him the presidency.
For many, the seemingly flawless execution of the plan to free the two journalists, who had been sentenced to 12 years' jail for straying into North Korean territory, demolished the notion that, in choosing his former rival as secretary of state, Mr Obama was getting not so much a ''twofer'' as trouble.
In the conventional wisdom of six months ago, the former president would not be able to resist meddling at the State Department or the White House, and his network of contacts at the Clinton Global Initiative could potentially embarrass Mr Obama.
''This is a very effective rejoinder to anyone who still had questions about the wisdom and absolute authority of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State,'' said Ann Lewis, an adviser to Mrs Clinton during her run for the White House.
Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation agreed: ''The Obama people always saw Bill as more of a threat than Hillary,'' he said. ''But now if I were Obama I'd say: great, let's use Bill for other things.''
Not everyone was convinced. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd saw the episode as one more instance of Mr Clinton hogging the spotlight, shoving aside Mr Obama and his own wife. ''Just as Hillary muscled her way back into the spotlight, moving past her broken elbow and grabbing the focus from her bevy of peacock envoys, she was blown off the radar screen again by an even more powerful envoy: the one she lives with,'' Dowd wrote.
But she conceded that Mr Clinton turned in a fine performance. The man accused of damaging his wife's run for the White House by indulging in angry rants against Mr Obama and the media, in public at least kept his personal views in check.
The week's events also confounded those who suggest Mrs Clinton had been shunted aside at the State Department - shut out of Mr Obama's inner circle because of lingering animosities and a new management structure that hived off hotspots such as the Middle East and Afghanistan to special envoys who report to the President as well as the Secretary of State.
Behind the scenes, Mrs Clinton was busy building relationships at the State Department and the White House. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, she ventured regularly out of her seventh-floor offices to meet desk officers. She has weekly one-on-one meetings with Mr Obama, though there are still reports of leftover animosities between their personal staff.
She also began to put out her own foreign policy message, often playing the bad cop to Mr Obama's more conciliatory statements. She waded into a spat with North Korea, saying its leadership was behaving like ''small children and unruly teenagers''.
North Korea issued a statement saying: ''Sometimes she looks like a primary school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.''
Mrs Clinton apparently set aside those exchanges to authorise her husband's mission. Last week's triumph could now give her a chance to put her own stamp on foreign policy.