Subject: Correct The Record Tuesday August 12, 2014 Morning Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 09:07:03 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

**

*Correct The Record Tuesday August 12, 2014 Morning Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*New York Times: “Attacking Obama Policy, Hillary Clinton Exposes Different
Worldviews”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/world/middleeast/attacking-obama-policy-hillary-clinton-exposes-different-worldviews.html>*

“As Mrs. Clinton stakes out her own foreign policy positions in advance of
a possible campaign for the White House, there are likely to be other cases
where her statements do not seem entirely in sync with her record as
secretary of state.”

*Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton criticizes President Obama’s foreign
policy in interview with the Atlantic”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-criticizes-president-obamas-foreign-policy-in-interview-with-the-atlantic/2014/08/11/46d30564-2170-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html>*

“Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet said whether
she will pursue the presidency. But for a candidate-in-waiting, she is
clearly carving out a foreign policy distinct from the man she used to
serve.”

*Politico Magazine: “Saving Syria Is No ‘Fantasy’”
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/mr-president-saving-syria-is-no-fantasy-109923_Page2.html#.U-nt5_ldV8E>*

[Subtitle:] “Hillary Clinton’s former adviser says Obama stood alone
against calls to arm the rebels.”

*New York Times column: David Brooks: “Clinton, Obama and Iraq”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/opinion/david-brooks-clinton-obama-and-iraq.html>*

“If you don’t take steady, aggressive preventive action, of the sort that
Clinton leans toward, then you end up compelled to take the sort of large
risky action that Obama abhors.”

*Politico: “Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary Clinton line seemed like ‘shot’ at
President Obama”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/jeffrey-goldberg-hillary-clinton-interview-109915.html>*

“‘Hillary hedged in this interview,’ Goldberg told Andrea Mitchell. ‘And
she’s not attacking the president, but I think she felt like, ‘You know
what, I thought this, and I think events are bearing out the truth of what
I advocated for.’’”

*Talking Points Memo blog: TPM Editor’s Blog: “Hillary's Delicate,
Dangerous Game”
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hillarys-delicate-dangerous-game>*

“Quite apart from the pros and cons of particular foreign policy
strategies, I believe the great majority of partisan Democrats feel
protective of the President. So it's a delicate, perilous thing to
criticize him so publicly, particularly at a politically vulnerable moment,
especially when the nature of the criticism mirrors that of many of the
President's most dogged and aggrieved foes.”

*The Hill: “Hillary shows her hawkish side”
<http://thehill.com/policy/international/214900-hillary-shows-her-hawkish-side>*

"Clinton’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s in that it is “a little more
muscular, a little more deliberate and less deliberative,” he added."

*The Daily Beast: “Exclusive: Obama Told Lawmakers Criticism of His Syria
Policy is 'Horsesh*t'”
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/11/exclusive-obama-told-lawmakers-criticism-of-his-syria-policy-is-horsesh-t.html>*

"The argument that America should have done more in Syria, made for years
by foreign policy leaders in both parties and several members of Obama’s
senior national security team, was brought back to the fore this past
weekend."

*Capital New York: “Schumer: Hillary would be ‘so happy’ with D.N.C. in
Brooklyn”
<http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/08/8550538/schumer-hillary-would-be-so-happy-dnc-brooklyn>*

“Among the reasons New York's senior senator sees that Brooklyn should get
the 2016 Democratic National Convention: The location would suit the
party's most likely nominee.”

*CBS News: “As Hillary Clinton criticizes Obama, conservatives balk”
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-hillary-clinton-criticizes-obama-conservatives-balk/>*

“Criticism of Clinton's remarks was more muted on the left, though some
anti-interventionist liberals took issue with her statements.”

*Politico: “Karl Rove: Clinton tries to be ‘Goldilocks’”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/karl-rove-hillary-clinton-goldilocks-109908.html>*

“Karl Rove on Monday characterized Hillary Clinton’s split with the
president on foreign affairs as the former secretary of state painting
herself as ‘Goldilocks.’”

*Articles:*

*New York Times: “Attacking Obama Policy, Hillary Clinton Exposes Different
Worldviews”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/world/middleeast/attacking-obama-policy-hillary-clinton-exposes-different-worldviews.html>*

By Mark Landler

August 11, 2014

For the 19 months since Hillary Rodham Clinton departed as President
Obama’s secretary of state, she and Mr. Obama, and their respective aides,
have labored to preserve a veneer of unity over how they worked together
and how they view the world.

On Sunday, that veneer shattered — the victim of Mrs. Clinton’s remarkably
blunt interview with the Atlantic correspondent, Jeffrey Goldberg, in which
she criticized not just Mr. Obama’s refusal to aid the rebels in Syria but
his shorthand description of his entire foreign policy.

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is
not an organizing principle,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to the line that
Mr. Obama has used with aides and reporters to describe his reluctance to
inject the United States into messy foreign conflicts.

Mrs. Clinton said she assumed the line was more a “political message” for a
war-weary American public than his actual worldview — an interpretation
that makes her words even more stinging, since “don’t do stupid stuff” was
in fact the animating principle for the new foreign policy blueprint that
Mr. Obama laid out at West Point in May.

That Mrs. Clinton is more hawkish than Mr. Obama is no surprise to anyone
who watched a Democratic primary debate in 2008. Her policy differences
with the president are well-documented: She favored supplying arms to
moderate Syrian rebels, leaving behind a larger residual force in Iraq, and
waiting longer before pulling American support for Egypt’s former President
Hosni Mubarak during the historic protests in Cairo.

What has changed is her readiness to surface those differences and put them
in the context of a different worldview. Even her memoir, “Hard Choices,”
which she was promoting in her interview with Mr. Goldberg, soft-pedaled
the gaps and painted a portrait of her and Mr. Obama in lock step in
rebuilding America’s tattered image abroad.

