A question of timing

Thursday, August 14, 2014

"There's a town in Texas called El Paso. And I'm gonna el passo."--James Carville, Democratic consultant, when asked by Politico what he had to say about the sudden fight that Hillary Clinton picked with Barack Obama.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

Hillary Clinton, a smart woman chronically beset by political indelicacy, was on her way to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Then along came a more-engaging Barack Obama, a smart man now beset by seeming foreign-policy angst, not to mention a world no one can manage.

Obama assailed Clinton in '08 for voting for George W. Bush's war in Iraq. That's the war that laid the groundwork for the perfect mess now.

Obama overtook Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Hillary subsequently said she was wrong on that vote.


So this latest dust-up is kind of a sequel, at once both odd and logical. Call it "Hillary the Hawk--Part Two: Return to Iraq."

It's odd that Clinton is reaffirming the old hawkish persona that hurt her in the Democratic primary six years ago. After all, the primary of 2016 is unavoidably the first hurdle in her next best chance at being president.

It's logical, though, in that she needs to distance herself from Obama, for whom she was secretary of state and whose job-approval rating on foreign affairs is subterranean.

It's logical in that she probably has no real worries in a Democratic primary--though those could be famous last words.

Liberals already preferred Elizabeth Warren on domestic economics. Now they might prefer her on foreign policy.

That leaves electability as Hillary's sole advantage.

It's logical in that speaking for herself on foreign policy brandishes Clinton's independent credentials to lead in a dangerous world.

It's logical in that her presidential appeal is that people think she is tougher than Obama.

So Hillary gave an interview last week to The Atlantic. In it she plainly trashed Obama's foreign policy.

She was circumspect in general, hedging heavily and ever-complimentary with the back of her hand. But she was unmistakably catty in some specifics.

She said "great nations need organizing principles." She said that saying "don't do stupid stuff," which Obama once offered as his international guidepost, was not an organizing principle.

She talked vaguely of a need for a more muscular and interventionist policy by the United States. She said more specifically that we should have aided moderate Syrian rebels. It might--might, she stressed--have slowed the jihadist advances of these ISIL monsters in Iraq.

So David Axelrod, long a close adviser to Obama, put on Twitter that the first bit of "stupid stuff" we should have avoided was going to war in Iraq in the first place. You know--the war Hillary voted for.

And then MoveOn.org, the liberal group, put out a statement declaring that Hillary or any other person thinking of seeking the Democratic presidential nomination on a hawkish military platform should think again, and hard.

And then this little tidbit came out: Congressional leaders said they'd been in a meeting with the president.

They said Obama got worked up and declared that the idea that the current Iraq crisis could have been averted if he had provided more military support to Syrian rebels was--and I'm quoting now, leaving out two letters to oblige family readership--"horsesh**."

No wonder James Carville is gonna el passo.

Late Tuesday, Hillary called Obama to say she hadn't meant to say anything critical when she said those four or five things that were critical.

So making liberals mad one week and letting conservatives watch her back down to the president the next--perhaps this was not Hillary's grand design.

She made a credible political calculation, but played it poorly, mostly by horrible timing.

It's easy to watch the Middle East implode and explode, then exercise one's convenience of retrospection without responsibility.

But the right time for snide critique would be as distantly removed as possible from the hard and critical decisions this president is making at this very minute.

He is engaging our country in severe hostilities against ghastly crazies in Iraq. All the while, he is keeping a wary eye on Ukraine and Gaza.

It's no time for anyone other than a Fox News commentator to snipe.

Hillary's shot was not from the hip. It was thoughtful. It was appropriately aimed.

But the issue is neither the shot nor the aim. As Romeo recalled ruefully for Juliet in a Dire Straits ballad: It's just that the time was wrong.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/14/2014