"Hillary's Unprecedented Experience on the World Stage"
Submitted by mad4clark on December 15, 2007 - 6:31pm.
Foreign Policy | Hillary Clinton | Democratic politics
Lissa Muscatine and Melanne Verveer at Huffpost highlight HRC's international experience. This may have a lot to do with why Wes decided to endorse her.
Anyone who doubts Hillary Clinton's impact on the world stage might want to check with the top political leaders in Northern Ireland, who cite her work to end sectarian violence there and help secure a lasting peace.
Anyone who doubts Hillary Clinton's international experience might consult with democracy activists in the Slovak Republic, who remember when she stood in solidarity with them and publicly challenged their new government's suppression of civil society.
They might talk to women - from the Philippines to Latin America to the Middle East - who can vote, own property, or go to school, because Hillary Clinton helped start a global women's movement for women's rights. Or they might travel to Africa and Asia, where Hillary Clinton visited countless remote villages to show how the poorest of the poor could become entrepreneurial and self-sufficient when given access to small loans.
In the heat of presidential campaign politics, candidates on both sides dismiss a First Lady's work as insignificant to foreign policy. But in Hillary Clinton's case, such a presumption is not only wrong, it trivializes the important global issues of human rights, democracy, and international development that are so central to strengthening American values and influence overseas and are hallmarks of her exhaustive work around the world.
As First Lady and now as a two-term senator who represents the most ethnically diverse state in the nation and who sits on the Armed Services Committee, Hillary Clinton has become a fixture on international issues over the past 15 years. She has traveled to more than 80 countries, going from barrios to rural villages to meetings with heads of state. She has consulted with dozens of world leaders - Nelson Mandela, King Abdullah, Tony Blair among them -- on matters as diverse as America and NATO's roles in Kosovo, eradicating poverty in the Third World, and the plight of women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Today, she is one of the most influential voices in the world on human rights, democracy, and the promotion of a "new internationalism" in foreign affairs that calls for a balanced use of military force, diplomacy, and social development to strengthen American interests and security globally.
Whether working to support civil society in Russia, pushing for programs to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa, or flying into war-torn Bosnia to nurture a new peace agreement, she has carried the message and face of American democracy to some of the most challenging regions of the globe.
Her historic speech at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 not only galvanized women around the world, it helped spawn a movement that led to advances politically, legally, economically, and socially for women in many countries over the next decade. Among other initiatives, she spearheaded the Clinton Administration's efforts to combat the global crisis of human trafficking. She persuaded the First Ladies of the Americas to use their collective power to eradicate measles and improve girls' education throughout the western Hemisphere. And she is widely credited with helping women in Kuwait finally win the right to vote.
snip
While American First Ladies historically have made great (and often overlooked) contributions to our nation, Hillary Clinton's wide-ranging experience on international issues as First Lady is unprecedented. Indeed, she is the only First Lady to have delivered foreign policy addresses at major gatherings of the United Nations, the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Economic Forum.
Over the past seven years, she has amplified her experience through her work in the Senate on military and national security issues, leading efforts to combat nuclear proliferation, end the genocide in Darfur, and ensure that American troops are properly equipped when they go to war and properly cared for when they return home.
The world knows Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the world respects her.
thank goodness although of course, the McCain thing is sadly hilarious.
grin
Congrats Hillary
...picked McCain because he's the only Republican candidate who is even close to sane. ;)
"The Right always knows who its enemies are" Lance Mannion
yeabut- endorsing McCain is like endorsing a sack of potatoes that rotted away in a 17th century basement!! heh.
I'm not going to do it now, but - if by chance, he somehow becomes their nominee, I promise to come back & explore the topic of mccains sanity or lack thereof with you in detail... a sliding scale, to be sure! heh.
a Republican...who would you endorse? They all scare me. McCain scares me least. I think. ;/
"Some of them put on their cowboy boots and put their feet up on the desk." -Wes Clark
Is the one per party endorsement a mandate, in their charter that they must do it, or just tradition? I really think I'd have to fall on my sword on this one, for love of country. And all that is holy, heh. I guess if I were really a Republican I might have had to go with Ron Paul only to "send a message" to the base, gambling that he woudn't get too far down the road- because if I were one, I'd be obligated to rebuke my party.
