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US warrior queen Hillary Clinton is smiling on AfricaHillary Rodham Clinton, United States Secretary of State, was in the country to talk the language of President Barack Obama. She was here to talk not of regime change or “war on terror”, but of South Africa using its influence to raise the pace of reform in Zimbabwe.
Speaking after a briefing by International Relations and Co-operation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, Clinton said the three million Zimbabwean refugees were evidence of the failure of their government to look after its people, and were a burden on the South
African government.
Sanctions levelled at Robert Mugabe’s leadership would not be lifted, but the US would give Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai aid for education and health.
The Obama and Zuma administrations are to strengthen ties.
At the age of 61, smooth-skinned, ageless, chic, blonde, superhuman, alert and ready to roll, Clinton jetted into the continent’s economic powerhouse from Kenya on the second leg of her seven-nation tour of Africa to deal with the big issues.
To Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, Somalia’s president, she had pledged US military and other support for his transitional government. The US was ready to take action if Eritrea continued to support Islamist insurgents in the country, Clinton warned.
No one said the US was not coming to Africa to look after its own interests. In between visits to the US-backed Aids programme in Johannesburg and to Nelson Mandela, who stood by her and Bill Clinton after Bill’s disastrous affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton talked business and bilateral trade.
That she arrived in time to celebrate Women’s Day was auspicious, say fans, who have dubbed her the feminist hero in Obama’s Cabinet.
The third female US secretary of state, Clinton is credited with directly having influenced the appointment of the first Madame Secretary of the US, Madeleine Albright.
Clinton’s own bold and often cheery persona contrasts with the hawkishness of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That her South African host and counterpart, Nkoana-Mashabane, is the second female foreign minister after Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, indicates that the ceiling-shattering which Clinton advocates is irreversible.
Clinton came to show those of us still bent under the yoke of patriarchy that politics is the art of the possible. Well, the almost possible.
The world’s most famous woman acquired the top diplomatic post in Obama’s Cabinet – but not the one for which she fought him tooth and nail.
Obama described the election race as “a cold war”.
Clinton, a woman who changes political persona as often as some change underwear, has been converted from formidable warrior queen Boudica into the user-friendly foreign relations player described by The New York Times as Obama’s finest asset.
Last month, Tina Brown complained on her Daily Beast blog that Obama had rendered Hillary almost invisible. He had jetted off to Moscow and to visit King Abdullah in Cairo without Hillary or any envoy.
But Hillary’s intimate experience of the White House is unlikely to be wasted.
She has negotiated access to the president and she chose her own staff, on the whole. Although critics say her high-flung envoys – she has made Richard Holbrooke the envoy of the explosive AfPak (Afghanistan and Pakistan) portfolio – may detract from her own power, she has said she wanted it that way.
There are too many hot spots for the top US diplomat to handle alone, including being in charge of the US Agency for International Development.
In June, Clinton said she was also strategising for her team, and now that her broken arm is on the mend, she is on the move.
The North Koreans, irritated by her perceived scolding, held her to ridicule with capital city Pyongyang apparently remaining unyielding.
While in North Korea, she alledgedly instigated the release of two US journalists, which Bill Clinton saw through after a meeting with leader, Kim Jong-Il.
He returned the journalists to safety in what she said was “a humanitarian mission”.
The ‘two for the price of one’ Bill and Hillary (Billary) outfit, which the former president had offered voters when campaigning for his second presidential term in 1996, marches on.
The Billary partnership clicked in after Bill was beaten in the Arkansas governor’s race in 1980 following his sexual escapade with Gennifer Flowers, a lounge singer.
Hillary rose to his defence and Bill wanted her on his side. They complement each other.
Both Yale Law School graduates, they have been rated the smartest political power couple on the planet; with only Obama possibly rivalling Bill.
And as the comedian Chris Rock says, George Bush made sure that a white man would not stand for the US presidency.
The battle cry of last year’s election revealed how low she can go when the stakes are high. Her remark on 60 Minutes that Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know” was below the belt.
In May last year, she cited the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason for her decision to stay in the race until 3 June.
The irresponsible suggestion that Obama’s life was in danger showed that she was serious about wanting to win. She was obliged to “express regret”.
As if she did not have enough ammunition. Obama was too liberal, too weak on national security, inexperienced on foreign policy and his health policy would not provide security for 15 million Americans.
Obama called these attacks “old politics” and accused Clinton of evading the truth, of having an agenda – about issues such as social security, Iraq and Iran.
She said that as president, she would nuke Iran if it attacked Israel.
An outspoken first lady during Bill Clinton’s two terms as president and 12 years as Arkansas governor, she banged the drum for children’s issues, women’s rights and universal healthcare for all Americans.
She wrote a book, It Takes a Village, based on the African proverb about child-rearing.
Four decades of public life had honed her skills, but had not brought clarity.
Obama accused her of flip-flopping on torture and of being “a pseudo-Republican”. She had voted for the war, to authorise sending troops into Iraq in 2002 and then later said this was a war for diplomacy.
Her flip-flops were the fruits of an earlier political shape-shifting exercise in 2006 when New York Magazine asked whether she was a leftist or a New Democrat.
