Friday, March 06, 2009

File Under "What If Bush Had . . . "   [Mark Hemingway]

Our new Secretary of State is really wowing 'em on her European excursion. Over at Reason, Michael Moynihan reports:

Thank god America is now represented in Europe by an articulate, well-informed, Yale-educated politician. On her first trip to Europe as President Obama's Secretary of State, Clinton wowed diplomats with a discursive lecture on European literature and history, inveighing on topics as diverse as the impact of Catholicism on Evelyn Waugh's later novels and a radical and compelling reinterpretation of Leon Blum's rise as leader of the Popular Front.

Errr, no — Moynihan dispatches with his wishful thinking to confront what really happened:

Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows on her first visit to Europe as secretary of state when she mispronounced her EU counterparts' names and claimed U.S. democracy was older than Europe's...

A veteran politician, Clinton compared the complex European political environment to that of the two-party U.S. system, before adding:

"I have never understood multiparty democracy.

"It is hard enough with two parties to come to any resolution, and I say this very respectfully, because I feel the same way about our own democracy, which has been around a lot longer than European democracy."

The E.U. delegate from Athens must have been particularly impressed by the Secretary of State's command of history. Between this, the Fleet Street accolades over Obama's handling of U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown's recent visit, and the way the administration deftly brought Russia on board to help rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions — they're just running the foreign policy table. It feels so good to have the adults in charge once again.

03/06 01:40 PMShare