So glad Alan Gross is getting released.. 15 years for the installing the internet!

mahalo blm

.

.

Good job JK!

Or liberal only with the Clintons and their entourage.

I had remembered reading general articles about that visit (as well as the videos, in which both Obama and Kerry looked SO pleased to meet with Pope Francis), but had forgotten the mention about Cuba

A stunning bit of diplomacy, and brilliant politics, too (those Reoubs can yell all they want, but, try as they might, they won't be able to reverse direction on this ).

I love the deliciousness of months of secret meetings about spies with Cuban communists and US diplomats, brokered the Vatican, and I especially love how the Republicans seem to have been blindsided by the whole thing. Just excellent. Truth is definitely outdoing fiction here!

everything thanks to a relentless PR team. Kerry acts with quiet deliberation in search of POSITIVE RESULTS…….and the corporate media loathes his effectiveness.

One of the many reasons that I admire Kerry. Its because of that quiet deliberation (in addition to his vast knowledge of global issues, his persistence, and the creativity of his diplomacy) that he is doing such an OUTSTANDING job as SoS.

even here at DU so many are willing to buy the corporate media's BS narrative because they don't click on any thread that has been relevant to the issues Kerry has been dealing with ACTIVELY for decades.

She knows he's more effective than she was.

BCCI was a powerful reason for the alliance.

To keep BushInc in the WH in 2004.

Clinton was a not impressive SoS.
You doesnt get powerfull and positive crisis resolutions with acting as a rock star.

But it made sense for Obama to wait till after the midterms.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/hillary-clinton-cuba-embargo_n_5457117.html

PARIS (AP) — In her new book, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says she pushed President Barack Obama to lift or ease the decades-long U.S. embargo on Cuba because it was no longer useful to American interests or promoting change on the communist island.

In excerpts of the book "Hard Choices" obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release next week, Clinton writes that the embargo has given communist leaders Fidel and Raul Castro an excuse not to enact democratic reforms. And she says opposition from some in Congress to normalizing relations — "to keep Cuba in a deep freeze" — has hurt both the United States and the Cuban people. She says the 2009 arrest by Cuba of USAID contractor Alan Gross and Havana's refusal to release him on humanitarian grounds is a "tragedy" for improving ties.

"Since 1960, the United States had maintained an embargo against the island in hopes of squeezing Castro from power, but it only succeeded in giving him a foil to blame for Cuba's economic woes," she writes. She says her husband, former President Bill Clinton, tried to improve relations with Cuba in the 1990s, but the Castro government did not respond to the easing in some sanctions. Nonetheless, Obama was determined to continue the effort, she writes.

She says that late in her term in office she urged Obama to reconsider the U.S. embargo. "It wasn't achieving its goals," she writes, "and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America. ... I thought we should shift the onus onto the Castros to explain why they remained undemocratic and abusive."

and she had to pretend to be the catalyst. What 'groundwork' had she done? None.

Everyone in serious foreign policy circles knew Kerry would be far more proactive with difficult policy matters than Clinton who has always been labeled correctly as risk averse.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/could-kerry-hagel-drive-reboot-us-cuba-ties

http://www.democracyinamericas.org/blog-post/sarah-stephens-kerry-and-hagel-offer-obama-a-way-forward-on-cuba/


Dec/2012: Kerry and Hagel Offer Obama a Way Forward on Cuba


Memory Lane for those of us unsurprised by the Cuba deal. News to those who get the bulk of their info from MSM networks.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-stephens/kerry-hagel-cuba_b_2304675.html

Days ago, the future of Cuba policy in President Obama's second term seemed predictable.

In his first term, Cuba and Latin America never rose on his priority list. At her confirmation hearings, Hillary Clinton promised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she and the president were prepared to "seize the opportunities in Latin America," but they never did.

After repealing all restrictions on travel by Cuban Americans, opening categories of People-to-People travel, and restarting migration talks, progress on engagement was thwarted by the imprisonment of Alan Gross and the administration's reluctance to negotiate directly with Cuba for his release.

