Is her resume empty?

[Big Money]

Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state.


After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America’s top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise.


“The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson,” enthused Google’s Eric Schmidt. “Stellar,” pronounced Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson.


Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her “outstanding” State Department tenure.


That was then.


When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was the downbeat assessment of Kerry’s predecessor.


The headline? “How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.”


A few days later, the New York Times chimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as secretary.


All of which yields the question:


Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016?





http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/was-hillary-clinton-a-good-secretary-of-state-john-kerry-2016-100766.html#ixzz2tDGpDqyl

 

[Big Money]

As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of "good" is.


Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no crisis defused.


There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure.





http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/was-hillary-clinton-a-good-secretary-of-state-john-kerry-2016-100766.html#ixzz2tDJ7YoD8