'Hugging it out: Hillary Clinton calls Obama to calm tensions

Looks like some handlers got together to patch things up between Hillary and Obama. Apparently her scathing comments were not an attack on Obama. How that could ever be construed to be the case is beyond me. Yet here we are with Hillary making peace. Must be a relief for whoever writes liberal talking points though...

'Hugging it out’: Hillary Clinton calls Obama to calm tensions
Posted by
CNN's Dan Merica
Washington (CNN) – Hillary Clinton reached out to President Barack Obama on Tuesday to tell him that headline-grabbing comments she made about his foreign policy were not meant as a political attack.

The potential presidential candidate called Obama to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him, his policies, or his leadership," Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the former secretary of state, said.



In an interview with the Atlantic published Sunday, Clinton dramatically distanced herself from Obama’s approach to foreign policy.

In it, she trashed his self-coined mantra for a cautious foreign policy: "Don't do stupid stuff."

"Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle," Clinton said.

She later labeled Obama's decision not to arm Syrian rebels, something she disagreed with, a "failure."

According Merrill, though, Clinton "was proud to serve” with Obama.

"While they've had honest differences on some issues, including aspects of the wicked challenge Syria presents, she has explained those differences in her book and at many points since then," Merrill said. "Some are now choosing to hype those differences but they do not eclipse their broad agreement on most issues."

David Axelrod, Obama's former top adviser who now acts as his biggest defender outside the White House, rebuffed Clinton with a tweet that knocked her for her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq War.

Clinton said in the interview that “don't do stupid stuff" did not really reflect Obama’s big-picture thinking.

“I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his worldview,” Clinton said. “I’ve sat in too many rooms with the President. He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited.”

Clinton’s comments put into sharper focus an effort to put more space between herself and Obama, something she’s been doing slowly in speeches and interviews since releasing her book, “Hard Choices,” in June.

Obama's poll numbers are slipping and Clinton, who is widely considered the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, needs to separate herself from the negative numbers.

After criticism of Obama policy, Hillary Clinton to party with President

In her book, Clinton outlines how she and Obama disagreed on arming Syrian rebels. And during the book’s promotional tour, she has drawn small divisions with him over second-term leadership and partnering with Iran to combat extremism in Iraq.

But the reaction to Clinton's comments, which inflamed the left, show how careful she has to be when trying to separate herself from her fellow Democrat while he’s still in office. It’s a task made even more complex by the fact that she served as America’s top diplomat under him for four years.

MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy and organizing group, also warned Clinton about taking too hawkish a tone, something it accused her of doing when she ran for president in 2008.

David Axelrod smack-tweets Hillary Clinton

Clinton’s call to Obama care a day before they were expected to attend the same party at the Martha's Vineyard home of Vernon Jordan, a former close adviser and golfing buddy of her husband.

"Like any two friends who have to deal with the public eye, she looks forward to hugging it out when they see each other tomorrow night," Merrill said.

A White House official declined to comment, saying they will leave it to Clinton's aides to handle this for now.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...inton-calls-obama-to-calm-tensions/?hpt=hp_t2

 

I think it's rather sweet, how two people in the public eye who are defined by their political personas at some point have to let their private personalities shine through, and acknowledge that just because they play around with politics, they can still like eachother in private.

Now I'll be walking around all day with this rosy picture in my head of Clinton and Obama huggling!

 

When will Hillary produce the stained pantsuit?

 

Why should there be a stained pantsuit? If there were to be man staining on her pantsuit, unlike the men in charge in these situations, I well bet she gets her pantsuit cleaned.

And if the CiC's tryst was not with a male, there will not be a stain left in the first place!

 

An interesting take. Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night.

Memo to President Obama: You should have made Hillary your vice president back in 2008.
She was the obvious choice. But you believed you were strong enough without her, and worried that Bill would be impossible to control.
Big mistake.
If Hillary were veep, she’d be inside the tent even now, biting her lip. Instead, she took her leave, wrote her book and is now taking aim — at you.
Hillary Clinton was and is your enemy. She says she’s your friend, but that’s what Iago told Othello.
In 2008, with blithe self-assurance, you took away from her the thing she most wanted — and as you did so, you allowed as how she was “likable enough.”
If she doesn’t still hate you for saying that in front of tens of millions of people on national TV, she’d be a better person than 95 percent of the people on Earth.
And she’s not.
What’s more, when she was working for you, you refused to give her the reins of US foreign policy and centralized all the power in the White House.
Fair is fair. You took Michael Corleone’s advice: You sought to keep this enemy close. But you didn’t keep her close enough. And now you shall pay. She has made you start paying already.
Hillary Clinton is the most popular politician in America now — more popular than you, if you haven’t noticed. And she has decided, for all intents and purposes, to go into opposition.
That was the meaning of the extraordinary interview she granted Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic over the weekend. It was the annunciation of her separation from you and your legacy.
Though filled with qualifications and words of praise for Obama here and there, the interview is a rare assault against a sitting president by his former secretary of state.
The key sentence is this: “Great nations need organizing principles,” Hillary told Goldberg, “and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
According to Mark Landler in the May 28 New York Times, it was Obama himself who reportedly boiled down his foreign policy to “a saltier variation of the phrase, ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ — brushing aside as reckless those who say the United States should consider enforcing a no-fly zone in Syria or supplying arms to Ukrainian troops.”
As it happens, Hillary used the Goldberg interview to make it clear she supported more aggressive actions against the Syrian regime but was shot down — and clearly intimated she’d support more aggressive efforts to support Ukraine against Russia’s depradations than Obama is willing to do.
She also took pains to separate herself from the administration’s disdainful treatment of Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas.
She refused to take Goldberg’s bait and say Israel had acted recklessly or irresponsibly.
“I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets,” she said. “And there is the surprising number and complexity of the tunnels, and Hamas has consistently, not just in this conflict, but in the past, been less than protective of their civilians.”
Rather than tasking Israel with the responsibility to “do more” to protect the civilians beneath whose legs Hamas was hiding its missiles and tunnels, she said,
“I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are — and I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position — that hasn’t made errors.”
Some read this as Hillary’s reemergence as a hawk, but I think it makes more sense to read it as part and parcel of her new determination to serve as an outside critic of the Obama administration’s approach — a critic more in sorrow than in anger, a seemingly friendly critic, who’s neither a Republican pol nor a neocon pundit.
Last year, when it looked like Obama might maintain his popularity, Hillary was ready to run as his confidant, adviser and friend.
Now, as the world comes crashing down upon him, along with his poll numbers and the increasingly disastrous prospects for his party in the November midterms, Mrs. Clinton has laid a bet.
She is betting she has two years to set herself up not as Obama’s natural successor but as his sadder-but-wiser replacement — the one who saw it go wrong, the one who watched as the mistakes were being made, the one who sought to mitigate or reverse those blunders to no effect, the one best able to take inspiration from a more successful, more centrist Democratic presidency.
Mrs. Clinton’s political judgment is not to be trusted. She allowed Obama to eat her lunch in 2008 in part because she was overconfident and tacked too far to the center too early. She may well be doing it again.
But she has made her choice. If Obama stumbles, she’ll be there — with her ankle turned out, to trip him up still further and then, with a sad smile, claim credit for having known that the obstacle had been there in his path all along.
Hillary called Obama yesterday to assure him nothing in the interview was meant to be critical of him. Well said, Iago.