The prospective appointment of Susan Rice as Secretary of State -- she once told the United Nations that U.S. sanctions did not cause deprivation among the Cuban people -- seemed a signal of continuity. But, her candidacy was devoured by opponents on issues ranging from the tragedy in Benghazi to the contents of her investment portfolio, and she never arrived at the point of being nominated or given close to a fair hearing.

On the heels of her misfortune, things could get interesting. If the speculation now is accurate, President Obama may appoint Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as Secretary of State and former Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. By doing so, the president would bring into his security cabinet two seasoned figures with long histories as Cuba policy reformers and simultaneously place the Foreign Relations Committee in the hands of some of the coldest of the Cold Warriors in Congress.

Kerry, a steadfast opponent of U.S. intervention in Latin America since his election in 1984, has been consistently smart on Cuba. He supported travel rights not just for Cuban Americans but for all Americans. He would not give the Obama administration a blank check to run the USAID regime change programs in Cuba and held up funding when he could. He was a reliable skeptic of the millions spent on the anti-Cuba broadcast propaganda arms -- Radio and TV Martí -- and of the consultants and bureaucrats who create the programming that most Cubans don't see, hear, or care much about.
>>>>>>

As she did the same in this very book regarding Afghanistan deal in 2009.
Kerry s job. Hillary s recuperation.

"After repealing all restrictions on travel by Cuban Americans, opening categories of People-to-People travel, and restarting migration talks, progress on engagement was thwarted by the imprisonment of Alan Gross and the administration's reluctance to negotiate directly with Cuba for his release."

These were actions taken before Hillary left the office that helped pave the way for the actions Obama has taken now.

She put her face on the actions she WANTED to be seen taking. Didn't she?

WaPost 2011:

The new regulations had been drawn up by Obama administration officials last summer. But, wary of political fallout, they had held off introducing them until after the November elections.

Another complicating factor has been the detention of Alan P. Gross, a Potomac contractor who was arrested in Havana in December 2009 while working on a secretive U.S. government pro-democracy project. He has not been charged.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been quietly pressing for the rules to be issued. In a recent letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton obtained by the Post, Kerry wrote "the United States has a choice and an opportunity to be relevant" at a moment when Cuba has allowed more economic freedom.>>>>

were aligned with and helped pave the way for Kerry's actions during his term as Secretary of State -- actions that can come into fruition now that Obama has passed the last mid-term election.

This is not a Clinton vs. Kerry argument except in your imagination. This is the outcome of a long process that began during Obama's first term, while Clinton was SoS.

You just don't want it to be brought up.

the media with reports crediting her for the thin sentence in her book, and no mention of credit or acknowledgement, whatsoever, to the man who actually did ALL of the work from the ground up?

TeamClinton certainly seemed to think it WAS all about Clinton vs Kerry - image wise. Gee - too bad Kerry doesn't operate the same way, eh?

You're ruining the "Hillary bad, John good" narrative that's (not) working here...



It will drive people to distraction to learn that they LIKE EACH OTHER....!

And TeamClinton certainly has done plenty of that over the last 20 years.

http://election.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=273x129473

If you hate someone, you don't hop up from an open-heart surgery sickbed to campaign for them...



http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6328991/ns/politics/t/thousands-cheer-clinton-philly-rally-kerry/#.VJQ-y14AKA

Click on this link--does this look like "hate" -- I think not: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kerry-end-student-loan-windfall/

More:
http://imagecollect.com/picture/hillary-clinton-john-kerry-photo-2610988/new

http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/kerry-hil-boost-article-1.557008

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/apr/15/nation/na-kerry15

If that's "working against him" I'd like people like that to work against me in that fashion--I'd feel well loved.

This fake "Team (fill in name of politician)" stuff here at DU is getting old and lame, and tiresome and obvious. These are DEMOCRATS who support the essential planks of our party platform--it serves no one to try and pretend that they have earth-shattering differences, because they just don't.

Get over it.

So you have deemed standard Dem photo ops more accurate than observations from highly regarded historian Douglas Brinkley. Enjoy that soporific feeling.

