Amid GOP rage against Susan Rice, how Hillary Clinton has remained unscathed

Unlike Ambassador Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has not come under fire for Benghazi – a reflection of strong relationships she built in the Senate, and the broad popularity she currently enjoys.

|
Reuters
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addresses a joint news conference with Egypt's Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Cairo November 21. As the GOP continues their public flogging of Susan Rice, Clinton has not come under fire for Benghazi – a reflection of strong relationships she built in the Senate, and the broad popularity she currently enjoys.

As Republicans on Capitol Hill continue their public flogging of Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, it’s hard not to notice that a more senior administration official – who, arguably, might bear more responsibility for what went wrong in Benghazi – has largely escaped criticism.

We’re referring, of course, to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

True, a handful of right-wing news outlets have raised questions about why Ms. Clinton’s department failed to heed earlier warnings about security concerns in Benghazi. But the top Republican senators driving this story have so far chosen to leave Clinton largely out of the discussion.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for a woman who, not too long ago, was seen as such a lightning rod that she could have easily been called “GOP Enemy No. 1.” Today, the secretary of State is the de facto Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 nomination (though she has not made a decision about whether to run) and seems almost – as Saturday Night Live’s Darrell Hammond once famously called her husband – “bulletproof.”

The lack of criticism directed at Secretary Clinton over Benghazi may be in part a reflection of her years in the Senate – a still-clubby institution that instinctively protects its own. Clinton only served two terms, but she made the most of her time there, reaching across the aisle and developing close relationships.

In particular, Clinton’s friendship with Sen. John McCain appears to be paying dividends. As Politico’s Scott Wong writes Wednesday, in a detailed examination of the warm relationship between the two, Clinton’s “decade-old bipartisan friendship with McCain appears to have helped shield her from GOP fire – even as her agency finds itself in the thick of a partisan battle over Benghazi.”

It may also indicate how sharp Clinton’s own political instincts have become. Notably, it was not Clinton who went out on the Sunday shows with those now-infamous talking points. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote recently, Rice should have been “savvy enough to wonder why the wily Hillary was avoiding the talk shows.”

But Clinton also seems to be benefitting from a larger rehabilitation of her reputation that began even before her husband left office. She earned praise during her time in the Senate for buckling down and seeming to eschew the spotlight (“a workhorse, not a showhorse” was the oft-repeated phrase).

And as secretary of State, Clinton’s status has been elevated even more – in part because, for the first time in decades, she’s been front and center in a decidedly nonpartisan role. Her above-the-partisan-fray image probably also got a lift from the fact that she gamely went to work for a former rival who arguably took the presidency away from her.

In the job, she has earned kudos, again, for hard work – most recently, for her role in brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. And she’s shown a fun side, boogieing in South Africa, partying at a nightclub in Cartegena, and playing along with the “Texts from Hillary” blog on Tumblr.

According to a Gallup poll taken last year, Clinton is now the most admired woman in the world, ahead of Oprah and Michelle Obama

Indirectly, Clinton may also be profiting from the warm public embrace that her husband – like many former presidents whose time in office has receded sufficiently into the past – has been receiving of late (that same Gallup poll found that Mr. Clinton was No. 3 on the list of most admired men).

Of course, a 2016 presidential run would likely bring Hillary Clinton’s reputation back down to earth. As Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton's former press secretary, recently told the Daily Beast: “Once she was running for office as a partisan – as a Democrat – again, as opposed to being the global figure she is, she’d lose a little bit of that luster.”

For now, however, that luster is proving awfully powerful.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Amid GOP rage against Susan Rice, how Hillary Clinton has remained unscathed
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2012/1128/Amid-GOP-rage-against-Susan-Rice-how-Hillary-Clinton-has-remained-unscathed
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe