Obama to see Clinton after criticism of his foreign policy

[August 13, 2014]  By Jeff Mason
 
 EDGARTOWN Mass. (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will have a reunion with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday on Martha's Vineyard, days after the former top diplomat criticized the foreign policy vision of his administration.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, will attend a party hosted by Washington power broker Vernon Jordan, a Clinton friend, on the Massachusetts island, where the presidential family is spending a two-week vacation, a White House spokesman said.

Clinton will be on the island to promote her book, "Hard Choices," a memoir of her time as Obama's secretary of state.

"The president and first lady have accepted an offer to attend a social gathering at the home of Vernon Jordan on Wednesday evening," White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

"(They) are very much looking forward to the occasion and seeing former Secretary Clinton."

Clinton, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, distanced herself from Obama's foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic that was published on Sunday, saying it was a failure that the United States did not intervene early in the Syrian war.

She also took issue with Obama's slogan of "Don’t do stupid stuff" to describe his foreign policy thinking.

"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle," she said in the interview.

Obama and Clinton were adversaries for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 but developed a close relationship when she served as his secretary of state.

They have seen each other a handful of times, sometimes for lunch at the White House, since she departed the administration in 2013.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason)

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