Memory lane:
TeamClinton backstabbed Kerry throughout the 2003-4 campaign and continued afterwards and still haven't stopped since he turned over his national network to the Obama campaign -

Clintons' backstabbing of Kerry was noted by historian Douglas Brinkley in April2004.
http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=13354

Bill timed his book tour to use it to DEFEND BUSH on his Iraq war decisions for 3 weeks in 2004.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/19/clinton.iraq /

Carville sabotaged Ohio Dem voters on election night.
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2006/oct/07/did...


Hillary validated Bush and McCain's lie against Kerry.

Your argument was that they tried to shaft Kerry--I proved otherwise, by showing you they campaigned for him. You respond with one opinion in a very short paragraph by a biographer about who Kerry will pick as a running mate as though that's the whole kit-n-kaboodle--that not picking HRC because the McAuliffe team wasn't his cup of tea means that they're mortal enemies (not). Your link doesn't say what you're pretending it is saying. Fail.

Your second link of "proof" ignores all the nuance of POTUS Clinton's thoughts on Iraq, but you can't simplify his views even if you try--anyone who reads the link sees through that attempt. Also, that link does not mention Kerry ONCE--not even tangentially. So, nice try but big fail there.

Your third link, I tried three times and all I got was This webpage is not available--it's "TPM cafe" so that's just someone's opinion, in any event. It wasn't Carville that "sabotaged" Ohio. Here--read the assessment from the CEO of a progressive PAC who used to be a player in the AFL-CIO and who was on the ground in Ohio --this guy has bona fides. Read the WHOLE thing, both pages--that's why JK lost, not anything that Carville did or said: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34157-2004Dec3.html

Your last link is all about a flat-footed and very bad joke (a remark, really) by Kerry that WAS lame and was taken the wrong way--what HRC said was that the remark was inappropriate but we can't let it divert us from looking at the issues--in other words, he misspoke, so what, and move the f--k on. She was basically telling the right to get over it, but funny how you took that in a way to supposedly support your POV (not) when what she was doing was defending Kerry and telling people to focus on the larger points he was making--nice try, but again, fail.

You can't rewrite history by providing links that do not prove your assertions, and don't even say what you suggest they are saying. So, as far as your walk down Memory Lane goes, it would appear you are a bit forgetful on the key elements, there, to the point that your recollections are unreliable--to put it in the kindest way I can manage.

That was enough proof for you.

Brinkley, of course, is unreliable….for you.

McAuliffe and Clintons were never thinking of Hillary2008. Never. And you think Clinton's high-profile book tour in the summer of 2004 where he 'vigorously defended Bush on Iraq' against the criticisms being launched by Dem campaign was just unfortunate timing that couldn't be helped, right?

Pretty naive way to think.

That Brinkley quote doesn't SAY what you purport it to say, yet you keep pulling it out--but keep beating that dead horse. It specifically deals with the VP aspect, but that doesn't suit your narrative so you continue to ignore that.

And what benefit would "standard Dem campaign photo ops with Hillary 2008 in mind" have? Look, here's HRC with a LOSER!! Look, here's her husband POTUS Bill, with a LOSER!!!" And look how much younger they both looked back then--"Yeah, let's use these pictures with that LOSER where we look so much younger than we do now--that'll Get Out The Vote!!!"

That's a terrible argument, reeking of flopsweat desperation, frankly.

And repeating your characterizations of WJC that you first advanced by using a link that didn't even MENTION Kerry? That's a terrible argument, too. Doesn't work any better the 2nd time around. Again, no sale--no matter how often you try to push it.

You've got nothing. You just want to spin a POV from thin air and play the "Team (fill in politician)" game, as if elections are like a teen-ager's TWILIGHT film and everyone has to pick a hero to gush over. I don't think the naive thinker here is me.

going down as it was happening and after - and posted about it at the time…and after. You prefer the Clintonsdidalltheycould narrative, but, few of us are willing to embrace that lie as easily as you.

We'll vote for her in the general, and will keep the truth of their backstabbing at bay throughout, but, don't expect us to further the Clintonsdidalltheycould narrative at this point because it worked on YOU.

I am not buying any more divide and conquer nonsense. It's funny that the only place I see that kind of thing is here. People can differ over policy and still LIKE each other--and it's clear that they DO (even if you don't) LIKE each other.

