What part of “Beaches and Speeches” does Jonathan Alter not understand?

I’d like to start off by flashing back to February 23, 2008. Here’s what one Jonathan Alter had to say back then: Hillary Should Get Out Now…

Hillary wins Texas and Ohio.

If Hillary Clinton wanted a graceful exit, she’d drop out now—before the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries—and endorse Barack Obama. This would be terrible for people like me who have been dreaming of a brokered convention for decades. For selfish reasons, I want the story to stay compelling for as long as possible, which means I’m hoping for a battle into June for every last delegate and a bloody floor fight in late August in Denver. But to withdraw this week would be the best thing imaginable for Hillary’s political career. She won’t, of course, and for reasons that help explain why she’s in so much trouble in the first place.

Ah, yes, the most viable female candidate for president ever should have dropped out before she won two big primaries. How foolish of her to actually want to run for real and prove her mettle!

Fastforward to the June 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, in which the same Jonathan Alter has penned this profile on Hillary Clinton: Woman of the World…

VF illustration and caption from Alter's Woman of the World piece: THE PERILS OF HILLARY As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton finds herself dealing with foreign upheaval not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Aloft, the secretary of state can often be found with a black binder clip in her hair instead of fastened onto classified documents. It helps. Her stylist, Isabelle Goetz, does her hair in Washington, but on the road—unless the ambassador’s wife can recommend someone good—she takes care of herself. For years she’s routinely done her own makeup, which is easier because she has good skin. And her genes seem unusually strong. Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, is 92 but looks more like 80. Hillary is 63 but seems a bit younger. She is one of those lucky people who look better—or at least not worse—with age.

All of this is relevant politically because it means that in 2016, when she’s 68, she is unlikely to be written off as too old to run for president. Since the beginning of the year, Hillary has said repeatedly that she will leave office no later than early 2013 and retire from public life. In Bahrain, just before the Middle East upheaval, I heard her be more direct than ever before on the subject: “I’ve had a fascinating and rewarding public career …. I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position and then I’ll probably go back to advocacy work, particularly on behalf of women and children, and probably around the world.”

Hillary isn’t as calculating as her public image. The 2000 Senate race, for instance, was practically serendipitous. But it’s hard to believe “Clinton” and “ambition” have been fully sundered. In 2016, the Democrats are unlikely to have anyone better or more acceptable to different parts of the party.

First. Was it really necessary to launch into a discussion of Hillary’s electoral fitness by saying she looks younger than her age? I mean, what is this? The progressive version of Rush Limbaugh?

Second. Hillary should have just gotten out of the race the week of February 23, 2008. That obviously would have been the best move for her career. So said the Clueless Class.

Staying in the race until June 2008 has clearly been oh-so-detrimental for Hillary, as evidenced by how the Jonathan Alters in 2011 are now clamoring for her to run in 2016.

Talk about the Audacity of Hope. They WISH Hillary would run in 2016.

Hillary in Harper’s Bazaar, February 2011:

As for Clinton’s own postsecretary course, she says, “I’d probably teach international relations, current events, something involving women’s roles and rights around the world. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I have a lot of interests that I hope to fulfill. And then an occasional beach, an occasional time-out.”

And what of 2016, the next date Clinton could conceivably run for president? “I have no thoughts for 2016,” she says with a benevolent smile. “Beaches … speeches.”

What part of that does Alter and the rest of the Clueless class not understand?

Hillary has transcended both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the clueless class that worships the empty suits that sit inside it.

Her “not fully sundered ambition” after leaving the Obama Administration will be to use her power as an emeritus stateswoman to make the rights of women and girls a hallmark of any human rights campaign and national security agenda. What she’s going to be launching in the near-future is her own foundation for women–we’d be only too lucky if she had time to launch another presidential bid. And, frankly, after watching the the Democratic party self-destruct and sell out their core constituencies for K-Street/C-Street gobbledygook , come 2016, I’d rather see Hillary become UN Secretary General than President of the United States.

You had your chance at Hillary, progressives. Somewhere between saying Hillary had “more baggage than Paris Hilton on the Riviera” (that’s from Alter himself) and chanting WWTSBQ, you blew it.

