Honest Advice - For Hilary
by Graham Davies

Be tough, be knowledgeable, be diplomatic, and most of all, be honest.

These characteristics aren’t essential for misunderestimated presidents who can’t recall the name of the leader of Pakistan, who don’t believe there’s sufficient evidence of global warming to warrant signing up to international agreements on climate change, who have bad memory lapses about the extent and timing of their military service, and who don’t know the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia.

But anyone wanting the job of Secretary of State in the US administration needs to demonstrate all of these qualities. There’s no doubt Hilary Clinton is tough (you have to be to ride out the kind of character assassinations she’s suffered over the years), and she seems knowledgeable (as she’s always telling us).

But diplomacy is not her strong card. This is the former candidate who once indicated that one of the reasons she was staying in the Nomination race was that there was always a chance that her opponent might get assassinated.

And the bigger problem is honesty. Her campaign-trail misspeaking/minor blip/misstatement (aka “lie”) about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire might be dismissed as par for the course in the bloody hand-to-hand combat of nomination, and she dismissed this slight error very eloquently:

"I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things - millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement."

You know.

(Incidentally, just for the sake of the pedantry, and worrying about honesty and accuracy, if you wanted to talk a million words per day, that would be 11.574074 words per second, every second of every minute for 24 hours).

The point being: put that behind you Hilary, own up to it, cast it in the context of fighting the good fight to get the nomination, and make sure – absolutely sure – that you present yourself with real integrity.

You can use all the slick tricks in the book – PR, spin, advertising whatever – to sell a product, and you can get away with it and even do rather well. For a while. But ultimately, if what you’re selling isn’t any good, people find out. If it lacks fundamental integrity (and you’ve spent a lot of time telling them it IS the real deal), then you’re in big trouble.

So. Honesty, Hilary. One of the essentials, whenever anyone presents to the public. Whether it’s to an annual company conference, or a worldwide audience of billions.