The Clintons did what they were ASKED to do--what, did you want them to "take over" Kerry's campaign and run it FOR him?

You can't have it both ways--either Kerry was a man with a clear vision of how to run his own damn campaign, and knew when and how to ask for the help he needed, or he wasn't. HRC made many appearances with him, Bill got up after serious open heart surgery to help....but still you find something "nefarious" in that.

Ooooh kayy...

In all parties, in every country there are same party people that dont share same interest and goals. And the Clintons never shared Kerry's vision for america. Part of it is that they have much personality difference. Part of it is their miles away two approches on living and practicing political games.

Get over it.

Because people always pull in the crowds and give lauding speeches supporting those they hate....

I think I'm not the one who needs to "get over" anything, here....

suggest that "she established the groundwork" on this.

Many MANY people had called for the end of the embargo long before Obama became President. This was not a new idea. (As to her husband working to improve relationships - he signed Burton/Helms that added sanctions - Kerry voted against that.) However, this deal does not lift the embargo - because due to Burton/Helms they need Congress to do so.

It is fair to say that HRC in her book did say that she was in favor of improving relations. There is absolutely no reason to think this influenced Obama, who was for normalizing relations when he ran in 2008. Here, the credit she deserves is that she is on record that the policy should change.

However, that does not mean that she gets credit for work that she had no involvement in that started after she was out of office. ( I will take this back if it turns out that she had any back channel role on this.)

If you look at WHY this worked, it is clear that the one brilliant move that allowed it to happen was the involvement of Pope Francis - respected by both countries. It was not - from what anyone has suggested Hillary's idea. It does not surprise me that it was Kerry, who is both a Catholic, with extensive exposure to Jesuit priests (including his long time friend Father Drinan) and a pretty creative diplomat. The other thing he can get credit for was using his long relationship with the Cuban FM to create pressure to finalize this by saying that it becomes impossible if Gross were to die. (This is a very simple politic truth) In addition, he is credited with having reached out to Gross after his mother died fearing that it - added to all his troubles - could be too much.

Then there is what Kerry did not do. It was Obama as President who set this as a goal and approved it - and it does not matter much if HRC or JK or both suggested he do it. Only the President is really responsible for what his administration does. We also know the two men who worked out all the details from the US side. They did not start with a plan laid out by anyone. It is to their credit that they got the details to work.

It is precisely articles like the one you linked to that BLM is complaining about. I actually sympathize with Clinton on the fact that they are out there. She personally is not claiming to have been the mastermind on this. What she has said is that she supports what Obama did on this.

began to loosen relations with Cuba, in his first year of office. This work did not just start after she left office.

I give credit to Kerry for everything he did, but I don't think this is a zero sum game. Giving credit to him doesn't require taking any from her.

However, this effort was said to have started around 18 months ago.

I am not saying that Hillary Clinton did nothing. She did support the effort to loosen the relationship when she was SoS and she promptly supported the moves Obama made.

The problem is that the article overstates what she did --- without any explanation of what she did to have been said to "lay the groundwork". That article and the Rogin article (the Chicago Tribune article is labeled "Credit Hillary for Cuba&quot give far more credit than they can support.

Here it is not Kerry, but OBAMA whose deserved credit is given to Hillary. While it is true that Hillary argued for a change in policy -- the same change that Kerry had publicly argued for a decade earlier, it was a policy change that Obama was in favor of.

Had they said that she developed the Canada connection allowing the negotiations to go forward, worked to get the Vatican involved, or used any connections to help get Cuba to say yes, I would agree -- but she didn't.

The fact is that for ANY country, there will have been some actions in the first term that changed where they were leading into the second term. However, it is not logical to claim that for any new initiative or significantly changed action that it is fair to claim that Hillary is the main person who deserves credit. ( I would say the three main people who deserve credit are Obama, Castro, and Pope Francis. The second tier on the US side would be the two negotiators and Kerry. All of whom did more on this than Hillary.)

Ask yourself whether you would assign BLAME to Hillary for anything that had its initial beginnings in the first term and then became a much larger initiative in teh second term that failed.

