Peggy Noonan, no stranger to needless provocation, has jumped on Tina Brown's bandwagon: She agrees that Hillary "got rolled" by agreeing to be secretary of state and thinks Brown telling Hillary to take off her burqa was "witty." But Peggy thinks it is all part of Hillary's wily plan to eventually become president:

One thing Mrs. Clinton's learned is how to wait. Things turn on a dime, you wake up in the morning and there's a new headline that changes everything. Sooner or later Mr. Obama is going to get in trouble, sooner or later the trouble will take hold and settle in, and sooner or later she will be the unsullied one who quietly did her duty in spite of the slights to which she's been subjected. And when that happens, she will emerge—reluctantly, painfully—as the Democratic alternative. The one who almost won, who knew—who learned the hard way—that you can't do everything all at once, that it's the economy, stupid.

According to Peggy, Hillary is distancing herself from the drama, not because, as Sara argued this morning, she doesn't want it to seem like Tina Brown has inside information. Hillary is staying quiet only because she wants to be back in the Oval Office sooner rather than later.

I don't buy Noonan's claims. Not that I don't think Hillary is calculating, but I don't believe her current stance is exclusively selfish and manipulative. Clinton knows she took a job that requires her to be part of a team, and she is merely respecting the limits of her position.

Photograph of Hillary Clinton by Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Hillary Clinton, Obama, peggy noonan, secretary of state, Tina Brown

Jess, Emily and Dayo, I saw Tina Brown's column on Hillary through a slightly different lens. Brown is writing The Clinton Chronicles, a book about Hillary and Bill, reportedly due out in 2010. The subject makes sense after Brown's terrific, dishy bio of Lady Di. The Clintons, after all, are our messy royalty. (The book deal was announced in January 2008, back when it must have seemed like Hillary would still be crowned our next Commander in Chief.)

Given this, Brown probably has some inside dope on what the Clintons are really thinking. She could be channeling Bill's thoughts about his wife. (Maybe The Big Dog is tired of being muzzled.) She could also be trying to raise Hillary's profile in advance of the book. Or, maybe Brown is just trying to do Hill a favor, by casting a little deserved limelight her way.

For all the column's husband-and-wife analogies, I didn't read it as a takedown of Hillary. To the contrary, much of it seemed like a thinly veiled defense of our Gal Friday. At the end, for example, Brown conjures up the image of Hillary sitting at the back of her State Department plane, feet up, no makeup on, with her "bookworm glasses," happily digging deep into a pile of briefing papers. It's a beguiling portrait of a mature, confident woman, content in her element. Brown even suggests that by keeping a low profile, Hillary may be taking a little gleeful revenge on her real husband, Bill, who likely scotched her chances to be president. But given that The Clinton Chronicles is forthcoming, Hillary surely felt she had to publicly distance herself from Brown's comments. Otherwise, Brown might seem like Hillary's Andrew Morton.

Tags: bill clinton, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, The Clinton Chronicles, The Daily Beast, Tina Brown

Like Jessica, I also think Tina Brown’s big, bad, quasi-racist swipe at Hillary Clinton was opportunistic and somewhat misguided. But Mark Landler’s New York Times piece, penned seemingly in response to Brown’s potshot, raises an interesting history, and attempts to answer fair questions about the obviously awkward role in which the Secretary of State finds herself vis-a-vis her formal rival and his foreign-policy heavy White House. It’s not necessarily melodrama, but, for instance, the fact that George Mitchell, special envoy to Israel/Palestine, and Karl Eikenberry, ambassador to Afghanistan, report to both her and to president Obama, could get messy once in a while. Add to this the need for foreign diplomats to believe with absolute clarity that Clinton speaks for the president, and you see how Foggy Bottom would want to nip any accusations in the bud.

However—bureaucratic hierarchies aside—when it comes to the actual projection of strength as Secretary of State, Clinton has a mixed record. Ben Smith at Politico makes a great point about spin surrounding Clinton’s speech at the Council on Foreign Relations this week. I watched the speech in Washington, which countless commentators described as “muscular” (After Mark Lynch, I put this performance in the “swagga” category previously reserved for flashy rappers). But, he says

The focus on Clinton's strength is familiar. Mark Penn's leaked campaign memos show an obsessive—and very successful—focus during her campaign on showing strength at every pass, a major reason she refused to apologize for backing the Iraq war. The focus is an understandable effort to combat gender stereotypes, and a cornerstone of remaking Clinton's image after she left the White House.

But the early spin gave, at best, a very partial and misleading sense of what Clinton actually said yesterday. The most "muscular" portions were the carefully-drafted signals to Iran and Saudi Arabia, which represent the White House's formal stance, not Clinton's personal vision. The more personal elements of the speech—the ones that actually carry some meaning for her stature and role as Secretary of State—were in the realm of what used to be called "soft power," and is now called "smart power."

Though she stood up for American hegemony a few different times, insisting to American enemies that “our willingness to talk is not a sign of weakness to be exploited,” Clinton has always been a fan of this more cerebral methodology. So it’s fascinating—and on some level, totally awesome and welcome—to see her affect a “tough guy” posture at the slightest sign of a challenge. Even if the provocation was silly, yellow journalism.

Tags: catfights, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, Tina Brown, white house

Jess, here's a theory: Tina Brown told Hillary to take off her burqa in hopes of starting a rumble. Once the Sec of State has derobed, she and Obama can start the fight Washington watchers expected them to have when she took the job. Cue Season 3 of the Barack and Hillary soap opera: Inside the White House.

Melodrama is what this pairing is supposed to produce for us, after all. The projected series of plot twists: Which donor thug would embarrass Bill? Which Hillary staffer would trash-talk Obama? Which photo-op with her would Obama flub? Instead, there's been practically nada. No leaks, no complaining. Even Bill has been muzzled. And so maybe Tina, like any good troublemaking journalist, is trying to goose some action. "It becomes clearer by the day how brilliantly Obama checkmated both Clintons by putting Hillary in the topmost Cabinet job," Brown writes. Maybe. But so far it mostly looks like he checkmated the gossip mongers. Which is a real problem, don't get me wrong. Sometimes I think this administration is too disciplined for its own good.

Photoraph of Hillary Clinton and President Obama by Peter Souza/The White House via Getty Images.

Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Tina Brown

Earlier this week, Tina Brown referred to Hillary Clinton as Obama's submissive "foreign policy wife" in a Daily Beast column. In that same space, she urged Hills to "take off her burqa." Though Brown scored some points in her critique of Clinton's invisibility (where was she this week in Russia?), those critiques were somewhat buried in deliberately provocative and arguably racist asides about how Hillary is Obama's "Saudi" spouse. The whole thing was insulting toward the women of Islam, and I'm not sure why Brown felt it necessary to make those repeated analogies.

Anyway, the column clearly hit a nerve with Hillary, because today, Clinton had her aides respond to Tina's jabs in the New York Times.The Times article says that Hillary has been absent of late because she's nursing a severely broken elbow, and Clinton "professes to be amused, if baffled," by Brown's recent takedown. So what do you think, ladies? Was Tina Brown just giving Hillary much-needed straight talk, or was she just deliberately provoking the Secretary of State for pageviews?

Tags: foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Islam, secretary of state, spouses, Tina Brown