Jamesb101.com

commentary on Politics and a little bit of everything else

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get along fine…..Thank you……

And people thought?…..Oh, my gosh!….Will they ever trust each other?

How could she work for him?

Turns out everything is fine…….

The Dog has always a soft spot in his heart for the tough, hard working, and slightly wounded Hillary Clinton….

“We’ve developed, I think, a very good rapport,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, assessing her relationship with President Obama.

On a snowy Thursday shortly before her weekly meeting with President Obama last month, Hillary Rodham Clinton got a distressing phone call: her husband, Bill Clinton, was in a hospital with chest pains and needed an urgent heart procedure.

Mrs. Clinton kept her appointment with Mr. Obama in the Oval Office, taking her customary seat on the yellow sofa as the two talked about her coming trip to the Persian Gulf, where she planned to turn up the heat on Iran over its nuclear program.

“No one had any idea” that she might have had a personal worry, said a senior White House official who was present. Afterward, Mrs. Clinton raced for a shuttle flight to New York to see her husband.

But the fact that she first spent 45 minutes plotting Iran strategy with the man who beat her in a divisive primary campaign shows just how far Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have come since the bitter spring of 2008, when he sniped that her foreign-policy credentials consisted of sipping tea with world leaders, and she scoffed that his consisted of living in Indonesia when he was 10.

Sixteen months after Mr. Obama surprised nearly everyone by picking her as secretary of state, the two have again surprised nearly everyone by forging a credible partnership. Mrs. Clinton has proved to be an eager team player, a tireless defender of the administration, ever deferential to Mr. Obama and careful to ensure that her husband, the former president, does not upstage her boss.

Mr. Obama has been solicitous of Mrs. Clinton, yielding to her at times in internal debates, even showing signs of adopting some of her more hawkish world views.

They now joke about their “frenemies” status and have made gestures toward each other’s families. When Mr. Obama learned that Chelsea Clinton had become engaged, he turned to Mrs. Clinton and asked, “Does she want a White House wedding?” a senior official recalled. (Mrs. Clinton declined, saying the offer was “sweet” but would be “inappropriate.”) And when Mrs. Clinton traveled to Honolulu in January, she paid tribute to Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in a speech she gave while looking over a garden dedicated to Ms. Dunham.

Still, there is none of the deep familiarity or the tight bonds — the round-the-clock, back-channel access — of their predecessors, Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, or going further back, James A. Baker and the first President Bush orHenry A. Kissinger and Richard M. Nixon.

“Hillary Clinton is the secretary of state,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who has written about the shaping of foreign policy. “The question now is whether she becomes a real adviser, and whether he trusts her.”

Mr. Obama has jealously guarded his prerogatives as the architect of American foreign policy, concentrating decision-making on crucial issues like Iran, Iraq and the Middle East in the White House. And Mrs. Clinton has yet to stake a claim to a core foreign-policy issue, the kind of signature role that would allow her nascent partnership with Mr. Obama to become a truly historic alliance.

More…….


March 19, 2010 - Posted by | Government, Media, Men, Other Things, PoliticalDog Calls, Politics, Updates, Women | , ,

6 Comments »

  1. Yes indeed. On Foreign Policy the President has my full backing. That doesn’t happen pretty often that I back the President these Days.

    Comment by Daniel G. | March 19, 2010 | Reply

  2. His CIC numbers are also impressive….

    like most president’s….. foreign affairs are much more fun and easier to handle….except for the Middle East, that is……

    Comment by jamesb101 | March 19, 2010 | Reply

  3. Hillary is likely done politically and she ain’t running for President in 2016 (if Obama gets a 2nd term in 2012).

    Do you think she’ll stay at State for 8 years or resign after the midterm elections ?

    Comment by Conservative Democrat | March 19, 2010 | Reply

    • I don’t know…..she’ll stay until she gets tired…SOS’s put in a lot of flying time….and I’m sure that gets old……

      She’s got a daughter to get married …….that willl be good for her…

      I can’t see her just sitting back…that’s not her……

      Comment by jamesb101 | March 19, 2010 | Reply

  4. How could she work for him?
    ————-

    Other way around …Obama works for Hillary

    Young African American Obama sells better than Hillary Clinton

    Comment by Timothy Peter Leal | March 19, 2010 | Reply

  5. The voters went for the black guy stronger than the white women……

    that speaks tons about a woman becoming president of this country……

    Comment by jamesb101 | March 19, 2010 | Reply


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