Jan/2014: Kerry to Vatican: Help free Jewish-American jailed in Cuba

[karynnj]

62. There were changes made in the first term and there were unsuccessful efforts to get Gross back

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.