In the new New Republic, Michael Crowley has a short, front-of-the-magazine piece on Sec. of State Hillary Clinton. The piece mainly tries to impute significance to Clinton’s verbal “gaffes” so far, i.e. comparing North Korea to an unruly teenager. Crowley less than compellingly concludes that such gaffes are a continuation of Clinton’s mistake-filled presidential campaign.

What was interesting, though, was that Clinton was being profiled at all. No political appointment attracted as much political attention as Clinton’s but once in office she has received a fraction of the attention paid to Defense Sec. Robert Gates or Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner. In the previous New Republic, for example, Crowley did a lengthy cover story on Gates, putting the Defense Secretary in the center of the debate over Afghanistan and America’s transition to a post-Cold War foreign policy. While Crowley elevated Gates, he reduces Clinton’s diplomatic tenure to a blooper reel.

So is  the media is seriously under-covering Clinton or is she’s really not doing anything that’s newsworthy? Some of what Clinton has done (like wrangling with Obama over the future of USAID) should probably get more attention. But it does seem that she’s had a minor impact on foreign policy.

Maybe one reason for this is that when the Obama administration wants to make a big diplomatic statement, Obama does it. Bush administration Secretary of State’s Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, both pretty high-profile news makers, reached out to a world that often neither liked nor respected George W. Bush. That’s not the case with Obama and maybe that’s a reason why Clinton’s role has so far seemed a secondary one.

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