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Why
Hillary Isn’t Qualified to be Commander in Chief
The terrorist attack in Paris—and the fear that such a horrific fate could
befall a major American city—has recast the presidential race and prompted
former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to brag that she is the most qualified
candidate in either political party to be commander in chief.
That, at least, is the story line that Hillary and her campaign are feeding
the American public.
But is it true? Let’s refresh our memory.
When Barack Obama offered Hillary the job of secretary of state, she was
suspicious of his motives and skeptical that he would allow her to put her stamp
on foreign policy.
“I don’t want to be a pantsuit-wearing globetrotter,” she told Bill Clinton
in the presence of several friends, two of whom I interviewed.
Her suspicions proved to be accurate. Obama and Valerie Jarrett, his senior
adviser, never let Hillary run foreign policy. As one official told Politico,
Hillary practiced “odometer diplomacy,” with a “focus on globetrotting to
bolster America’s relationships abroad coupled with attempts to cope with an
array of pop-up crises.”
Hillary extracted a promise from Obama that she would be free to choose her
own deputies, but that is not how things worked out. Jarrett insisted that
Hillary hire James Steinberg as her deputy secretary of state, even though
Hillary didn’t like or trust Steinberg.
As part of the Obamas vs. the Clinton blood feud that I have written about,
the White House went out of its way to humiliate Hillary. For example, Hillary
would be summoned to the White House for a meeting only to discover when she
arrived that the meeting had been canceled without anyone bothering to tell her.
Other times, she was left in the dark about the timing of cabinet meetings.
Bill Clinton urged Hillary to stand her ground with the White House and hit
some foreign policy homeruns. But when she tried to follow his advice—as she did
in Libya, the “reset” with Russia, and the “pivot” to Asia—the results were
disastrous.
Libya became a breeding ground for the Islamic State; the Russian “reset”
gave Vladimir Putin an excuse to annex Crimea; and the Asian “pivot” encouraged
Beijing to create an archipelago of militarized islands in the South China
Sea.
Finally, Hillary’s claim to commander in chief status was demolished once and
for all by the events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, where four Americans
lost their lives, including our ambassador to Libya.
If this tragedy had been inflicted on any other major industrialized country,
the foreign minister would have been forced to resign.
That’s exactly what Hillary should have done—taken responsibility for
Benghazi and resigned. The fact that she is still trying to wiggle her way out
of taking any blame is proof that she is not qualified to be commander in chief
of the United States.
Sincerely,
ED
KLEIN
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Edward Klein is one of America's most celebrated journalists and the
author of several New York Times bestsellers including Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. The Obamas and The Amateur:
Barack Obama in the White House. He
previously served as Foreign Editor of Newsweek and Editor-in-Chief of The New
York Times Magazine. |