And, anyways, if Hillary was really going to run, you better believe these goons wouldn’t be floating her for 2016–they’d still be spending every waking hour cataloguing how unlikeable and unelectable she is.

Alter doesn’t still seem to get that Hillary has transcended all of this and truly is a “Woman of the World” whose horizons are bigger than what the pea brains in DC can comprehend. Here’s another excerpt from Alter’s current piece:

For any secretary of state, the prerequisite for success is a strong relationship with the president. “He’s hard for her to connect with,” admits one of her top people. “It’s hard for her to break through to the more-than-polite level.” That isn’t meant to suggest chilliness or dysfunction. “Is it Bush-Baker?” the aide continues, referring to the relationship between the first President Bush and James Baker, who was so tight with his boss that he felt obliged to resign as secretary of state to run Bush’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 1992. “No. But there’s a lot of mutual respect, and she feels like she’s always got a shot with him.” Imagine how it feels to be a supplicant, looking for her “shot” at impressing the president. It was only four years ago that Hillary said her main opponent in the Democratic primaries was “irresponsible and frankly naïve” when he promised to meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and other rogue regimes without preconditions during his first year in office. She hasn’t forgotten who turned out to be right on that one.

Daydreamer Barack and Hillary in Midsentence: Does anyone look particularly "supplicant" here?

One day I asked Hillary point-blank how she gets along with Obama, with whom she meets a few times a week when neither is on the road. She gave me a predictable answer, that her relationship is “not only very good professionally but very warm personally.” Of course, “warm” is just another term of art in Washington, where the advice to anyone looking for a friend has long been to get a dog. When I ask for examples, she has to pause before recalling a very public moment: a spring day in 2009 when the weather was so good that the president suggested they go outside, where they were photographed chatting at a picnic table on the South Lawn. “It was exactly what I could have hoped for. It was spontaneous and heartfelt, and we had a good time,” she says. Her second example is a full hug she and the president shared in the Situation Room after the health-care bill finally passed.

What Alter et al. don’t get is that Hillary isn’t “looking” for “a shot to impress the president.”

It’s not her fault Obama’s a cold fish.

Hillary is a professional. She makes an effort to keep a working relationship with her boss. She gets things done.

What a bitch!

(Think Tina Fey, Bitch is the New Black.)

In fact, if you see Jonathan Alter discussing his June profile on Hillary on C-Span, you’ll see that at between the 1 to 2 minute mark, Alter himself concedes that:

She never has quite connected with the president on a personal level, but then there are not a lot of people that feel close to him, so that also is to be expected. They have a working relationship that is productive for the United States.

In his C-Span appearance, Alter also reiterates more emphatically that while he thinks Hillary isn’t “plotting” to run and thinks that *she sincerely thinks* she’s out of politics, he doesn’t think the “Democrats” can find anyone “formidable” besides her in 2016.

Alter notes in both his article and on C-Span that Hillary is “terrific off the record” but that she’s guarded on the record, defensive, yada yada. What is it with Jonathan Alter, Maureen Dowd (who once said of Hillary, “She has kept her sense of humor — which has a tart side — mostly under wraps, so she won’t be accused of being witchy”), and the rest of the press?

I’ve never seen this kind of obsession with a male pol for, you know, being a pol.

On Hillary’s resilience, Alter offers this commentary:

Even as she navigates these choppy waters, Hillary’s own vessel is solid and surprisingly leakproof. One of the least-noticed changes in American public life is how she has been transformed from a subject of constant gossip and calumny into a figure of consequence and little controversy. There are structural reasons: secretaries of state always exist in a zone slightly above grubby politics, which is meant—in theory, at least—to stop at the water’s edge. The right-wing attack machine can apparently concentrate only on one or two villains at a time, and since 2008 it has been Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s turn in the barrel, not Hillary’s. I tried for months to find people willing to lace into her. None would, not even politicians and TV blowhards who had once catalogued her distortions and dined out on despising her.

Well, of course they don’t want to go on the record taking her down now. Bullies don’t go after the smart girl when they need her to save their butts on a group project.

