ELATED by the excellent address given by her husband, former President Bill Clinton Wednesday night at the 2012 convention of the Democratic National Committee in Charlotte, North Carolina, America’s secretary of state, Ms. Hillary R. Clinton has explained her conspicuous absence at the event.
Ms. Clinton was on official assignment, far away from the Charlotte convention crowd. Her picture watching the superlative performance of President Clinton on Wednesday has just been released.
She watched the Charlotte proceedings on the internet.
Gushing like every other individual who loved the compelling argument made by her husband against republican hurdles, Ms. Clinton said that she was absent from the event because of transcendental non-partisan structure of her office as the custodian of America’s foreign affairs policy. Hillary said that no American secretary of state has attended such function in recent history.
When Mr. Clinton wrapped up his speech, Mrs. Clinton was at a press conference 10,000 miles away in East Timor, according to an aide traveling with her. She then went to the ambassador’s house and watched her husband’s speech on a 17’’ computer; it was streamed using a program called SlingBox that was connected to an aide’s home TiVo. Despite being 9,930 miles away, there were only a few hiccups in the feed, the aide said.
The aide said Mrs. Clinton was as surprised as anyone to see Mr. Obama appear on stage at the end of Mr. Clinton’s speech, and she later told reporters—while boarding a plane to Brunei, the 110th country she has visited as secretary of State — that she thought the speech was “great.”
It wasn’t the first time Mrs. Clinton heard parts of the speech. “On a personal level, let me also say that my husband read parts of his speech to me over the last few days,” she said at the press conference in East Timor. “I received the as-prepared version, which I’m anxious, when I can, to compare with the as- delivered version.”
Secretaries of State have generally skipped political party conventions because foreign policy is supposed to be nonpartisan. Mrs. Clinton said the convention in Charlotte was the first she hadn’t attended “in many, many years.”