The broken elbow turns out to be worse than people might have thought. The elbow is held together with duct tape and "bobbed wire," as we used to say on the farm, and the recovery process involves physical therapy every day, and a "grueling" therapy at that, says Mark Landler in the New York Times.
It sidelined her from making the recent Moscow trip, which, in turn, sparked rumors that her influence in the administration was waning.
I don't think it's that, but I do think that the foreign policy team has a lot of strong personalities in some very key roles, particularly with "special envoys" the caliber and temperment of George Mitchell and, especially, Richard Holbrooke.
The three recent alleged "points of friction" between the administration and Hillary involve some relatively low-key matters--the selection of a major contributor to Obama's campaign for ambassador to Japan over Hillary's preference for Joseph Nye, a foreign affairs expert; the slow vetting of the director of USAID, and the nixing of Sidney Blumenthal as an aide to Hillary in the State Department.
Hillary has publicly griped about the vetting process for USAID, though scuttling the Blumenthal appointment is the one of the three that makes the least sense to me. Blumenthal is a major Clinton supporter, and a strong advocate, but so what? Blumenthal is also an exceptionally skilled wordsmith--the Sam Seaborn character on West Wing was said to be modeled on him--and it seems that Hillary ought to be able to hire somebody like Blumenthal without the White House staff getting all quivery over it.
Blumenthal and I are one-time correspondents. I'd written a letter to the New Republic asking them why they always trash Blumenthal, whose writing, it seemed to me, was oft on-target and always well-written. They never responded, so I wrote to Blumenthal, recounting all this, and asked him why people didn't like him? Seriously, I wanted to know. He wrote a nice note back, hence my special interest in the furtherance of his illustrious career.
Photo: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images
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