HILLARY CLINTON’S UKRAINE 2016 ELECTION PROBLEM: MAGGIE HABERMAN
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/hillary-clinton-ukraine-2016-election-104213.html
As a freshman U.S. senator in 2002, Hillary Clinton reveled in the freedom of her new position outside the White House.
Being first lady “is more of a vicarious responsibility in that you are, like everyone in the White House, there because of one person, the president,” she told The Washington Post at the time. In the Senate, “there’s a lot more opportunity to express my own opinions, to work through what I would do and how I would do it.”
Twelve years later, Clinton is inextricably tied to another administration over which she yielded only partial influence. And as President Barack Obama grapples to resolve the expanding crisis in Ukraine, the situation underscores Clinton’s dilemma as she looks toward a potential presidential run in 2016: Separating from the White House is a very difficult proposition, if it’s possible at all.
As secretary of state through Obama’s first term, Clinton was in many ways the face of the administration’s “reset” policy with Russia, an effort to establish a new relationship that focused heavily on fostering the relationship with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
The administration’s allies argue that some positives emerged from the reset, and that trouble began with Vladimir Putin’s returned to the Russian presidency in 2012. Skeptics of the “reset” believe Putin never actually left the stage.
Still, as the runaway favorite for her party’s nomination, Clinton will have to provide further answers if she runs.
“I think Russia is the single most substantive issue that she failed at from conception to implementation,” argued political-risk expert Ian Bremmer, of the Eurasia Group.
“The view of the United States [toward] Russia is that the Russians just don’t matter that much,” Bremmer said. “There was a real belief in the White House that you could work with Medvedev, Putin was the problem, but Medvedev was in charge …. that was a real misread.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of his party’s most hawkish voices, singled out Clinton for criticism on a policy that stemmed from Obama.
“Of course, she got it wrong,” McCain told the Daily Beast. “She believed that somehow there would be a reset with a guy who was a KGB colonel who always had ambitions to restore the Russian empire. That’s what this is all about.”
P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary for public affairs during Clinton’s tenure, argued that the reset not only worked but also helped lay the groundwork for improving negotiations on Mideast issues while Medvedev was in power.
“The reset died when Putin returned to the presidency, and obviously it’s been a prickly and now deteriorating relationship in light of recent events,” said Crowley, adding that Obama’s reset perspective was the result of an inherited situation when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008.
For Clinton, the notion of the “reset” is fraught with the troublesome memory of an early faux pas. During an early meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, she presented him with a red button inscribed with what she hoped was the correct Russian word.
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov told her as the cameras whirred. Lavrov and Clinton laughed at the time, but the moment presents Republicans with a visual aid for television ads for the policy, should she become a candidate.
“She’s crazy to run on Obama’s foreign and defense policy even one iota more than she already has to by virtue of being a first-term accomplice,” said former McCain adviser Michael Goldfarb, currently a strategist who also works with the Washington Free Beacon. “She was embarrassingly compliant on the reset; she can’t run from that. But cutting the Army by 20 percent? Leaving Syria to the slaughter? Letting Iran go nuclear? … I think Hillary will want to show she’s made of sterner stuff.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Goldfarb’s remarks.
Korb argued that, even with specific points that Republicans will attack her over, Clinton’s overall foreign policy experience could be a plus against a potential field of GOP contenders without that type of background.
“I don’t see any of the Republican candidates [for 2016] that can offset that,” Korb said.
Either way, the conflict is another instance in which Clinton is tethered to the administration’s decisions heading into 2016 — more so than any other Democrat, with the possible exception of Vice President Joe Biden, who would be a heavy underdog against Clinton.
“Whenever you run for office, you’ve got pluses and minuses based on your background — [If] you say, ‘Well, elect me because I was governor of X,’ people are going to look at what you did as governor,” said Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the top liberal think tank in Washington.
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On health care, energy policy, NSA spying and the economy, Clinton will face questions about her role in formulating the policy or her current level of support for it.
Her supporters believe that being out of the administration for a year will provide some distance from a White House whose current occupant’s poll numbers are under water. They don’t believe she needs to comment on every issue that arises.
But as the year wears on, with the publication of her second memoir approaching and Democrats increasingly focused on holding the White House in 2016, Clinton will face new pressures to explain her thinking.
Though by some accounts Clinton was excluded from major White House decisions early in her tenure, that likely won’t offer much relief.
It is to Clinton’s advantage that voters generally don’t determine national elections based strictly on foreign policy issues — the economy is likelier to play a deciding role in 2016 than what is happening in Ukraine. What’s more, there’s dwindling public appetite for U.S. intervention abroad, and, barring a seismic development, voters don’t appear particularly engaged in this conflict.
Few Democrats have wanted to issue lengthy statements on a suggested course of action with Russia, as the president deals with a shifting set of problems in Ukraine. In a speech at a health care forum in Florida last week as the conflict was unfolding, Clinton said she was still talking to some of her former governmental colleagues and predicted Putin would “look seriously” at consolidating his country’s position in eastern Ukraine.
Putin “sits as the absolute authority now in Russia and it is quite reminiscent of the kind of authority exercised in the past by Russian leaders, by the czars and their successor Communist leaders,” she said, according to CNN. She added that it was imperative for the U.S. to back a “unified Ukraine.”
On Monday night, the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record, which hadn’t weighed in on the Ukraine issue before, came to her defense.
“Secretary Clinton worked to successfully secure Russia’s cooperation toward anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan, and worked with Russia to secure critical, crippling sanctions against Iran. Not to mention, Secretary Clinton oversaw passage and enactment of the New START Treaty reducing nuclear weapons and making us all safer. This is another case of selective memory lapses by Republican opportunists,” communications director Adrienne Elrod said in a statement, after the group posted tweets to that effect.
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