Hillary Rodham Clinton was confronted with nonstop challenges over the course of the past year as US secretary of State, a position that deals with some of America’s most sensitive and critical relationships around the globe.
From managing the government’s response to the release of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables via the website WikiLeaks to grappling with the upending of the United States’ critical, sensitive relationships with several Arab governments amid the revolutions of 2011, to the death of Osama bin Laden, Ms. Clinton’s handling of the potential diplomatic landmines has been largely considered adept and consistently solid.
Clinton, who served as senator of New York before becoming President Obama’s secretary of State, is the third woman to serve in this position. She has denied speculation that she might stay in politics, even if Obama were to be reelected.
"I have made it clear that I will certainly stay on until the president nominates someone and that transition can occur" if Obama wins re-election, the Associated Press reports she told a town hall meeting. She says after 20 years in politics, she’s ready to “see how tired she is,” however, some still hold out that the trailblazing politician could have a change of heart.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