Now, though, Mrs. Clinton is suggesting that she and the president hold
fundamentally different views of American power: his view cautious,
inward-looking, suffused with a sense of limits; hers muscular, optimistic,
unabashedly old-fashioned.

“You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down
and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when
you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” Mrs.
Clinton said to Mr. Goldberg. “One issue is that we don’t even tell our own
story very well these days.”

Much of the interview’s resonance is in its timing, coming two days after
Mr. Obama authorized airstrikes against Sunni militants in Iraq. Mrs.
Clinton’s aides say this was a coincidence; the session was scheduled long
before anyone knew about military action.

Still, when Mrs. Clinton says “the failure to help build up a credible
fighting force” against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria “left a big
vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” it suggests Mr. Obama’s
refusal to arm the rebels might end up being a singular misjudgment.

At the time of the Obama administration’s internal debate over that
decision, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy was far less
thunderous: the United States had tried every diplomatic channel with
Syria, she said, and nothing else had worked, so why not try funneling
weapons to the moderate rebels.

As Mrs. Clinton stakes out her own foreign policy positions in advance of a
possible campaign for the White House, there are likely to be other cases
where her statements do not seem entirely in sync with her record as
secretary of state.

At the end of her tenure, for example, Mrs. Clinton wrote a memo to Mr.
Obama recommending that the United States lift its half-century-old trade
embargo against Cuba. It was not a position that she seriously advocated
while at the State Department, officials said.

Mrs. Clinton also dashed off an exit memo warning about President Vladimir
V. Putin of Russia, which White House aides said was redundant, since his
behavior was already clear by then. At the beginning of the administration,
she was an enthusiastic proponent of the administration’s attempt to reset
relations with Russia.

In the interview with The Atlantic, Mrs. Clinton said she had always been
in the camp of those who believed that Iran had no right to enrich uranium.
Yet in December 2010, she was one of the first American officials to
acknowledge publicly, in an interview with the BBC, that Iran could emerge
from nuclear negotiations with the right to enrich.

Mrs. Clinton is not the only former cabinet member to part company with Mr.
Obama on foreign policy. Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary,
wrote a memoir laced with scathing criticism of the administration’s
approach to Afghanistan and other crises.

In a New York Times article in April about Mrs. Clinton, Leon E. Panetta,
the former defense secretary and C.I.A. director, said, “The president has
made some tough decisions. But it’s been a mixed record, and the concern
is, the president defining what America’s role in the world is in the 21st
century hasn’t happened.”

But because of their long history and Mrs. Clinton’s political future,
advisers to her and Mr. Obama have worked especially hard to head off any
discord. Her staff gave parts of her memoir to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy
national security adviser, for vetting before publication.

And interlocking staffs has been a big factor in that effort. Jake
Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s top policy adviser at the State Department, went
to work as national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
a post that allowed him to convey the White House’s sensitivities to her
aides.

Mrs. Clinton hired Tommy Vietor, a longtime Obama aide who was the
spokesman for the National Security Council, to help with the rollout of
her book. Mrs. Clinton’s aides worried that some in the news media might
use the book to try to drive a wedge between her and the president; Mr.
Vietor’s job was to push back on that effort.

While Mr. Obama still speaks periodically with Mrs. Clinton, their staffs
communicate more regularly. During the Crimea crisis, the White House chief
of staff, Denis R. McDonough, invited in several Clinton aides, including
Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, for consultations. Mrs. Clinton also
checks in by email with senior aides like Mr. Rhodes on issues like
Myanmar, in which both have a special interest.

Whether that communication will weather Mrs. Clinton’s latest statements
remains to be seen.

*Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton criticizes President Obama’s foreign
policy in interview with the Atlantic”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-criticizes-president-obamas-foreign-policy-in-interview-with-the-atlantic/2014/08/11/46d30564-2170-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html>*

By Juliet Eilperin

August 11, 2014, 8:44 p.m. EDT

Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet said whether
she will pursue the presidency. But for a candidate-in-waiting, she is
clearly carving out a foreign policy distinct from the man she used to
serve.

In the spring, President Obama articulated a philosophy for avoiding
dangerous entanglements overseas that was modest in its ambitions and
focused on avoiding mistakes. Don’t do stupid things, he said.

Now Clinton is offering a blunt retort to that approach, telling an
interviewer, “Great nations need organizing principles — and ‘Don’t do
stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

The surprisingly direct critique, coming in an interview with the Atlantic,
represents Clinton’s most forceful effort yet to distance herself from an
unpopular administration ahead of her expected 2016 campaign. It also
foreshadows the unusual political challenges facing Clinton as she
accentuates her foreign policy credentials while trying to avoid blame for
the nation’s defensive posture in an increasingly unstable world.

The White House declined to comment on Clinton’s remarks, which came as
Iraq has plunged into political turmoil and the United States has launched
airstrikes to aid Kurdish forces under siege by the Islamic State militant
group.

The administration is now grappling with multiple armed conflicts in the
Middle East and Ukraine, making Clinton’s record as the nation’s top
diplomat more fraught.

Clinton, who has already used her recent memoir, “Hard Choices ,” to
apologize for her decision to support the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and to
draw some careful distinctions between herself and the administration,
provided a more direct assessment in the interview published Sunday.

She drew special attention to Obama’s determination to sidestep costly
foreign interventions. The president and his aides have referred privately
to that strategy in recent months as, “Don’t do stupid s---.” That approach
has come under fire from some now that Islamist militants have gained
ground overseas.

Clinton said the phrase was “a political message” rather than Obama’s
“worldview.”

Even so, she argued that the United States has to strike a better balance
between overreaching in foreign affairs and being so restrained that
conflicts can spiral out of hand.

“You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down
and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when
you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” Clinton
said.

