Does Hillary Clinton wish she’d stayed in the Senate, and politely said ‘no’ to President Obama when he offered his former antagonist from the primary season the exalted position of nation’s top diplomat? At the time, it seemed a great chance to burnish her resume and to be above politics. And when she stepped down at the end of Obama’s first term, her favorability ratings were in the low 60s.
That was then. This is now. And Clinton’s ratings are in the 40s and falling, largely due to what she did and what happened to her and to the world since she left the Senate. All of it was complicated and none of it good.
Were Hillary still in the Senate, there would have been no government server to scuttle, no private server to set up and then scrub free of email, no Sidney Blumenthal sending emails on Libya and no pending hearings upcoming in Congress. And there would be no Barack Obama being put off by these problems, both because of the server, which he said was verboten, and by the return of El Sid. Were she still in the Senate, the Clinton Foundation might still have smelled, but the stench coming off it would have been nowhere as fragrant, because the stakes would have been nowhere as large.
Being a senator is all very well, but it is still being only one of a hundred. Being the nation’s top diplomat is a whole other story, with decisions to make that help or hurt others, many of them with a whole lot of money and even more skin in the game. It is no coincidence, as Peter Schweitzer reveals in Clinton Cash, that 11 of the 13 speeches given by Bill for $500,000 or more were given while Hillary was still in the Cabinet, and paid for by people with an interest in the kind of decisions in which secretaries of state have a say.
Then there’s the matter of what Hillary did, and didn’t do. There was the reset with Russia, which went so well that Vladimir Putin has now seized Crimea, and is chipping away at Ukraine. There was Benghazi, when she failed to answer the phone when it rang at 3 in the morning, and insisted for the week after that the riots were caused by a video, which she had to have known was a lie. There was the coup in Libya, where Hillary backed the attempt to depose the tyrant in power, without a plan for whatever should follow or a clue as to what might come next.
What came next was chaos, followed by massacres, followed by Islamist influence, which should put an end to any illusions that she has sound judgment, or has learned anything from Iraq. Libya is Iraq, only without the security angle or the Surge that redeemed it, and which she opposed.
Along with almost all of his other advisers, Hillary opposed Obama’s plan to pull all of the troops from Iraq, so she, and they, are not complicit in what will surely be labeled the worst foreign policy decision of the present era. But her very presence as part of his team has linked her with him forever in history, as part of an administration that inherited a situation that was stable, but difficult, and made it in every way worse. It may not happen now, but at some point in 2016 Hillary will be asked if she can defend his decision to vacate Iraq in the way that he did and will not find it easy to answer. Her prior decision to join Team Obama may have already cost her the prize.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
