John Kerry Drops A Truth Bomb On Republicans About Hillary Clinton’s Sec. Of State Record

Sec. of State John Kerry is staying out of partisan politics, but when asked about Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State, he dropped some truth on Republicans.

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Transcript via ABC’s This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: As you know, your predecessor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, announcing for president today. And already, her tenure as secretary of state is in the crosshairs.

Marco Rubio is calling her the architect of a failed foreign policy. Ted Cruz, “the Obama-Clinton foreign policy disaster.” Jeb Bush says, “It’s a mess.”

You said you had big heels to fill when you took the job.

What’s your response to these critiques?

KERRY: Well, George, as you know, the secretary of state happily is able to not be involved in the presidential hurly-burly. I’m not going to get involved in it now.

It’s important for me to be able to speak to both sides of the aisle and talk about our foreign policy without being involved in partisan politics.

And so I’m not going to get involved in it now.

But I will say that Secretary of State Clinton did a terrific job of rebuilding alliances that had been shredded over the course of the prior years. She spent a lot of time, as you know, working on a number of different issues, including the beginning of the effort with Iran, as well as the Gaza cease-fire and other things.

She will defend, I know, her own record for herself. It’s not my job to do it.

But I wish her well in this race and I look forward to being able to stay well away from it.

The fact is that under the last Republican president, America managed to alienate or anger most of the world. George W. Bush’s go it alone, with us or against us foreign policy burned the vast majority of the country’s diplomatic alliances. Hillary Clinton was tasked with rebuilding those relationships.

If Republicans want to make the presidential campaign about former Sec. Clinton’s record, they are going to regret opening that door. It is easy to remind voters of foreign policy chaos and tatters that were left behind after the last Republican named Bush was in office.

John Kerry didn’t get partisan in his comments, but he didn’t have to. The facts are more than enough. Republicans want to obsess over the Benghazi scandal while actively undermining and poisoning the work that the Obama administration is doing. Republicans want voters to believe that Obama’s foreign policy, and by extension Hillary Clinton’s, are failures.

Sec. of State Kerry demonstrated why this gambit will fail.

Reality: 1 Republican attacks on Clinton’s time as Sec. of State: 0.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association