Differences on Syria

As secretary of state, Clinton backed arming the rebels in Syria’s ongoing
civil war. In the new interview, she said, “The failure to help build up a
credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the
protests against [Bashar al-Assad] — there were Islamists, there were
secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that
left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

Clinton added that she couldn’t be sure whether her preferred course of
action would have changed the direction of the war. “I can’t sit here today
and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what [former U.S.
ambassador to Syria] Robert Ford recommended, that we’d be in a
demonstrably different place,” she said.

While Clinton and Obama have taken steps since her departure from the
administration to present themselves as friends, the two engaged over the
weekend in a sort of indirect foreign policy debate — with each sitting for
separate interviews with journalists known for their Middle East expertise.

Clinton made her comments to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Obama,
speaking with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, dismissed the
idea that arming the Syrian rebels would have made a difference, saying it
has “always been a fantasy.”

“This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated
arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors,
farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to
battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by
Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the
cards,” he added.

*Benefits in distance*

In an e-mail Monday, an aide to Clinton wrote that the interview was
“intended to promote her memoir, and Goldberg was a long-planned-for target
on a list of interviews around the book — and not part of an overarching
political strategy related to 2016.”

Several experts said there is little precedent for a secretary of state
preparing a presidential campaign in part by criticizing the foreign policy
being carried out by the administration she helped lead. Yet the benefits
to Clinton are clear.

“It’s in her political interest to begin to distance herself from an
unpopular president and to drive home the fact that she’s risk-ready while
Obama’s risk-averse,” said Aaron David Miller, vice president for new
initiatives at the Wilson Center.

Clinton’s comments cheered some Democrats who have become anxious about the
threat Islamist militants pose to both stability in the Middle East and
U.S. national security.

Josh Block, president of the Israel Project, said it is “important” to see
a Democratic leader laying out a worldview “that recognizes the role of our
values and very real threats and trends facing the U.S. and our allies
today.”

“It struck me as the reemergence of common sense in Democratic foreign
policy after a period of drift and indecision,” Block added.

Republican National Committee press secretary Kirsten Kukowski seized on
Clinton’s remarks Monday, e-mailing reporters, “good luck to you, Hillary”
as she tries to refashion her record.

“She’s going to try, because that’s what the ever-calculating,
ever-political Clintons do best, but let’s be real, she was the Obama
foreign policy for four years,” Kukowski wrote.

Shawn Brimley, who served as the National Security Council’s director for
strategic planning during Obama’s first term, said he did not see “much of
a chasm between where Secretary Clinton is and where the president’s been
at some time.”

Brimley said it is always easier for those who have left the administration
to reflect upon world affairs and articulate an overarching vision than
those who are “running on a treadmill at 20 to 30 miles an hour.”

Still, Clinton’s remarks appear to be carefully calibrated, the latest
example of a deliberate distancing from her former colleagues.

Syria, for example, was not the only issue in which Clinton had a more
interventionist view than Obama. Along with then-Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates, she advocated sending more troops to Afghanistan. Clinton also
wrote in the book that when it came to the Arab Spring, she and other
senior advisers — including Gates and Vice President Biden — were not
“swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment” like other, younger
White House aides when it came to ousting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

*Politico Magazine: “Saving Syria Is No ‘Fantasy’”
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/mr-president-saving-syria-is-no-fantasy-109923_Page2.html#.U-nt5_ldV8E>*

By Frederic Hof, former special advisor for transition in Syria at the U.S.
Department of State

August 11, 2014

[Subtitle:] Hillary Clinton’s former adviser says Obama stood alone against
calls to arm the rebels.

In June 2014, the Obama administration asked Congress for $500 million to
train and equip nationalist Syrian rebels battling both the Islamic State
in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Assad regime. Questions were posed
then about the genuineness of the gesture: The request was emailed to
Capitol Hill rather than made in person; it was unaccompanied by visits or
telephone calls; there were no follow-up consultations; there was no order
to the Department of Defense to reprogram funds to initiate activity
quickly; and there was no evidence of an existing plan or overall strategy.
Two months later, those questions seem to have been answered by the
president of the United States. He says that arming nationalist Syrian
rebels was never going to work anyway.

In an interview with the New York Times on Aug. 8, President Obama said the
notion that ISIL’s rise could have been stopped or hindered if he had armed
the secular, more Western-friendly Syrian rebels at the start of the civil
war—a view recently endorsed by his former secretary of state, Hillary
Clinton—“has always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some
light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an
opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth,
and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state
but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a
battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.’”

Ironically, in the same interview the president also defended the
U.S.-supported NATO military intervention in Libya on the grounds that
without it, “it’s likely that Libya would be Syria.” One wonders if Syria
itself would “be Syria” had its armed nationalists been adequately
supported since 2012 and had the Assad regime’s mass terror-delivery
systems been neutralized in the summer of 2013 following the
chemical-weapons atrocity, when more than 1,400 people were killed in an
attack outside Damascus.

No doubt the president is sensitive to the charge that his rejection of the
2012 recommendation by his national security team to arm and equip
nationalist Syrian rebels robustly has contributed significantly, if
inadvertently, to ISIL’s growth in both Syria and Iraq. His comments to
Friedman implicitly dismiss the 2012 recommendation itself as a fantasy,
but as Secretary Clinton’s Syria adviser I was a member of the
administration at that time. The recommendation, in one form or another,
was offered not only by Clinton, but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta,
CIA Director David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin
Dempsey. Yet the president, ignoring decades of universal conscription and
mandatory military service in Syria, persists in characterizing the Assad
regime’s armed opponents as a hopeless collection of former butchers,
bakers and candlestick makers.

What is truly curious, however, is the request to Congress for $500 million
to finance what the president deems a fantasy. Indeed, if press reports are
true that the United States is already involved in some low-level arming,
equipping and training of Syrian rebels, one wonders how many taxpayer
dollars have already been spent on something the commander-in-chief deems
illusory. What is Congress now to make of this $500 million request? What
are military planners at the U.S. Central Command to make of the midnight
oil they have been burning trying to give shape to something they thought
was real? What exactly was the purpose of whatever interagency process
produced the $500 million initiative in the first place?

