With a TV mini-series based on her and a rise in popularity ratings, Clinton is tipped to be the 2016 Democratic candidate, writes LARA MARLOWEin Washington
WHILE US president Barack Obama was cringing at the Washington Post’s three-page exposé on “Where Obama failed on the Middle East”, his Teflon secretary of state Hillary Clinton was in the Middle East.
She gently mediated between Egyptian generals and Islamists and braved the tomatoes and “Monica, Monica” taunts hurled at her motorcade in Alexandria on Sunday. Yesterday, she reassured Israeli leaders that Egypt would not rescind its peace treaty and Iran would not get the bomb.
Back home, Political Animals, a six-part mini-series about a former first lady who stands for president, is defeated by a younger, less experienced man, and then becomes a stellar secretary of state, premiered on cable television on Sunday night, starring Sigourney Weaver as the Hillary figure.
Political Animals was produced by Greg Berlanti, a Hollywood screenwriter who supported Clinton in her 2008 primary race against Obama. Like many diehard “Hill-raisers”, Berlanti still feels “buyer’s remorse” over the Democratic Party’s decision.
At times, one suspects the fictional Hillary is pretty true to life, as when she vents: “The egos and the men. I am sick of the men. Just one time – just once – I would like to accomplish something in this city without having to spend all my energy navigating the shortsighted, selfish, self-involved and oh-so-fragile male egos that suck up all the oxygen in this town.”
In what the Washington Post’s television reviewer called “a bit of national wish fulfilment”, the fictional Hillary divorces her narcissistic, philandering husband. Earlier, the Bill Clinton character (played by Irish actor Ciarán Hinds) pleads with her as she prepares to throw a Ming vase during a spat in the White House: “Mao gave that to Nixon!”
Yet despite the hairdos and diets, affairs and ambition – or perhaps because of their human foibles – the Clintons continue to fascinate America. It is what New York Times columnist Frank Bruni calls “the thrill of Bill and Hill”. Without them, he writes, “where would we be? Bored even sillier than we are. Bereft of genuinely juicy players. Consigned to the snooze button that is Mitt and the cold touch of no-drama Obama.”
The Clintons, Bruni adds, “are political animals – unpredictable, ferocious – to a degree that Obama and Romney really aren’t”.
Through girl scout-like modesty, dedication and hard work, Hillary Clinton has won plaudits from all quarters – including Republican lawmakers – as secretary of state.
She has visited almost 100 countries, flown close to a million air miles, and shines especially in the far east, where she made her first trip abroad in February 2009 to initiate the US “pivot” from Europe to Asia.
Clinton is the first US secretary of state to visit Burma, where she embraced Aung San Suu Kyi, since the 1950s. In Beijing in May, she deftly defused a crisis over the defection of Chen Guangcheng, preserving the dissident and his family, and had talks with the Chinese on Iran, North Korea and Syria, as well as Clinton’s pet issue: clean, safe cookstoves for the developing world.
Clinton humoured Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari through the tense Nato summit in Chicago. Earlier this month, she apologised to Pakistan for the deaths of 24 Pakistani troops in a US airstrike last November, and concluded an agreement for the resumption of US convoys to Afghanistan.
After Obama decided to intervene in Libya last year, Clinton did the ground work to forge the fragile international coalition that overthrew Muammar Gadafy. She and her staff also performed what she calls “the hard shoe leather of diplomacy” that led to the toughest sanctions yet against Iran.
When Obama appointed Clinton, pundits predicted friction. But where the president and secretary of state have disagreed, she has ceded to his authority.
When demonstrators challenged former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s rule in January 2011, Clinton – perhaps blinded by her decades-long friendship with Suzanne Mubarak – announced the regime was “stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people”. Though she had criticised flawed elections in Russia last year, Clinton fell into line and expressed her willingness to work with Vladimir Putin this spring.
US opinion polls show two-thirds of Americans like Clinton; sweet revenge for her low popularity ratings when she was in the White House. She has been the most admired woman in the world in Gallup polls for 16 of the past 19 years. And Clinton (64) seems to have mellowed with age.
The New York Post dubbed her “Swillary” after she drank beer with staff at the Cafe Havana in Cartagena in April. After fake “Texts from Hillary” became an internet sensation, she invited the pranksters to call on her in the state department.
Clinton says she will step down as secretary of state regardless of who wins the November election.
In Copenhagen in May, she said she was looking forward “to some time to collect myself and spend it doing just ordinary things . . . like taking a walk without a lot of company”. But rumours about her future are a favourite Washington past-time. First, it was said she might challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination this year. Then she was going to replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate.
Now she’s tipped to be the Democratic candidate in 2016. Several Democratic politicos – including Clinton’s husband – have urged her to stand again.
After a well-earned rest, they wager, she’s too much of a political animal to resist it.