BTW, how many months has Alter ever spent “trying to find people willing to lace” Obama? Good grief.

Of course, Alter can’t resist this bit of Bill, Hillary, Obama commentary:

Despite running against each other, the president and secretary of state have a lot in common in the way their minds work—more, arguably, than either has in common with Bill Clinton. Staffers have noticed that both Obama and Hillary are methodical, secure, and human-scale when you talk to them; they’re deductive thinkers who drill down into a problem. The former president, by contrast, is discursive, needy, and larger-than-life; he’s an inductive thinker with a connective mind.

Bwhahahaha! Hillary is more disciplined than Bill, but both Clintons are wonks who make policy specifics accessible to the public, each in their own styles. They both blend populism with intellectualism in a way that’s been sorely absent from the White House since they left. Their styles complement each other. Where Hillary is focused like a laser, Bill is able to bring the big picture into focus.

Obama’s plenty disciplined, but he thinks the song is about him and doesn’t get deep in the weeds about the issues. (Either that or he doesn’t think he has to engage any of us little people on the issues.)

Then there’s this refrain from Alter throughout his piece:

On Egypt, it was Hillary who early on recommended caution and Obama who insisted that U.S. policy should be to push for an immediate transition.

What? Dakinikat, Minkoff Minx, bostonboomer, and I liveblogged Egypt at Sky Dancing.

Obama was just as foolishly entrenched in the “orderly transition” and “stability” memes as Hillary was. It took forever for Obama to respond and when he finally did, it necessarily fell short, by virtue of the Administration looking pathetic, having earlier had Biden opening his big mouth and saying he wouldn’t call Mubarak a dictator. It was officially Samantha Power who was pushing Obama to be more bold on Egypt, but all of this was probably good cop/bad cop shenanigans anyway, to give Obama cover to “evolve” his position once Mubarak’s ouster became a foregone conclusion.

Oh, and just look at how Alter wraps things up:

She has been involved in this cause for years, but now has a much bigger platform to push the idea of new cookstoves that cost as little as $25 each. “This could be as transformative as bed nets or even vaccines,” she says, the excitement in her voice palpable. “We are excited because we think this is actually a problem we can solve.”

That’s rare. Development challenges and global conflicts often seem intractable, and that has to be a little discouraging at three in the morning in the skies over Kabul or Cairo. “You can’t just look at these conflicts and issues and say, ‘O.K., that’s been solved,’” Hillary says to me at the end of an interview, starting to chuckle. “Because most of these problems are never solved.” Now she’s back in dutiful, dogged mode, which happens to be the mode that best fits today’s Hillary—the one almost everyone seems to like. “You know,” she says, “you just keep working at them and working at them and working at them.” Who can argue with that?

Likeable, congenial, hard-working, dutiful Hillary… meh.

There’s a lot more where that kind of faint praise came from in Alter’s profile of Hillary, stuffed between interesting details about her work at Foggy Bottom (e.g. at townterviews, “Often a questioner will refer to her in fractured English as ‘President Clinton.'”), but I think you get the point already.

I’m going to leave you with a passage where Alter actually lets Hillary’s merits as a stateswoman stand on their own somewhat, instead of trying to put too much of his own backhanded spin on it:

She accepted the post, in November of 2008, only after President-Elect Obama—in an inspired move over the objections of many on his campaign staff—twisted not just her arm, she informed friends, but her fingers, toes, and every other bone in her body. The president, for his part, is proud of himself for choosing her. He knows that she represents the United States better than anyone but him and is—to the surprise of many Obama veterans—refreshingly low-maintenance. When budget season arrived this year and the departments all faced drastic cuts, Hillary used a Cabinet meeting to offer tips on how to avoid making cuts that would affect vulnerable people—children, the elderly—and look bad politically. (She recalled that Newt Gingrich’s effort to slash the school-lunch program, which put Gingrich on the defensive, was the real turning point in the 1995 budget debate.) Several second-tier Cabinet members thought it one of the most useful White House meetings they had ever attended.

Wouldn’t you love to have Hillary as your boss?