Perhaps the president misspoke or was inaccurately quoted. Perhaps he meant
to argue that his 2012 decision was correct, but that the rise of ISIL has
been a game-changer, and this is why he is seeking $500 million from
Congress: to accelerate, despite all of the difficulties, the development
of an alternative to Assad and the jihadis. Perhaps he really meant only to
repeat his customary straw-man argument: Those who claim Assad would be
gone today if only a different decision had been made in 2012 are wrong.
One prays this is the case.

Congress, mercifully in recess, now has a choice: Take the president
literally and summarily reject the $500 million request; or give the
president the benefit of the doubt as to his choice of words and deliver
the kind of serious consideration the request merits. It should choose the
latter. When it returns to session it should invite senior administration
officials to testify about the national security objectives and strategy
motivating the request. Obama, for his part, should move quickly to clarify
his remarks to convey that he is not asking Congress to throw money at a
policy he doesn’t believe in.

American pilots are now engaging ISIL targets in northern Iraq to support
Kurdish peshmerga warriors. Syrian nationalists battling ISIL next door
have long since given up on getting that kind of direct combat support from
the United States. In the past, President Obama’s words about a dictator
who should step aside and red lines that are not to be crossed encouraged
the Syrian opposition to believe that the United States would not permit
Iranian and Russian support for mass homicide to go unanswered. They have
grown deeply disappointed, disillusioned and embittered. Yet they have held
out against steep odds.

Evidently, they never got the memo about successful resistance not being in
the cards.

These people do not, in their dire straits, need a presidential
back-of-the-hand, even one that may not have been meant as such. They need
help in their two-way fight: help in downing regime helicopters bearing
barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians, and help in repulsing
and expelling the jihadis’ terror squads. Had the requisite assistance
started flowing two years ago, both Syria and Iraq would be in better
places now.

Fantasy? Few in the administration—including at very senior levels—think
so. But the president has the only vote that counts. And what he does
now—not what he did or failed to do two years ago—is what truly matters.

*New York Times column: David Brooks: “Clinton, Obama and Iraq”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/opinion/david-brooks-clinton-obama-and-iraq.html>*

By David Brooks

August 11, 2014

Last week, Hillary Clinton had a fascinating interview with Jeffrey
Goldberg of The Atlantic. The interview got immediate attention because of
the way she discussed her differences with President Obama.

While admitting that no one will ever know who was right, Clinton argues
that Obama might have done more to help the moderate opposition in Syria
fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “The failure to help build
up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the
protests against Assad ... left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now
filled,” she told Goldberg.

While showing lavish respect for the president’s intelligence and judgment,
Clinton also made it clear that she’d be a more aggressive foreign policy
leader. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid
stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said, citing Obama’s famous
phrase.

But the interview also illuminates the different flavors of Democratic
thinking on foreign policy. We are now living in what we might as well
admit is the Age of Iraq. The last four presidents have found themselves
drawn into that nation because it epitomizes the core problem at the center
of so many crises: the interaction between failing secular governance and
radical Islam.

In her interview with Goldberg, Clinton likens the current moment to the
Cold War. The U.S. confronts a diverse global movement, motivated by a
hostile ideology: jihadism.

“Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there,
though. They are driven to expand.” This jihadism shows up in many
contexts, but whether in Gaza or Syria or Iraq, she says, “it is all one
big threat.”

Clinton speaks as a Truman-Kennedy Democrat. She’s obviously much, much
more multilateral than Republicans, but there’s a certain muscular tone, a
certain assumption that there will be hostile ideologies that threaten
America. There is also a grand strategic cast to her mind. The U.S. has to
come up with an “overarching” strategy, she told Goldberg, to contain,
deter and defeat anti-democratic foes.

She argues that harsh action is sometimes necessary. “I think Israel did
what it had to do to respond to the rockets, “ she declared, embracing
recent Israeli policy. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated
this conflict. ... So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas.”

This tone sometimes stands in tension with the approach President Obama
articulated in his West Point speech in the spring, or in his interview
with my colleague Thomas Friedman on Friday.

Obama has carefully not organized a large part of his foreign policy around
a war against jihadism. The foreign policy vision he describes is, as you’d
expect from a former law professor, built around reverence for certain
procedures: compromise, inclusiveness, rules and norms. The threat he
described in his West Point speech was a tactic, terrorism, not an
ideology, jihadism. His main argument was against a means not an end: the
efficacy of military action.

Obama is notably cautious, arguing that the U.S. errs when it tries to do
too much. The cast of his mind is against intervention. Sometimes, when the
situation demands it, he goes against his natural temperament (he told
Friedman that he regrets not getting more involved in Libya), but it takes
a mighty shove, and he is resistant all the way. In his West Point speech,
he erected barriers to action. He argued, for example, that the U.S. could
take direct action only when “there is near certainty of no civilian
casualties.” (This is not a standard Franklin Roosevelt would have applied.)

Obama and Clinton represent different Democratic tendencies. In their
descriptions of the current situation in Iraq, Clinton emphasizes that
there cannot be inclusive politics unless the caliphate is seriously pushed
back, while Obama argues that we will be unable to push back the caliphate
unless the Iraqis themselves create inclusive politics. The Clinton
language points toward some sort of intervention. Obama’s points away from
it, though he may be forced by events into being more involved.

It will be fascinating to see how Clinton’s approach plays in Democratic
primaries. (I’d bet she is going to get a more serious challenge than
people now expect.) In practice, the Clinton approach strikes me as more
sound, for the same reason that early intervention against cancer is safer
than late-term surgery. In the Middle East, malevolent groups like the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria grow unless checked. Even in situations
where our “friends” are dysfunctional, the world has to somehow check them,
using a multitude of levers. Having done so little in Syria and Iraq for
the past year, we can end the caliphate or we can stay out of Iraq, but we
can’t do both.

