There’s both an upside and a downside to being in a team photo.
When you pull on the team colors and take that team photo, you are part of that team. Its story. Its legacy. You own a share of its winning record — if it has one. You also own a share of responsibility for the dashed hopes of fans if you lose. You don’t get to have it both ways.
That’s the message that Gloria Borger is bringing to the Democrats’ leadership race.
If former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is going to “hug the President Obama really close, she’ll have to hug the fact that we haven’t gotten control of ISIS.” This must come as bad news for Hillary.
Bill, if you have been paying attention, was already trying to set up Obama as a foil for any problems she might have as president, with words like 7 awful years as he was caught saying in my piece just yesterday.
Borger actually reverses that. Instead of affording Hillary plausible deniability for the unpleasant aspects of Obama’s administration, it actually puts her in the spotlight for its actual failures, some of which fall directly under her prevue as former Secretary of State. (Most famously, that failed nation state of Libya, and her own role in bringing that about.)
As the dust still settles in Brussels, and Islamist attacks around the world become commonplace, we have not seen anything like a plan for victory over that “JV team” as her administration so badly misjudged it. Both she and the President she worked under had an opportunity to show their true mettle in times of crisis, and I’m not sure that’s a record she really wants to be called out on.
Does she have a plan going forward?
Does it matter? Her party has been finger-wagging since Dubya for how they would do everything so much better than the Republicans. Unearned Peace Prize notwithstanding, what have we seen Hillary and her president doing to truly solve this crisis?
Not much.
