Hillary leaves office with one notable “accomplishment”: Remaining aloof from the administration whose interests she was tasked to serve

As I’ve mentioned before, it is tough being a Democrat in a family of Republicans. Thus when a person in my family defends Hillary Clinton, it makes me question why this can be so. I’ve already on several occasions pointed out that Clinton has little substantive to show for all the adulation she has received from the media and in public opinion polls. This member of the family actually thinks UN ambassador Susan Rice has more culpability with the Benghazi tragedy than Clinton does, and I haven’t hesitated to point out that this belief might have more to do with more superficial considerations. It is remarkable to me that despite the Benghazi report’s findings of a State Department rife with incompetence that starts with the “most senior” leadership—which presumable includes Clinton—the person most responsible has emerged as “blameless” as ever.

Now, in regard to Clinton’s recent injury, I hope as everyone else does that she recovers and continues to pursue a useful life; but this still shouldn’t cause people to be fearful of criticizing the failures of her tenure and blame others for it. Since she is leaving office, she will never be forced to answer questions that will tarnish her image. And can you name a single notable accomplishment she had a significant hand in shaping in the past four years? Pretty damn hard to do off the top of one's head. Her reputation remains untarnished because people can’t think of anything she’s done—to criticize or to praise. She is just there, a symbolic representation of whatever people wish to place on her or believe. 

It truly says a great deal about Clinton that some people on the right would actually find her so inoffensive. One reason is that she is perceived as a “hawk”—meaning that like the right she has a yen for war and conflict; however, it might also merely be a psychological mechanism of working out her self-image issues. Another—and doubtless a more crucial reason—is that she has remained aloof of the administration whose interests she was supposed to serve. There is even a question of whether her presence in the administration even helped in Obama’s reelection; she was almost entirely a non-presence during the 2012 campaign, even during the convention. When the Romney campaign used her own words against Obama, she could only say that she “disapproved” of their “unauthorized” use without ever suggesting that they were used out of context or was just campaign hyperbole.

What was she doing instead? Doing her own “thing”—which didn’t go much further than making speeches and traveling a lot. Oh yes, she’s set a “record” traveling to more countries than any other Secretary of State. She also has spent a great deal of State Department funds and time on her personal pet projects, like funding a program that supplies propane stoves to women in poor countries, presumably so they do not use scarce wood for energy. Commendable, except that a BBC report had already revealed that the program was mostly an expensive failure, mainly because of the typical Western ignorance and misunderstanding of the cultural mores of other countries. 

If you read the book Game Change about the 2008 presidential election, you would discover  how a touchy Hillary surrounded herself with sycophants, yes-people, disciples and groupies, and disliked being told what she didn’t want to hear—and we can suspect that this was the kind of entourage that surrounded her in the State Department. Hillary may look reasonable during television interviews when asked softball questions, but she revealed herself during an early trip to the Congo, when she uncouthly and self-consciously berated a Congolese student who asked if she consulted with the president on policy issues; the translator was behind the times, mentioning Bill Clinton in the apparent belief that her husband was still president.  She is also a “hawk”—which the right seems to like but again reveals that she was not temperamentally suited for diplomacy. 

Thus her image has to be “massaged”—which the media has done a good job of. Yet over at Fox News and right-wing talk radio stations, they are still calling Obama a communist, a socialist, a terrorist, a racist, a Muslim, a Nazi and whatever else pops into their “fair and balanced” little minds. It is dangerous, of course, to use the same sort of language in regard to Clinton (especially within earshot of Bill). Perhaps in the final analysis, it was just as well to keep Hillary happy and not become the kind of old, bitter, irrational curmudgeon that John McCain has become.