If you don’t take steady, aggressive preventive action, of the sort that
Clinton leans toward, then you end up compelled to take the sort of large
risky action that Obama abhors.

*Politico: “Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary Clinton line seemed like ‘shot’ at
President Obama”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/jeffrey-goldberg-hillary-clinton-interview-109915.html>*

By Jonathan Topaz

August 11, 2014, 2:02 p.m. EDT

Jeffrey Goldberg on Monday dissected his interview with Hillary Clinton,
saying she took “a bit of a shot” at President Barack Obama and his foreign
policy.

Appearing on MSNBC, the Atlantic journalist who interviewed Clinton was
asked about the former secretary of State’s comments that an Obama foreign
policy quip — “Don’t do stupid stuff” — was not an adequate “organizing
principle.”

“[W]hen she says, that’s not an organizing principle — and people
understand that to be one of Barack Obama’s organizing principles — it does
seem like a bit of a shot,” Goldberg said.

He added that her comments on the issue underscore a significant stylistic
difference between Obama and Clinton, who served in the administration
during the president’s first term.

“What she’s saying is that, ‘My organizing principle is, we defeated
Communism and we’re going to defeat jihadism,’”

Goldberg said of Clinton. “Barack Obama, as you well know, is allergic to
that kind of sweeping language.”

The interview, conducted last week and published over the weekend, was
perhaps Clinton’s largest break from Obama, whom she has strongly supported
since leaving the State Department. On Syria — in what Goldberg called the
“single sharpest point of disagreement” between Clinton and Obama expressed
in the interview — she suggested that the president’s failure to arm the
Syrian rebels earlier in the conflict helped created a security “vacuum”
now filled by jihadists. Goldberg said that Clinton, who advocated a more
hawkish foreign policy on several issues during her time in the Cabinet,
might feel “vindicated in her position” that the U.S. should have
intervened in Syria earlier.

“Hillary hedged in this interview,” Goldberg told Andrea Mitchell. “And
she’s not attacking the president, but I think she felt like, ‘You know
what, I thought this, and I think events are bearing out the truth of what
I advocated for.’”

Mitchell asked Goldberg about Clinton and Obama’s differences on Israel,
noting that Clinton seemed to be more resolutely siding with Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Hillary doesn’t think that differently [from
Obama],” he said. “I think she’s running for president and he’s not and she
knows that Israel remains, according to polls, a popular cause in America.”

Goldberg added that Clinton’s more unequivocal answer supporting Israel
lacked some “nuance,” adding that her message to the U.S. public and
Netanyahu was: “[Obama] had a tough relationship with Israel; I’m going to
have a smoother relationship with Israel.”

*Talking Points Memo blog: TPM Editor’s Blog: “Hillary's Delicate,
Dangerous Game”
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hillarys-delicate-dangerous-game>*

By Josh Marshall

August 11, 2014, 10:56 p.m. EDT

Let's start by affirming a few points. After a bruising and devastating
defeat to Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton went on to serve his
administration ably, loyally and well for four years. It's also true that
it's entirely natural for a future presidential aspirant to find ways to
separate herself from the current president, especially one with flagging
popularity. Indeed, it is incumbent on a would-be president to make clear
what she would have done differently and what she would do if she were
elected. As President Clinton has said many times, elections are always
about the future.

But there's an element of Hillary's strategic distancing I've not seen
widely mentioned. President Obama is not popular at the moment. His
popularity is at best in the low 40s. But among the people who choose
Democratic nominees - that is, partisan Democrats - he remains quite
popular. And even for many Democrats who feel disappointed, let down or
just worn out by the whole six year journey, President Obama represents
something that transcends how they may feel about him at just this moment.

Quite apart from the pros and cons of particular foreign policy strategies,
I believe the great majority of partisan Democrats feel protective of the
President. So it's a delicate, perilous thing to criticize him so publicly,
particularly at a politically vulnerable moment, especially when the nature
of the criticism mirrors that of many of the President's most dogged and
aggrieved foes.

The particular nature of the supposed disagreement adds to the equation.

Remember that Sen. Clinton's hawkishness - summed up by her Iraq War vote
but expressed on various fronts during her six years in the Senate - was a
significant reason she lost her primary fight against Obama in 2008. And
that's matched by what seems to be an effort on Hillary's part today to
position herself as the candidate of what might be termed the moderate wing
of the neoconservative foreign policy intelligentsia.

Both the positioning and the substance of the positioning hearken back to
what undid Hillary in 2007-08. Indeed, there's one more thread: the sense,
critical in 2007-08, that Hillary had become a creature of Washington, its
factions, its consultants, its conventional wisdoms so impervious to
outside influence.

I don't pretend any of this is likely to derail her. She's phenomenally
popular and for good reason among Democrats and beats all comers in the
general. But it all threatens to crystallize a mix of traits many Democrats
grew suspicious of in 2008 and could led to a catalyzing if not successful
primary challenge to her in 2016.

Perhaps more than anything, as a political matter, once you loose these
memes and mini-controversies, you don't necessarily control them. The
Murdoch press, aggrieved frenemies, Fox News, MSNBC, the Sunday Show crowd
do with them what they will. Which is half the point, of course. But not
necessarily as you planned.

*The Hill: “Hillary shows her hawkish side”
<http://thehill.com/policy/international/214900-hillary-shows-her-hawkish-side>*

By Peter Sullivan

August 12, 2014, 6:00 a.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton is staking out a more hawkish foreign policy stance than
President Obama as she moves toward a run for the presidency in 2016.

From Syria to Israel to Iran, Clinton is beginning to draw contrasts with
the man she served under as secretary of State.

“It’s a decision on her part to remind people of where she’s coming from
and how that’s different,” said Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Clinton’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s in that it is “a little more
muscular, a little more deliberate and less deliberative,” he added.

The strongest break came over the weekend, when in an interview Clinton
criticized Obama’s “failure to help build up a credible fighting force” in
Syria while faulting his foreign policy approach in broad strokes.

