Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview on Monday that she feels emboldened to run for president because of Republican criticism of her handling of the deadly 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
In an interview with ABC News, Clinton said the Benghazi inquiry from Republicans gives her a greater incentive to run for president because she considers the multiple investigations into the attacks “minor-league ball” for a country of the US’ stature. However, she said she is still undecided.
The interview publicizing her new book, Hard Choices, highlighted some of the key lines of criticism Clinton could face if she runs for president in two years’ time: Her record as US President Barack Obama’s top diplomat and charges by Republicans that she has been insulated from the everyday problems of Americans after more than two decades in public life.
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It also brought up painful moments. Clinton told ABC’s Diane Sawyer she would wish Monica Lewinsky “well,” but said she had moved on from her husband’s affair with the White House intern while he served as president.
Reflecting on her failed presidential run in 2008, Clinton said her campaign had a poor strategy and did not hit its stride until after she was “badly beaten” in Iowa’s leadoff caucuses.
In the interview, Clinton said her family struggled with legal bills and debt when she and her husband left the White House in early 2001.
“We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Clinton said.
Republicans seized on the comment, saying that she received a US$8 million book advance for her 2003 memoir and that the comments reflected her insulation from the problems of average Americans.
“I think she’s been out of touch with average people for a long time,” National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said, pointing to Clinton’s estimated US$200,000-per-speech speaking fees and million-dollar book advances.
Clinton’s Senate financial disclosure forms, filed for 2000, show assets between US$781,000 and almost US$1.8 million. However, the same form showed that the Clintons owed between US$2.3 million and US$10.6 million in legal bills to four firms.
In the new book, Clinton dishes about key world leaders, saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin remains “fixated” on reviving the Soviet empire, former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) was “aloof” and former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “bellicose peacock.”
After visiting 112 countries in her four years as a top US diplomat, Clinton sheds light on her dealings with power players. Among her most difficult relationships was with Putin, with whom she had rocky ties after the failed US-Russia “reset” at the outset of the Obama presidency.
“He’s always testing you, always pushing the boundaries,” she writes of Russia’s president, whom she described as an autocratic leader with an “appetite for more power, territory and influence.”
China’s Hu, meanwhile, was less directly combative and more “scripted” and “polite,” Clinton writes in her 635-page tome.
With the US and China the world’s two largest economies, the “predictability [and] formality” from leaders like Hu made sense to Clinton. However, she stressed that Hu lacked the “personal authority” of predecessors like former Chinese president Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).
“Hu seemed to me more like an aloof chairman of the board than a hands-on CEO,” she explained, citing her trips to Beijing where she often held more fruitful meetings with lower-level dignitaries. “How in control he really was of the entire sprawling [Chinese] Communist Party apparatus was an open question.”
She reserved poignant criticism for Iran’s Ahmadinejad, whom she described as “a Holocaust denier and provocateur who... insulted the West at every turn.”
Clinton wrote that her years of knowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped ease their occasionally strained debates over the Mideast peace process and Iran’s nuclear program, which she said Netanyahu believed “was a bigger and more urgent threat to Israel’s long-term security than the Palestinian conflict.”
“I learned that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done,” she said.
Few US allies appeared to hold as much sway for Clinton as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom she described as “the most powerful leader in Europe.”
“She was carrying Europe on her shoulders,” she said of Merkel, whom she first met in 1994 when Hillary and her husband, then-US president Bill Clinton, traveled to Berlin.
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy often offered “rapid-fire, almost stream-of-consciousness soliloquies” on foreign policy that sucked the oxygen out of a room.
“He would gossip, casually describing other world leaders as crazy or infirm,” she said. “One was a ‘drug-addled maniac’; another had a military ‘that didn’t know how to fight’; yet another came from a long line of ‘brutes.’”
However, Rodham Clinton insisted that “despite his exuberance, [Sarkozy] was always a gentleman.”
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