Credit where it isn't due
I had to laugh the other day when the Clintonistas went all Claude Rains in "Casablanca" on us, getting so worked up over Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster.
Lord knows the Clinton crowd would never stoop so low as to call someone . . . names!
If one of those talk-radio guys had called Mrs. Clinton a monster he would have been fired.
For being too soft.
But, then, we should hold Harvard professors to a slightly higher standard than shock jocks, and so Power, one of Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers, had to lie down and let that big bus run over her long red hair.
What Samantha Power was most guilty of was not poor manners but inexperience in the hurly burly of politics. It's too bad, because she's a good person and really smart. But being smart and shrewd are two different things, and in politics it's infinitely better to be the latter, while the importance placed on being the former is greatly exaggerated.
Speaking of greatly exaggerating, the tempest in a teapot that was Samantha Power's inelegant description of Hillary Clinton obscures a legitimate, important point that Power made before everybody went cuckoo over her choice of words. Before signing, as Michael Collins might have put it, her own death warrant in an interview with The Scotsman newspaper, Power had in another interview ridiculed the idea that Hillary Clinton played a major role in ending the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Last week, on CNN, Hillary Clinton actually said, "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland."
Really?
To suggest Hillary Clinton was a major player in ending what the Irish in their penchant for understatement called the Troubles is like saying Eleanor Roosevelt played a big role in ending World War II.
Please.
To this day, Bill Clinton and his administration do not get enough credit for what they did in Northern Ireland. Free of the constraint of Cold War politics, Bill Clinton did much to persuade the British government to regard the Troubles as a political as opposed to a law-and-order problem. The Clinton White House treated Britain, America's closest ally, and Ireland, which sent so many of its people to help build America, as equals, and that attitude dramatically altered the political equation and made Dublin and London work even closer. By allowing Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams into the United States, over British objections, Bill Clinton showed the IRA the benefits of abandoning violence and entering the political mainstream.
Most people inside the Beltway, be they politicians or pundits, don't have a clue what happened in Northern Ireland. And that means Mr. Clinton isn't appreciated enough for all he did, while Mrs. Clinton can traipse around the heartland, or go on CNN, and with a straight face tell people she helped get them there fightin' Irish around the conference table.
Guess it all depends on how you define help. Hillary Clinton accompanied her husband on his trips to Northern Ireland. And, at a meeting arranged by diplomats, she met a group of women in Belfast and heard them talk about their aspirations. And she was there on that magical night in 1995, when native son Van Morrison serenaded the crowd outside Belfast City Hall. But, using her logic, you could say Van the Man, a good Prod from East Belfast, did as much as Hillary Clinton to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
There was a woman in the Clinton administration who did play a major role in ending the Troubles. Her name is Nancy Soderberg, and she worked for the National Security Council. She was especially good at convincing Protestant loyalists that the Clinton people were honest brokers, not closet Irish nationalists.
In Belfast, they have a name for people who exaggerate their influence, status or power: a chancer.
By saying she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland, Hillary Clinton is a chancer.
And, by the way, that's off the record.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 