"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is
not an organizing principle," she told The Atlantic.

Clinton aides said the interview was part of her book tour, and not about
the 2016 campaign or any political strategy.

Nonetheless, the remark could be the start of a more aggressive effort by
Clinton to distance herself from Obama’s foreign policy, which scored an
approval rating of just 36 percent in the most recent NBC/Wall Street
Journal poll.

But shaking off her association with the president could be a tall order,
given that she helped shape major policy decisions from within his Cabinet.

Republicans eyeing a presidential run in 2016 have begun to make the link
between Obama and Clinton a point of attack.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over the weekend blamed the “failures of the
Obama-Clinton foreign policies” for the rise of Sunni militants in Iraq.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), another rising GOP star, criticized Clinton for
backing the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011.

“There are some who call Libya ‘Hillary’s war.’ She was all for it. . … And
if you look objectively at Libya now, it’s a jihadist wonderland there,” he
told The Washington Post earlier this month.

And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told CNBC that under the Obama administration
there has been “chaos all over the world,” with Clinton “at the State
Department while all this was happening.”

Clinton has stressed that she often disagreed with the president’s policy
moves, most notably on Syria, where she failed to persuade him of the need
to arm rebel fighters.

“We pushed very hard,” Clinton told CNN in June. “But as I say in my book,
I believe that Harry Truman was right, the buck stops with the president.
And the president had very legitimate concerns.”

Obama, by contrast, told Thomas Friedman of The New York Times last week
the idea that arming the Syrian rebels would have made a difference in the
conflict is a “fantasy.”

Clinton has also begun to diverge on the conflict in Gaza.

The administration has repeatedly criticized Israel for not doing enough to
prevent civilian casualties, earlier this month stating that the United
States was “appalled” by the shelling of a United Nations school in Gaza.

Clinton took a different tack. Asked by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg,
“Do you think Israel did enough to limit civilian casualties?” Clinton
responded, “It’s unclear. I think Israel did what it had to do to respond
to the rockets.”

She went on to criticize the international reaction against Israel, adding,
“You can’t ever discount anti-Semitism as an explanation.”

The daylight on policy extends to Iran, where Clinton has aired doubts
about the ongoing nuclear talks.

“President Obama has said that the odds of getting a comprehensive
agreement are 50-50,” Clinton said in May. “I personally am skeptical that
the Iranians will follow through and deliver.”

Clinton and Obama famously clashed on Iran during the 2008 campaign when
Obama said he would be willing to meet with then-president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad “without preconditions.” Clinton at the time called the
position “irresponsible and frankly naïve.”

Clinton’s criticism of Obama is not as sharp-edged now. While critiquing
Obama’s “Don't do stupid stuff” mantra, she cautioned that it doesn’t
encapsulate Obama’s full policy approach.

“I think that that’s a political message,” she said. “It’s not his
worldview, if that makes sense to you.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said
Clinton was not diverging on policy, but instead making a point about how
Obama’s motto could leave U.S. foreign policy without a “clear voice.”

“It’s more disagreeing with the messaging,” said O’Hanlon, who has
co-authored a new book with James Steinberg, Clinton’s deputy secretary of
State.

Clinton told The Atlantic her organizing principle is “peace, progress and
prosperity,” and emphasized the role of ensuring domestic prosperity to win
support for foreign policy.

“You’ve got to take care of your home first,” she said.

*The Daily Beast: “Exclusive: Obama Told Lawmakers Criticism of His Syria
Policy is 'Horsesh*t'”
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/11/exclusive-obama-told-lawmakers-criticism-of-his-syria-policy-is-horsesh-t.html>*

By Josh Rogin

August 11, 2014

[Subtitle:] Hillary Clinton and congressmen alike have called on Obama to
arm Syria’s rebels. But the president fumed at lawmakers in a private
meeting for suggesting he should’ve done more.

President Obama got angry at lawmakers who suggested in a private meeting
that he should have armed the Syrian rebels, calling the criticism
“horseshit.”

The argument that America should have done more in Syria, made for years by
foreign policy leaders in both parties and several members of Obama’s
senior national security team, was brought back to the fore this past
weekend. Obama and Hillary Clinton gave dueling interviews in which they
publicly split on whether the security and humanitarian catastrophe in
Syria could have been avoided if the United States had played a larger
role. Obama’s outburst on July 31, one week prior, reveals the criticism
was already getting to him, even before the White House tried to deflect
Clinton’s remarks as pre-presidential political posturing.

Just before the Congressional recess, President Obama invited over a dozen
Senate and House leaders from both parties to the White House to talk about
foreign policy. According to two lawmakers inside the meeting, Obama became
visibly agitated when confronted by bipartisan criticism of the White
House’s policy of slow-rolling moderate Syrian rebels’ repeated requests
for arms to fight the Assad regime and ISIS.

According to one of the lawmakers, Sen. Bob Corker asked the President a
long question that included sharp criticisms of President Obama’s handling
of a number of foreign policy issues—including Syria, ISIS, Russia, and
Ukraine. Obama answered Corker at length. Then, the president defended his
administration’s actions on Syria, saying that the notion that many have
put forth regarding arming the rebels earlier would have led to better
outcomes in Syria was “horseshit.”

White House officials confirmed the charged exchange between Obama and
Corker but declined to confirm that Obama used the expletive. The
interaction between Obama and Corker was a tense moment in the otherwise
uneventful meeting.

Corker’s office declined to comment for this story. But days after the
White House meeting, he wrote a blistering op-ed for the Washington Post
criticizing Obama’s handling of foreign policy. “Today, after three years
of bold rhetoric divorced from reality, 170,000 Syrians are dead, and we
are not innocent bystanders. The president encouraged the opposition to
swallow deadly risks, then left them mostly hanging,” the senator wrote.
“Extremist groups from Syria have surged into Iraq, seizing key territory
and resources, and are threatening to completely undo the progress of years
of U.S. sacrifice.”