MC is getting pretty beat up elsewhere- think he'll make it in NH?
btw- if McCain gets real traction, this plays to WKC's strengths & would make his presence all the more valuable to camp hillary- in my opinion, a very very good thing
You could always squint your eyes and try to remember back to a former incarnation of McCain before he drank the Kool Aid. The rest of them... Whoa. Freaky lot.
His wife's childhood home is right near me (albeit on the more expensive block) and her photo is in the school I was working in, as she graduated there. Why, for the love of Pizza, he sold that home to move into an overpriced condo, which looks like a big parking lot, and is situated across from the shopping center in Phoenix where all the anti-Bush protests are held, is beyond me. Maybe he secretly likes to watch those protests from his huge windows.
...if I were a Republican I'd have to go with Tom Tancredo. If she can go for Gravel, I can go for the lunatic Tancredo.
But seriously folks...
A month or six weeks ago I would have said Mike Huckabee. But not now. He's scary. By process of elimination, today it might be McCain, since at least he doesn't claim that God is making his decisions for him and has shown some flexibility on some issues. Besides, he's a Navy man.
Do you think Huckabee will self-destruct between now and November if he gets the nomination? I do.
Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Don't settle for less.
Make America All It Can Be!
The Weasels on Fox are playing anti-Huckabee clips. They are obviously pushing Romney and Guilliani.
was never even a serious candidate to begin with in my opinion:
http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/5563
ANALYSIS: John McCain has virtually no chance to become President in 2008!
Submitted by Mitch Dworkin on April 17, 2006 - 12:09am.
http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/12663
ANALYSIS: John McCain is imploding now because of the Neocon GOP activist base!
Submitted by Mitch Dworkin on July 13, 2007 - 11:20am.
Neocon Hugh Hewitt explained very well today from his standpoint why John McCain will probably NOT win the 2008 GOP nomination:
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog/g/e0c8c6c1-75d6-4b12-9b13-c4cb5db83592
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Judge Bork Endorses Mitt Romney
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 1:21 PM
"There is no way John McCain will ever recover the trust of the GOP. The boomlet in New Hampshire and Michigan reflects those primaries openness to independents, but you can't win the nomination without the base, and Senator McCain alienated it with McCain-Feingold, angered it with the Gang of 14, and permanently split with it over the September 2006 derailment of the Senate GOP's plans on a number of fronts and then the McCain-Kennedy attempted jam down on immigration reform. The trouble with pundits pumping Senator McCain is that they don't remember what GOP voters remember, and they remember that Senator McCain --always steadfast on the war-- was a maverick on everything else."
And it seems the Des Moines Register agrees. Listening to Wes, perhaps? Perhaps.
There will be a full court press over the next couple weeks discussing experience....although I prefer the word "qualifications".....as it should be.
Bill said on Charlie Rose, BO is a roll of the dice. So true. You don't roll the dice unless you can afford to lose. And we can't afford to right now.
I hope it gets front and center on HRC's webpage, and also gets into the msm somehow--could there be a commercial in this? and bravo to the Des Moines Register--an important endorsement!!
I have long thought McCain would be strongest against HRC--but I have a feeling the GOP establishment (minus the neocons and evangelicals) wants Romney to be the nominee. Interestingly, from what I heard about a piece Huckabee did for Foreign Affairs, he was castigating Bushco for their bullying, negative work in FP--sounded a lot like what WKC has said. So often, the people you don't want to pick up on Wes's good ideas so, and those you do, seem oblivious.
The General gets it right.
Competence--What a concept!
written by each of the candidates are probably the best sources to hear indepth - from the candidates themselves- what their positions are.
I have been putting them all aside, each issue features two candidates - they "talk" uninterrupted for about 15 to 20 pages on all the issues. It's the kind of stuff we should be hearing on the "news"... if we had any. But there is no time in a 24 hour cycle to present these things. There is however time for Boeing commercials. Go figure.
I'll check out the Huckster one, have not read it yet.
Rudy's was terrifying. 9/11 9/11 9/11.
Hillary and McCain