MoDo hasn’t sharpened her claws on Hillary for a while, but she remedies that today. She says getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary Clinton cloaks her nepotism in feminism. Mr. Friedman says it’s clear that the surge by U.S. troops has dampened violence in Iraq. Don’t we now need a surge in diplomacy to finish the job? Well, actually, if you look at Basra where violence is down 90% after the British left, maybe that could be a plan for us too??? Just thinking… Here’s MoDo:
Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.
At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.
Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”
Everybody laughed, including Obama.
It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point.
Her Democratic rivals had meekly gone along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.
She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”
She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.
Obama’s one-liner evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. Getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism.
“She hasn’t accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law,” wrote Joan Di Cola, a Boston lawyer, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, adding: “She isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who spent years as mayor of San Francisco before becoming a senator, or Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her political abilities. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton. She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because of that, senator of New York because of that, and (heaven help us) she could become president because of that.”
The Clinton campaign in Iowa is in a panic. Obama has been closing the gap with women and her ginning up of gender has lost her male votes. Speaking around Iowa this week, Obama made the point that his exotic upbringing, family in Kenya and years as an outsider allow him to see the world with more understanding, and helped form his judgment about resisting the Iraq war.
“I spent four years living overseas when I was a child living in Southeast Asia,” he said. “If you don’t understand these cultures then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions. Foreign policy is all about judgment.”
President Bush is not so enamored of Obama’s foreign policy judgment. He gave a plug to Hillary on ABC News last night, calling her a “formidable candidate,” even under pressure, who “understands the klieg lights.”
Asked by Charles Gibson about Obama’s offer to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, W. declared it “odd foreign policy.”
Laura Bush also gave Hillary a sisterly — and dynastic — plug when she told the anchor that living in the White House and meeting people everywhere would be “very helpful” to a first lady trading up.
Though he did not mention the quick “color me experienced” trip Hillary took with some Senate colleagues to Iraq and Afghanistan just before she started running, Obama might have been thinking of it when he mocked Kabuki Congressional junkets:
“You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador’s house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance.”
Hillary pounced, knowing that her chief rival’s foreign policy résumé is as slender as his physique, once more conjuring a childish Obama. She brazenly borrowed Republican talking points, even though she accused John Edwards of “throwing mud” that was “right out of the Republican playbook.”
“With all due respect,” she told a crowd in Iowa. “I don’t think living in a foreign country between the ages of 6 and 10 is foreign policy experience.”
But is living in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience?
Here’s Mr. Friedman:
Watching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice making repeated trips to Israel to try to broker some kind of deal between Israelis and Palestinians, while Iraq remains politically unresolved, leaves me feeling like my house is burning down and the fire department has decided to stop along the way to get two cats out of a tree.
At one level, I just don’t get it. It’s clear that the surge by U.S. troops has really dampened violence in Iraq. So don’t we now need a surge in diplomacy to finish the job?
It often feels to me as if Secretary Rice just wants to keep Iraq at arm’s length and hope that it will somehow end up on someone else’s report card.
If you were President Bush and your whole legacy was riding on the outcome of this war, wouldn’t you be sending your top diplomat to Baghdad to work with Iraqis and their neighbors to broker a political settlement and not let them grow complacent that they have an open-ended commitment from the American people?
(It makes you glad Democrats are still banging their drum.)
But then I talk to people in Baghdad and look at what is really evolving there and I say to myself: “Maybe you’re missing something that Secretary Rice knows — that there isn’t going to be any formal political reconciliation moment in Iraq, grand bargain or White House signing ceremony. The surge has made Iraq safe, not for formal political reconciliation yet, but safe for an ‘A.T.M. peace.’ ”
That is, each of the Iraqi factions basically agrees to live and let live with the new lines drawn by the last two years of civil war and the Baghdad government serves as an A.T.M. cash machine — supporting the army and local security groups and dispensing oil revenues to the provincial governors and tribal chiefs from each community.
Sure, the Shiites haven’t passed a law to let more Sunni Baathists into the government, but they’re still letting some back. Yes, they haven’t passed an oil law, but the government is still spreading around the cash.
Michael Gordon, The Times’s top military expert, whose history of the Iraq war, “Cobra II,” is one of the best books on the subject, said the phrase circulating in the military lately to describe the situation evolving in Iraq is “accommodation without reconciliation.” The various parties basically accept the new imbalance of power — Shiites on top, but allowing the Kurds and Sunnis to have a share — and the political struggle continues with lower levels of violence.
It isn’t irreversible. That only happens when refugees start returning in large numbers, because they see a flourishing economy, a government delivering services equitably and reliably, political alliances developing across Sunni-Shiite lines and security forces they can trust in their neighborhoods. We are still miles away from that, yet something seems to be moving.
And that brings me back to Secretary Rice. Is she just keeping away from the Iraq mess to save her image, or does she know that the Iraqi politicians will not and cannot seize this moment to reach a grand bargain, because making big public concessions to one another is still extremely dangerous in a country like Iraq. It is an invitation for assassination.
But maybe their own very Iraqi, very ad hoc, very oil-lubricated, modus vivendi can still get us somewhere stable and decent.
If that is the case, maybe the question we need to start asking is not: When do Iraqis reach a formal internal peace so we can go? But rather: Can the informal arrangements they’re cobbling together reach a level of stability that would enable a major drawdown of U.S. forces next year?
I don’t know. My Iraq crystal ball stopped working a long time ago. I’m taking this one step at a time.
Right now what is indisputable is that we are seeing the first crack in years in a wall of pessimism that has been the Iraq story. It is only a crack, but it creates new possibilities. It would be reckless to ignore or exaggerate.
You have to keep your mind open that something may be emerging from the ground up — and yet be wary. Are the parties really working something out, or are they just tired? Is Secretary Rice wisely letting the situation ripen or deftly running from the problem?
I have more questions right now than strong opinions.
So I went to a source I knew I could trust — my colleague James Glanz, The Times’s Baghdad bureau chief who has lived through so much craziness there: “There is a sense of quiet on the streets that we have not seen for a long time in Baghdad,” he told me, “but there is also a big question mark in the shadows of every alley. We don’t know what is lurking back there, but we suspect, and evidence suggests, that it is the same set of problems that were always there.”
