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Tension Builds Between Hillary, Obama

Clinton a strong secretary, but not yet administration's voice

By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff

Posted Nov 5, 2009 6:50 PM CST

(Newser) – Ask Hillary Clinton or her staff about President Obama and they’ll praise him and tell you the relationship between the two really is strong. But the tensions between the State Department and White House are starting to show, writes Joe Klein. The president’s foreign policy hasn’t yet yielded results, and on her recent Pakistan trip, Clinton gave the first hints that she’d like to assert her independence—and move beyond what Klein calls “the Rodney King ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ phase.”

The White House, meanwhile, doesn’t like Clinton’s tendency to use unnecessarily dramatic language, like when she called Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest peace overture “unprecedented”—even though it wasn’t—annoying Palestinians. Clinton has been a valuable voice abroad, but she hasn’t been Obama's foreign-policy voice at home. Such tensions are within the boundaries of “creative policy making,” writes Klein in Time, but the question lingers: “How much can these former rivals really trust each other?”

Hillary Clinton listens to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, not pictured, at the Presidential Palace in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009.
Hillary Clinton listens to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, not pictured, at the Presidential Palace in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009.   (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 36 comments
Shannonals
Nov 7, 2009 12:45 PM CST
Think she already lost that fight Jayster999.
thejoint00
Nov 7, 2009 11:31 AM CST
Electability, not popularity. The debate was racism over feminism and racism won. Meaning that, there is far less of it to the point that Obama had a better chance of winning by exploiting it.
NxBigmouthery
Nov 7, 2009 3:34 AM CST
Politics aside, see if you can find the gross tautology in the following sentence: "They are both incompetent and holding positions for which they are poorly qualified." The thing is, the guy is serious.

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