But we know that she wrote a letter to Obama before she left office, urging him to regularize relations with Cuba.

As I said MANY people have been in favor of regularizing relations - including Kerry publicly for many many years. Just being in support of normalizing relations, is not laying down the groundwork for how it should be done.

Note that I did write that it was possible that she did something to facilitate the deal. However, NOTHING like that is hinted at in the article. Not to mention the article distorts the overall actions of the Clinton administration - he was not all that progressive one this.

I also did not deny her any credit. I did credit her with immediately backing what Obama did and I did credit her with favoring change in the letter she wrote at the end of her term. Those are real and she deserves credit for them.

What she does not deserve is being called the person who deserves the credit for this. Do you disagree that she likely stands behind all of the following:

Pope Francis
Obama
Castro
the team of American and Cuban negotiators
John Kerry
the Cuban FM

For each of these, it is easy to list things that they did which made efforts that had failed in earlier attempts to work.

may partly be the obvious comparison that can and will be made of Obama's two Secretaries of State. (Forget that Kerry is not a competitor of HRC's and that it is not necessary for her team to argue she was a better SoS)

Here, for your amusement is an article by Josh Rogin, one of the least honest reporters around. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-18/hillary-clinton-secretly-pushed-cuba-deal-for-years Yes, Hillary deserves most of the credit here - not Obama, not Pope Francis, not Rhodes, or the Cuba expert who worked with him, or Kerry.

I have no problem with the media crediting the two negotiators -- though I never before saw the detailed negotiators given credit they actually deserve. However on this, the one brilliant move of the administration was pulling in Pope Francis. Not to minimize the difficulty in working out the details, this was not a complex negotiation compared to Iran or China. It seems to be what is really a unilateral executive decision by the US to normalize the relationship -- on top of what really is a prisoner swap. The two tough issues were the long unfriendly history - that Pope Francis was incredibly able to ask both sides to move above. The other was the US political ramifications. Time is on our side here as only the oldest people Here, it can't help to have Pope Francis on our side.

I remember watching the confirmation hearing for Portman in I think 2005 as trade representative. Kerry then quoted the liberation theology bishops on the harm done by NAFTA and their concerns on CAFTA, which was then being negotiated. There are very few Senators on either side who likely had ever spoken to or read what these people, who were a leading source for good in Latin America had to say. Kerry was the only one I ever heard mention or quote them.

Pope Francis is a more political, activist Pope than most recent Popes and if you read his long encyclical he really is calling on people to deal with things like inequity. He is also from Argentina - so the long estrangement of Cuba and the US is something he has likely thought wrong for decades.

Still, how many other diplomats would even have thought of involving the Pope as a mediator? Even had HRC thought of such a thing, would she do it without extensive focus group analysis or polling? There was one early hint - in addition to BLM's Haartez article that Kerry was working with the Vatican. He wrote an Easter oped for the Boston Globe on the joint work they were doing on human trafficking.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/04/19/cooperating-with-vatican-against-modern-slavery/5yQWBqDf9xF320ruta08rN/story.html

When I first quoted this on DU JK, I did not highlight that line. I also quoted the first 4 paragraphs - rather than the parts with more substance - because it was the JK group and it was so clear - as written - how thrilled JK was to be working with the Vatican on issues where American values were in line with the values of the Catholic church.

One thing that completely was lost in 2004 was that JK is an unusually religious politician, both a practicing Catholic and a man who has deeply studied his religion. In 2006, he gave a speech at the conservative Pepperdine University, then headed by Ken Starr. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091801046.html

I watched Rachel Maddow yesterday where she repeated a few times that this was a President to President negotiation bypassing the State Department. In fact, it may very well be that ONE key decision - working with Pope Francis - came from the State Department - in fact from John Kerry. While every account suggests that Kerry suggested it to Obama and raised the issue in his meeting with the Vatican FM before the meeting with Obama -- Maddow strangely claims it came about in the meeting between Pope Francis and Obama, ignoring that things are always sounded out first. (It is weird that Maddow was largely repeating the MSM accounts least friendly to Obama - and ignoring both the WP and NYT credited Kerry on this key idea.)

they prefer.

