Secretary of State Clinton Gets Feisty with Questioner

An aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed talk of Clinton’s clipped response to a questioner who asked her about her husband’s opinion. For her part, Clinton ignored questions about the episode as she was ready to finish a long African trip yesterday. A Congolese student asked what former President Bill Clinton thought of a particular international economic issue, to which Hillary replied, "Wait. You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not the secretary of state. I am. So you ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I’m not going to be channeling my husband."

Clinton’s repeated response to the unusual exchange has been to ignore it, though it’s doubtful it will go away. Malanne Verveer, a friend of Clinton’s, said the whole thing was "much ado about very little," going on to say, "I don’t want psychobabble read into it" and that the Clinton trip to Africa was "an incredible discussion with college students who wanted to have a heart-to-heart discussion." That they wanted to have a heart-to-heart with former President Bill Clinton was left out of Verveer’s remarks, but we’re not fooled.

A spokesman for the State Department, P.J. Crowley, noted of the exchange, "As the question was posed to her, it was posed in a way that said, ‘I want to get the views of two men, but not you, the secretary of state.’" Clinton also drew more negative attention when she compared a disputed election in Nigeria to the 2000 U.S. presidential election, noting, "Our democracy is still evolving. You know we had some problems in some of our presidential elections. As you may remember, in 2000 our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of one of the men running for president was governor of the state. So we have our problems too."