Uh, oh. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post says it offends her that Carly Fiorina is running for president with a career in business behind her, instead of being a former president’s wife. If only she had the gravitas of a Mrs. Bill Clinton, skilled in the arts of bimbo suppression, who went on to stellar careers in her post-Bill incarnation, as … well, as what?
Marcus ticks off the public posts held by Hillary: first lady, senator from New York, secretary of state for Barack Obama. But she fails to say what Clinton did with and in these posts. Were she to try, the seemingly impressive picture would become something considerably less bright.
In 1993, then known as “Bill’s better half” and a new kind of first lady,” was given the task of designing a government takeover of health care. This had been planned as the jewel in the crown of the liberal edifice, but it proved a tough nut to crack. In September, 1994 the bill was withdrawn, but not before it had become the great cause célèbre of the upcoming midterms, in which Democrats lost control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in forty years. Elected to the Senate in 2000, thanks in part to her husband’s fling with an intern, she voted in 2002 to launch the war in Iraq, turned against it the minute it ran into trouble and then tried to atone by opposing the Surge, which in 2007-2008 made Iraq stable.
Named secretary of state by Obama in 2009 after having failed in her first attempt to be president, she began her term trying for a ‘reset’ with Russia, in which even finding the right Russian word became an embarrassment. She supported regime change in Libya that proved catastrophic, and failed to foresee, prepare for or deal with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2012 in Egypt and Libya that killed our ambassador and three other Americans. She insisted for over a week later that the riots were caused by a video made in America, which she surely had known was a lie.
To her credit, Hillary was one of the legion of people who begged Obama not to withdraw hastily from Iraq, (which beats the decision to go in as the one of worst ever made by an American president), but the fact remains that she was part of one of the worst foreign policy administrations in American history, and did little to check the decline.
Correctly, Marcus calls out Fiorina for her defeats — the fact that she was fired “in a boardroom brawl” from Hewlett-Packard, and lost a Senate race in 2010 to Barbara Boxer by a ten-point spread. But she had to have done something right to have risen to the top. Since 2010, she has turned into a very good candidate — funny, articulate, adept at expressing the conservative message in accessible terms to an audience, and deflating Hillary’s claims that she alone speaks for women, at all times, on all things, everywhere.
What can’t be denied is that while everyone can name Hillary’s failures — health care, the Surge, Benghazi and Libya — no one can name a specific success over 23 years that bears her mark, shows her good judgment, her capacity to bring people together or get much of anything done. Marcus is right, Hillary outdoes Fiorina, but in the scope and extent of her misjudgments. And that should offend everyone.
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.”