Top Democratic lawmakers agreed with Corker and Clinton that doing more to
support the moderate rebels would have at least had a chance of averting or
mitigating the current crisis, which has now spread to large parts of Iraq
as ISIS expands its newly declared Caliphate.

Rep. Elliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, arrived at the White House meeting after the Obama-Corker
exchange. But the congressman also heard Obama defend his Syria policy,
although using more polite language.

“The president still feels very strongly that we are deluding ourselves if
we think American intervention in Syria early on by assisting these rebels
would have made a difference,” Engel told The Daily Beast in an interview.
“He still believes that. I disagree, respectfully. They were not looking
for U.S. troops, they were looking for help and the Syria civil war started
with the most noblest of causes.”

In a New York Times interview published Aug. 8, Obama said that the idea
arming the rebels would have made a difference had “always been a fantasy.”

“This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated
arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors,
farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to
battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by
Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the
cards,” Obama said.

Clinton told The Atlantic in an interview published Aug. 10 that Obama’s
“failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were
the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there
were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that
left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

In 2012, Clinton revealed that she and then-CIA Director David Petraeus had
pushed a plan earlier that year to arm the Syrian rebels that was rejected
by the White House. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs
Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey later said they supported the plan at that
time. Many lawmakers, including Corker and Engel, still support that plan
and they agree with Clinton that Obama’s policy left a vacuum that ISIS
rushed to fill.

“[ISIS’s threat in Iraq] is definitely tied to Syria because when the
uprising started against Bashar al Assad, it was a movement of people
wanting freedom and democracy in Syria, it wasn’t a war involving jihadism
at all,” Engel said. “They desperately needed our help, which we didn’t
supply, and as a result ISIS got the upper hand. We are now paying the
price of that.”

Not all lawmakers support arming the rebels; Sen. Rand Paul, for example,
is on the record opposing the use of U.S. military resources to fight ISIS
in Iraq or Syria. Also, Clinton and many lawmakers acknowledge that arming
the rebels was risky and might not have worked. The weapons could've fallen
into the extremists' hands, and Syria might have remained a jihadist
free-for-all.

“Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to
carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing
Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what
was going on on the ground,” Clinton said.

But experts say Obama still sees Syria as one place where more American
action will not make things better. Despite an uptick in American action
across the border in Iraq—and despite an announcement of a half-billion
dollars in military aid for the rebels—it’s unlikely Obama will drastically
change his policy.

“We may never know for sure if ISIS’s decisions were encouraged by Obama’s
choices in Syria. What we know for sure is that ISIS metastasized in Syria
and was not deterred because of anything Obama said or did so far,” said
Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. “Sometimes standing by and doing relatively nothing in the face of
such a threat implicates you. The question now is, what do we do about it?”

*Capital New York: “Schumer: Hillary would be ‘so happy’ with D.N.C. in
Brooklyn”
<http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/08/8550538/schumer-hillary-would-be-so-happy-dnc-brooklyn>*

By Azi Paybarah

August 11, 2014, 3:29 p.m. EDT

Among the reasons New York's senior senator sees that Brooklyn should get
the 2016 Democratic National Convention: The location would suit the
party's most likely nominee.

“Hillary Clinton, it’s been in the newspaper, wants it in Brooklyn, and she
walked the streets of Brooklyn with me when she first campaigned, and I
think she would be so so happy if we had the convention in Brooklyn,” said
Senator Charles Schumer, standing outside the Barclays Center, where
Democratic National Committee officials kicked off their 36-hour tour of
the prospective host city.

Clinton did not attend Monday event but prefers the prospective Brooklyn
site to other possible host cities, including Philadelphia and Columbus,
Ohio, according to unnamed sources cited by the Times.

Asked how much his erstwhile junior colleague's preference should factor
into the selection process, Schumer said, “You’ll have to ask the
delegates. We’re just selling them on Brooklyn. They’ll have to weigh
everything else.”

A Clinton spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday morning, D.N.C. officials traveled from midtown Manhattan to the
Barclays Center in “under 14 minutes,” Peter Ragone, a top City Hall aide,
told reporters.

That's important, because Brooklyn doesn't have enough hotel rooms to
accommodate all the delegates who would come to town for the convention.

Ragone acknowledged that the short trip was made possible because committee
members utilized "dedicated lanes" which, he said, are used “frequently in
New York."

When NBC's Melissa Russo noted that most people traveling the same route
have much longer commutes, Ragone replied, "We have world leaders visiting
all the time, including the president, very frequently."

New York is bidding against Birmingham, Alabama, in addition to Phoenix and
Philadelphia, which is considered early on to be the leading contender.

The tour continues Tuesday with breakfast at Rockefeller Center, featuring
an array of elected officials, “to demonstrate consensus among the
Democratic Party to have this here,” Ragone said.

Lunch will at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and “that will have all the
cultural leaders of New York City there.”

Though it would billed as a “five-borough” convention, the heart of it
would be in Brooklyn.

Borough President Eric Adams said Brooklyn is a micrcosm of the United
States. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, of Manhattan, said that
"Brooklyn's story is America's story."

For Mayor Bill de Blasio, who managed Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign in New
York, hosting the 2016 convention helps underscore an economic message,
Ragone said: “There is a concept here that goes beyond just the political
convention, which is 54 or 55 million visitors here to New York City every
year. ... But we want people to know it’s not just about Manhattan anymore."

*CBS News: “As Hillary Clinton criticizes Obama, conservatives balk”
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-hillary-clinton-criticizes-obama-conservatives-balk/>*

By Stephanie Condon

August 12, 2014, 6:00 a.m. EDT

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent critique of the Obama
administration's foreign policy, seemingly in preparation for a 2016
presidential run, has some pundits on the right crying foul.