She was talking about evils of illegal immigration, her pro-choice advocacy had gone down the tubes and she was veering to the centre.
She perplexed both the Right, which despised her liberalism, and the left-leaning Democrats with her corporate interests and, of course, the bloody war. That she voted for the war in Iraq as a senator, while Obama opposed it from outside the Senate, gave him ammunition.
In one of the many exclusive interviews collected in a new book, Renegade (Crown), Obama told the journalist Richard Wolffe why he believed Clinton would be an effective secretary of state. “She was disciplined, precise, smart as a whip and she could present a really strong image to the world.”
Obama found her gritty, consistent, passionate. Her fiercely competitive spirit clearly struck a chord.
In a world where image – and the way the world sees America – means so much, it was apparently easy to overlook the campaign debts to the tune of $23 million, the possibility of the effusive Bill Clinton stepping out of line by pushing his Global Initiative and work on HIV/Aids, and the possibility that she still harboured rank ambition.
Obama took his chances. Like his hero Abraham Lincoln, he has taken his rival into the fold, rather having her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
Bill has been made UN envoy to Haiti, with the approval of the US administration, and his philanthropic ventures have apparently been reined in.
Billary worked very hard during the election to have it another way and at one point, Obama said he was not sure which candidate he
was opposing.
Samantha Power, the Harvard professor and foreign policy adviser to Obama during elections, pronounced Hillary Clinton “a monster”.
Power was forced to resign. She apologised, saying that the campaign was becoming tense, she admired Clinton’s intellect and that “she’s also incredibly warm, funny”.
Clinton is not tough for nothing.
At the age of four Dorothy Rodham, Clinton’s mother, sent her out of the house with permission to slap Suzy O’Callaghan, the little girl who was pushing her around on the street.
There was no room in their middle-class Midwestern house for “cowards”, she said.
In Clinton’s 2003 memoir, Living History, she writes that after that incident she was able to go and play with the boys and that Suzy became a friend, “and she still is”. Combat and friendship: was this the way to Obama’s heart?
She is hard to read.
After the Lewinsky affair broke in the media, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, invited Hillary to be photographed by Annie Leibowitz for the magazine cover. But Clinton never stooped to talk of revenge.
Back at the ranch, we learn from Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, that when he told Hillary “the truth of what happened between me and Monica Lewinsky, she looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut”.
In Living History, she says she wanted to wring his neck. But as women supporters called for Hillary to dump Bill, he flopped down on the couch in the small living room adjoining their bedroom.
There he prayed, for forgiveness and a return to the bedroom. A counselling programme once a week for a year apparently drew the couple closer together. They both had crummy childhoods, abusive fathers, stuff to forget and dazzling futures to plan.
Hillary was not leaving the White House. She was uncertain about her husband, but not about her president.
She is a Methodist, he is a Baptist – faith made them stronger. Billary would not die.
Born on 26 October 1947, in what Clinton calls “the cautious conformist era” and “a family of conservative Republicans”, her parents taught her to resist peer pressure.
Theirs was not a happy home, despite the rose-tinted portrait she paints in Living History.
It stars herself as tomboy in her elementary school years, as Brownie, Girl Guide, co-captain of the safety patrol in the fifth grade and a slow starter in the romance department.
In A Woman in Charge; The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Carl Bernstein describes the tensions in their household. It was run like a boot camp by her militaristic father, who was placated by her mother who endured his abuse.
Clinton, who had swallowed whole the conservative Republican programme, kept it up and at Wellesley College she was president of the Young Republicans.
The Vietnam War led her to the more liberal approach of the Democrats.
There were to be other makeovers. When Bill failed to be re-elected as governor of Arkansas in 1980, she gave up using her family name Rodham, bought contact lenses, lightened her hair and stopped dressing like a nerd. Her task was complex: to look softer and more empathetic, yet to become tougher.
The Iron Lady needs a steely carapace to keep at bay detractors who have surfaced from every corner of political life.
Connie Bruck wrote in a 1994 New Yorker profile that Clinton is the only first lady to have been subpoenaed, testifying before a federal grand jury as a consequence of the Whitewater controversy in 1996. This centred on a failed business venture in the 1970s and 1980s.
Living History, about her eight years in the White House as first lady, explains that there were no irregularities. The memoir, airbrushed and sanitised, was “as a campaign book”; in it, she says the pain of Bill’s transgressions would “in a better world” not have been made public.
There are few dull moments in the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Her claim that she had dodged sniper fire when on a first lady trip to Bosnia with her daughter, Chelsea, was famously contradicted by a video tape revealing the serene scene of her arrival. Such risk-taking adds to the complexity of an often forbidding character.
Clinton watchers say that her connection with Obama is an excellent political moment.
In a recent television interview, she said she believed there would be a female president in the US during her lifetime. She would not stand for the presidency again – it was a daunting task.
For the mistress of metamorphosis, a change of mind would not be out of order.
Maureen Isaacson
The Sunday Independent
"Her claim that she had dodged sniper fire when on a first lady trip to Bosnia with her daughter, Chelsea, was famously contradicted by a video tape revealing the serene scene of her arrival. Such risk-taking adds to the complexity of an often forbidding character."
What?