Clinton Is the Teflon Secretary - Aaron David Miller, Foreign Policy

Untouchable

Why Hillary Clinton is the Teflon secretary.

Washington can be a cruel and unforgiving place. Want a friend? Harry Truman once said. Get a dog. Or maybe he didn't say it. But it's a good point: In this town, nobody gets a free pass from the press, the pundits, and the pols.
Nobody, that is, until Hillary Clinton. At the end of her tenure as secretary of state, she alone has emerged virtually unscathed -- the lone superstar of the president's first term. A recent poll has her numbers well above the president's and exceeded only by -- you guessed it -- her husband Bill. And those high favorability ratings have remained pretty consistent since 2008.
There's no denying that Clinton has done a very good job as the nation's top diplomat. But to read the media adulation, you'd think she was about to be admitted into the secretary of state Hall of Fame. Google Chairman Eric E. Schmidt introduced her last year as the "most significant secretary of state since Dean Acheson." A New York Times profile earlier this year claimed her legacy was nothing less than the "remaking of American diplomacy in her own fashion."
Unlike Obama, she also appears to have racked up almost no deficits. Nothing seems to stick -- not Benghazi, not Syria, and not the fact that she never managed to lead and succeed on a single consequential foreign policy issue. Last week, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza nailed it: Hillary, he wrote, was "the new Teflon Clinton."
So what is about those Clintons, or at least Hillary, that has made her virtually untouchable -- at least while running Foggy Bottom? What's in the secret sauce? How do we explain the magic touch?
I'm not sure I fully understand it. But here's my best take.

1. Everybody Loves a Star: With the exception of Colin Powell, no secretary of state in American history came to the office with more visibility, fame, fewer asterisks, and more good will than Hillary Clinton. She's even got Thomas Jefferson beat.
After all, how many of the nation's top diplomats had already been in the White House for eight years, missed being her party's presidential nominee by a hair, and had a readymade fan base of as many as 18 million Americans who cast votes for her in the primaries before she even settled into the State Department's 7th floor?
Add to this a dash of the bipartisanship that allows the secretary of state -- alone among the key cabinet posts -- to transcend politics, throw in a husband who remains the best politician in America today, and you have a recipe for success.

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