Yep - Hillary was pushing for the changes they claim, not Hillary BEING pushed because SHE wasn't as interested as TeamClinton wants to pretend now.

WaPost 2011:

The new regulations had been drawn up by Obama administration officials last summer. But, wary of political fallout, they had held off introducing them until after the November elections.

Another complicating factor has been the detention of Alan P. Gross, a Potomac contractor who was arrested in Havana in December 2009 while working on a secretive U.S. government pro-democracy project. He has not been charged.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been quietly pressing for the rules to be issued. In a recent letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton obtained by the Post, Kerry wrote "the United States has a choice and an opportunity to be relevant" at a moment when Cuba has allowed more economic freedom.
>>>>

Part of the reason that this effort was successful was because of the intervention of Francisco, which was no doubt facilitated by the fact that JK is a fairly observant Catholic as is his (very generous) wife.

The Vatican's role as go-between broke the logjam that made third party negotiation difficult in the past. The Cuban 5 v. Gross negotiations had been going on for several years without either party budging much (though USA did send one of them home early for humanitarian reasons, and another when his sentence was up). Neither wanted to be first to blink.

Even though Cuba is ostensibly secular, Catholicism has a deep root there and when a forward thinker (relatively speaking) like Francis talks, even Raul listens.

Kerry and Obama were very smart to pull him into the mix, and for that, they should--and are being--lauded.

Diplomacy doesn't happen in a vacuum. It operates on a continuum. Actions taken by actors as diverse as Warren Christopher and Henry Kissenger resonate down the years and influence what diplomats are able to accomplish today. To pretend otherwise is fallacious.

His motivation might be that he - like some Republicans - assumes this could as easily be a negative as a positive.

For Clinton, the key is what does it do in the general election with the people not 100% likely to be either for or against her. Any poll of the entire population - going either way - could mask what the real effect is. The key is - of those who are genuinely likely to be in the at most 20% of people who really have no ideological "side" who are likely to vote, how many would consider this a voting issue --- and, of them how many are for or against it.

The answer to that is very hard to even consider and harder to estimate.

If Clinton is the nominee (as seems very likely), the keys will be getting enough of that roughly 20% in the middle to win and getting out the highest percent of those on our side. It could be that claiming this and the immigration policies as DEMOCRATIC (ie doesn't matter if Obama or Clinton) could help get out more of teh Hispanic and liberal vote. I would suspect (that as on abortion when no one consider Roe vs Wade at risk (ie pre Alito and Roberts) ), there might be more one issue voters on the Republican side.

Another issue is that Clinton really has very few agreements signed when she was SoS - and she has distanced herself from the agreements (built on the Bush one) to leave Iraq. She can argue that polls did show an improved view of the US over the Bush years. In addition, maybe because of the chaos in the last 2 years in much of the world, Obama's foreign policy did poll higher in the first term.

I would guess that if HRC becomes President, her tenure as SoS will not be that big a part of her history and it will be glossed over from a later prospective as to how it helped her be a successful President.

However, assume that she loses or does not run, then her legacy is based on her time as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State. It may seem, in retrospect, that considering the expectations and the hype, that she did not really meet them as either Senator or Secretary of State. It may be that the reason was that they were set too high. In 2008, there were comments that part of Bill Clinton's motivations in going really over the top against Obama is that he thought any lose of respect that caused would be temporary and a Hillary Presidency allowed them to create a better legacy than what he had. (In fact, you wonder if she had many many legacy accomplishments as SoS, she might be more likely not to want to go through running for President.)

rather than the more common unjustified bashing we often happen to read here. Especially in GD.

We've been lucky to have him in public life.

John Kerry hit the ground running as SoS and has served this country well. He would have been a great president.

His list of major accomplishments continues to grow:

He was the lead American on:

Eliminating the Syrian chemical weapons - during a civil war - preventing them falling to ISIS

Brokered the resolution of the Afghani election, preventing Afghanistan from completely going over the cliff - giving them a chance to become stable. (the reporting on this was interesting - from the surprise negotiation that got credit, but all the wise pundits said would never actually happen, many articles on KERRY'S deal failing, then articles - some not mentioning him - that Afghanistan had pulled it off.)

