VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. — Hillary Rodham Clinton swept onto Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday amid torrential downpours – and a torrent of speculation ahead of her first meeting with President Barack Obama after she criticized his foreign policy earlier this week.
And if the skies hadn’t exactly cleared over the island, the Clinton and Obama camps insisted that the storm clouds that seemed to loom over the relationship between the two had dissipated.
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At Clinton’s first stop, the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, hundreds lined up outside for hours in the rain to meet the former secretary of state. They heard a brief explanation of her interview comments – and a personal confirmation that she would, as her spokesman had promised, “hug it out” with Obama at a party later that night.
“Absolutely,” Clinton said, when asked about the much-anticipated embrace. “Yeah. Looking forward to it. Going to be there tonight.”
Clinton said the decision to call Obama after the interview to apologize wasn’t a difficult one.
“We agree,” she said. “We are committed to the values and the interests of the security of our country together. We have disagreements as any partners and friends, as we are, might very well have.”
Obama has articulated his foreign policy as such: Don’t do stupid stuff. Clinton said in an interview with The Atlantic that it wasn’t enough.
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said.
Asked at the bookstore Wednesday whether she disagrees with Obama’s policy on Iraq, Clinton switched gears and said, “I’m excited about signing books.”
That would seem to be a prerequisite for an event like this one: The bookstore said it had ordered 1,000 copies of “Hard Choices,” the number Clinton’s people have said she can sign in two hours. Clinton, wearing a dusty-rose-colored textured jacket, greeted people who shuffled by the table where she was signing. As each person – many of them in ponchos and with soaking wet hair – filed by, an aide slid a copy of “Hard Choices” to Clinton, the front cover open.
“I’ll be voting for you,” a woman said to the prospective 2016 presidential candidate. “Bless your heart,” Clinton replied.
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