Having initially been highly skeptical of Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State, partly on the basis that she had neither diplomatic experience nor a diplomatic temperament, I feel obliged to pass on this observation from Joe Klein (via Andrew Sullivan):
Clinton, who can be spiky, has re-emerged as a natural diplomat. When she heard that Holbrooke and General David Petraeus had never met, she invited them over to her Washington home on a Friday night before the Inauguration. The two men spent two hours in front of a roaring fire with Clinton, getting to know each other, talking about the diplomatic and military division of labor in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clinton’s was an Obamian gesture — enticing the lion to lie down with the lion — the sort of attention to detail that seems to have been replicated across the policymaking spectrum during the Obama transition.
One fireside chat with elite Americans does not a foreign diplomat make. But it’s one bit of evidence that she may have the right temperament after all. Which would be a good thing, seeing as how she was confirmed easily yesterday.
Photo from Reuters Pictures