Pulled together a coalition of 60 plus countries, including many in the region and the approval of the Arab League on the fight for ISIS. Also, prodded the Iraqis to moving to a more inclusive government. Obama charged Kerry to do both in June. At that point, the media mocked the idea of a coalition and argued that it would be less real than Bush's (which JK mocked in 2004) and they said the Iraqi government would not do many things it has since done. Kerry and Obama both lead UN sessions and the UN approved a resolution on fighting ISIS. It was very obvious at Kerry's meeting that his peers from around the world hold him in greater esteem than McCain or Fox News does! These are - in and of themselves - major accomplishments. They are the diplomatic underpinnings of the military effort.

Iran - Kerry was instrumental while Senator in creating the back channel in Quator. He also was key on the interim negotiation and is a key player on the final agreement.

China - Kerry had long - back into his days in the Senate - been an advocate for using mutual work on climate change as a trust building effort with China that could improve general relations. This in addition to be essential to ANY chance at doing something on global warming. This was not a new issue for Kerry -- he worked with both the Chinese and Indian delegations to Bali in 2007 when Bush was President. He was so helpful that the Bush person heading delegation praised his effort speaking to both the House and Senate oversight committees. (I did recently see the NYT attempt to credit Todd Stern and Podesta with the negotiation and had the chutzpah to position Kerry's bringing the Chinese to Boston as just memoir material. Nice to ignore a few decades of Kerry's work!)

Cuba - he is credited with the idea of using Pope Francis and making several calls to the Cuban FM. Even if that is ALL he did, he deserves major credit.

Of course, the media is more willing to point out that he, like many before him, did not get Netanyahu and Abbass to agree on a peace plan. Funny that no one ever faults Netanyahu or Abbass with failing to finding a plan -- and they represent the primary parties.

Easy to do when you have most powerful GOP machine and most powerful Dem machine working together against him.

over him than when he was considering running for President. (Even had he stayed MA Senator working as he did in the first term, the media was unlikely to really be able to harm him - he likely could have continued getting about two thirds the MA vote.)

This may be something that really has freed him to work as hard and creatively as he can to succeed at the tasks that Obama gives him. When you look at where Obama has given him the lead responsibility (as in the list I wrote) they are nearly all the key foreign policy issues. (You can add Russia -- where it sure as hell won't be Susan Rice speaking to them, but Kerry.)

One thing to remember is that all foreign policy achievements will belong first and foremost to the President. They are done in his name, at his instruction. What is clear from past administrations is that after the fact, there will be competing memoirs and biographies that will attempt to shape history's view of what really happened. What is already clear is that there are some sharp elbow people - it will be most interesting when they go after each other.

While I suspect that Kerry will not be shy in speaking of things he was involved with, I don't think he would even have the need to elbow his way to credit. His past suggests that he is comfortable with who he is and knows what he has accomplished. It might also be that he really does see that actual things that help the world are more important than getting credit for them. All said, I suspect that other than Obama, he will likely have the most interesting memoir from his time in the administration.

Writing this, I am struck by the memory of him responding to Morey Safer's question of whether he wanted to be President (in 1971) by saying that there were important things he needed to do and didn't know if he could do them and keep people happy enough with him. In the BG book, this quote was mangled ending after the word "them" - greatly changing the meaning of a comment that would have countered many attacks on Kerry if given in its entirety. In the context of a 27 year old being asked SERIOUSLY by an important journalist if he saw himself as a potential future President, his response was also serious and while accepting the premise spoke of willingness to do things he thought important that could preclude the possibility.

could help find humanitarian solutions.

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It seems totally irrelevant.

was concern about his treatment as a consequence of his religion/ethnicity.

He was (ostensibly, mind you) in Cuba to "bring the internet to the Jewish community" there. His very Jewishness was part and parcel of the role he was playing. In that context, therefore, it "matters."

that was being done through State Dept. Most corporate media has ignored Kerry's work unless the RW propaganda media is running with an antiKerry narrative - then they fall all over themselves to join the propaganda bandwagon.