General

After the State Department, what next for Hillary Clinton?

An Economist interview suggests a possible run for the Oval Office in 2016

As is customary for all secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton will only serve for one term. By all accounts, she’s done a remarkable job and shown enormous grace, having landed the position after a fierce battle for the U.S. presidency with her current boss, Barack Obama. Americans certainly back her performance. A Bloomberg poll last fall showed 64 per cent of respondents have a favourable opinion of Clinton, and a third think the country would be better off had she been elected to the presidency instead of Obama.

This week, The Economist looks into Clinton’s legacy with a long piece in the print edition and an interview with its Washington bureau chief, available online.

From the article:

Not until the archives are opened will historians know reliably what big issues, if any, she and Mr Obama fought over. But on most big decisions there has been little cause to fight. She and the president had a shared view of America’s global predicament after George W. Bush left office. She says now that it was “painful” when she started to make her phone calls to hear how much perceptions of America had changed. There is self interest in this: her husband preceded Mr Bush. But in Asia in particular allies were anxious about the superpower’s willingness to stay engaged. It was time to bring some “old-fashioned balance into our relationships”.

The newspaper explores what’s next for the current secretary of state, hinting at a possible run for the Oval Office in four years time:

Whether she will run for the presidency again, nobody outside her inner circle can know. (…) But when the election of 2016 arrives she will be 69; no older, she can tell herself, than Ronald Reagan at the start of his presidency. In the meantime, says one of her supporters, the “Clinton network” remains in existence, ready to be activated. The temptation to reach again for the top prize in politics will be hard to resist.

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