The President gave a major, architectural speech in Moscow on July 7 at the New Economics School graduation. At least it was supposed to be an architectural speech. It had five major elements, pillars or points, and it was very far-reaching in its language (wait just a minute and I'll come back to that). So this, I and others thought, was THE speech, the one given near the beginning of an administration that tells the world what the purposes of American power are. Usually THE speech, the architectural blueprint, is given by the Secretary of State, but since, by nearly all accounts, this President is acting as his own Secretary of State with the help of the Vice-President, this did not come as such a surprise.
But then, just eight days later, the Secretary of State gave a speech at the Washington offices of CFR that--you could have knocked me over with a feather--looked, smelled, quacked and read like THE speech, an architectural blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. This was a surprise. At the beginning of the Bush Administration, for various reasons I know but don't want to spend time explaining here, we got no such speech. This time we got two.
It would not have been so surprising if Secretary Clinton's speech had tracked along with the President's. It too featured five elements or pillars or main points, after all. And as these things are properly done, for a Secretary of State to echo and elaborate on the President's policy would have been a good idea, and it would have been proper and standard practice. But it didn't track with the President's speech.
Here are President Obama's five pillars from July 7: anti-WMD proliferation; isolating and defeating violent extremism; global prosperity; democracy; and international system that advances cooperation while respecting sovereignty. Here are Secretary Clinton's five pillars from July 15: build stronger mechanisms for cooperation; lead with diplomacy; make development as a core priority; coordinate civil-military efforts in conflict zones; and shore up the traditional sources of American influence, notably the international economy.
There is some overlap here. Obama's #3 matches, sort of, Clinton's #5. Obama's #5 could be read as akin to Clinton's #3. Clinton mentions democracy and human rights, Obama's #4, but does not call them a pillar. Basically, however, these are two separate speeches saying different things in different tones and with different emphases. Obama's five pillars are goals or aspirations, living at a high level of abstraction, if one had to describe them; Clinton's are less goals than operational principles, living at a high--but not as high--level of abstraction. I can see some clever White House type, if asked, claiming that the speeches are complementary on this basis--the President lays out what we want to do and the Secretary lays out how we're going to do it. But no one has done so because the press, so far anyway, has been too stupid, or too fawning, to notice the disconnect and ask any questions about it. And it would be cleverness without substance, because in fact these are what they appear to be: two uncoordinated speeches.
How did this happen? I don't know the lead time on the President's speech, but I do know, or can surmise, that the lead time on Clinton's was more than eight days. That means that the speech was being prepared before Obama spoke in Moscow. I don't know how these folks operate, but I do know that when I was writing Colin Powell's major speeches, and the first two that Condoleezza Rice gave before I left her service, it would not have occurred to us to keep the White House uninformed as to what we were doing; in short, we would have cleared a mature draft at some point. Even more important, it would never have occurred to Powell, and certainly not to Rice, to essentially ignore what the President had said or was about to say on the same subject. They would have made it their business to know and align their language. They would have told me or the chief-of-staff or somebody to call over to the White House and talk to the speechwriters and find out what was going down. Powell used to insist that there never be any publicly perceivable "blue sky" between himself and President Bush, because that would just reduce his leverage, such as it was, on the President in private. What was Clinton thinking when she stood up there at the CFR podium, just days after the President's Moscow speech, knowing she was about to give a speech of parallel purpose to the President's but not of parallel content? Beats me.
Now, as to the speeches themselves, both are pretty bad as expressions of the "black arts" of speechwriting, to invoke Peggy Noonan's wonderful old phrase. Neither one is memorable, and neither sticks conceptually to the wall, as it were. But Obama's is worse. Good thing, I suppose, that no one noticed it since Michael Jackson died..... Clinton's at least has a theme that transcends pure banality, something the Building can understand and be lifted by, and the pieces fit together logically, sort of. Obama's, meanwhile, is all over the place; there is no logical thread connecting the parts, no theme one can remember as a take-away, no deliverables, no proposals or plans revealed. And there is way too much sentimental eyewash toward the end, and this in front of an extremely cynical Russian audience. Bad audience read.
But again, the real problem is that the President and the Secretary of State don't seem to be in the same huddle. I don't know this crowd--don't know the staffers who know the principals. But from the looks of this spate of speechmaking, I'd have to suppose that these teams are simply not speaking to one another on any level that matters. Maybe there's another explanation, but if so I can't see what it might be. So I'd have to conclude that this episode confirms my original view that Obama was on balance wrong to offer Hillary Clinton this job, and she was wrong to have accepted it.