By criticizing President Obama's handling of foreign affairs, Clinton is
attempting to distinguish Mr. Obama's view of America's role in the world
from her own. Conservatives, however, are questioning how much Mr. Obama's
former top diplomat can truly distance herself from the administration.
Some liberals, meanwhile, have revived the argument that Clinton may be too
hawkish -- a judgment some on the left leveled against her in the 2008
campaign.

Clinton's harshest criticisms targeted Mr. Obama's response to the crisis
in Syria, telling the The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that the
administration's actions there amounted to a "failure."

"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who
were the originators of the protests against Assad--there were Islamists,
there were secularists, there was everything in the middle--the failure to
do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Clinton
said.

Mr. Obama himself has called that line of argument a "fantasy."

"This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated
arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors,
farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to
battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by
Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the
cards," Mr. Obama said in an interview with the New York Times' Thomas
Friedman that was published over the weekend.

Marc Thiessen, a senior White House staffer during the George W. Bush
administration who is currently a fellow at the conservative American
Enterprise Institute, called Mr. Obama's defense of his foreign policy
"absurd."

At the same time, he noted that Clinton can't easily distance herself from
Mr. Obama's policies.

"If she wants to achieve separation, she will have to answer some tough
questions in the period ahead, such as: how hard did she really fight for
arming and training the Free Syrian Army?" Thiessen wrote. "Did she
threaten to resign? What specifically did she advocate doing to help the
opposition? Did she advocate air strikes against ISIS? And - most
importantly - did she oppose Obama's complete withdrawal from Iraq, which
also 'left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled'?"

Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, called
Clinton's remarks "the worst sort of political opportunism for which she is
infamous."

"For a year and a half after leaving the administration, she has not spoken
out against the president on Syria or much of anything else," Rubin wrote.
"She did not have the nerve to resign out of principle on Syria, as did
former ambassador Robert Ford. Only now, when the entire region has gone to
seed she decides the Obama critics were right on some key aspects of
foreign policy."

The Republican opposition research firm America Rising similarly called
Clinton's statements amount to " naked political opportunism." The group
pointed to a 2012 interview with CBS News in which shot down the idea of
more robustly arming the Syrian rebels.

"What are we going to arm them with and against what?" Clinton said to CBS
News' Wyatt Andrews. "We're not going to bring tanks over the borders of
Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan... If you're a military planner or if you're a
secretary of state and you're trying to figure out do you have the elements
of an opposition that is actually viable, that we don't see."

Clinton's political interest in distancing herself from President Obama's
foreign policy is evident: a CBS News poll released last week showed that
while 52 percent of Americans have at least some confidence in Mr. Obama's
ability to handle an international crisis, just 25 percent they have a lot
of confidence -- down 14 points from last September.

Criticism of Clinton's remarks was more muted on the left, though some
anti-interventionist liberals took issue with her statements.

Liberal Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com, wrote that as a 2008 Clinton
supporter, she found the former secretary of state's comments "sobering."
If Clinton were to run for president again, she "may think she can write
off the anti-interventionist left - again."

However, Walsh said, "So far, my approach to 2016 is to say that Clinton
may not be perfect, but she's the not-perfect candidate we know, very well."

*Politico: “Karl Rove: Clinton tries to be ‘Goldilocks’”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/karl-rove-hillary-clinton-goldilocks-109908.html>*

By Sarah Smith

August 11, 2014, 12:04 p.m. EDT

Karl Rove on Monday characterized Hillary Clinton’s split with the
president on foreign affairs as the former secretary of state painting
herself as “Goldilocks.”

“She’s trying to position herself as sort of the Goldilocks of foreign
policy,” the Republican strategist said on Fox News’ “Happening Now.”
“She’s not gonna be as belligerent as Bush or as overly cautious as Obama.”

Rove’s comments were a response to Clinton’s foreign policy interview with
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, published Sunday, in which Clinton voiced
her harshest criticism yet of her former boss. She painted herself as more
hawkish than Obama, arguing that not arming Syrian rebels helped lead to
the rise of ISIL and fiercely defending Israel. She also took a shot at
Obama’s colloquial “don’t do stupid stuff” foreign policy principle telling
Goldberg, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid
stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

Rove chalked up Clinton’s motives to pure politics.

“I’m not certain that they’re going to view this in the White House as
anything other than Hillary Clinton covering her political posterior in
order to get nominated in 2016,” he said.

*Calendar:*

*Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official
schedule.*

·  August 13 – Martha’s Vinyard, MA: Sec. Clinton signs books at Bunch of
Grapes (HillaryClintonMemoir.com
<http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/martha_s_vineyard_book_signing>)

·  August 13 – Martha’s Vinyard, MA: Sec. Clinton attends Ann Dibble
Jordan’s 80th birthday party (Politico Playbook)

·  August 16 – East Hampton, New York: Sec. Clinton signs books at
Bookhampton East Hampton (HillaryClintonMemoir.com
<http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/long_island_book_signing2>)

·  August 28 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes Nexenta’s OpenSDx
Summit (BusinessWire
<http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140702005709/en/Secretary-State-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-Deliver-Keynote#.U7QoafldV8E>
)

·  September 4 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton speaks at the National Clean
Energy Summit (Solar Novis Today
<http://www.solarnovus.com/hillary-rodham-clinto-to-deliver-keynote-at-national-clean-energy-summit-7-0_N7646.html>
)

·  October 2 – Miami Beach, FL: Sec. Clinton keynotes the CREW Network
Convention & Marketplace (CREW Network
<http://events.crewnetwork.org/2014convention/>)

·  October 13 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton keynotes the UNLV Foundation
Annual Dinner (UNLV
<http://www.unlv.edu/event/unlv-foundation-annual-dinner?delta=0>)

·  ~ October 13-16 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes
salesforce.com Dreamforce
conference (salesforce.com
<http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF14/keynotes.jsp>)

 ·  December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts
Conference for Women (MCFW <http://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/>)