A transcript of the segment, and the video are below:
Hewitt: Ryan, last week, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times sat down with Hillary Clinton. And have you had a chance to read that interview, yet?Lizza: I have, yeah.Hewitt: You know, softball after softball, right?Lizza: It’s, yeah, it’s not a (laughing), it wasn’t the most hard-hitting interview. I agree with you there.Hewitt: Yeah, and so my question is Chris Christie gets, I mean, it’s a trip to the proctologist every time he goes near the media. Hillary goes out, sits down with the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, and even as Afghan women are voting, gets asked about, you know, what did you do at State, and she has nothing to say. Is this just the way it’s going to be for Republicans, that you know, there are Chris Christies, their dynamic people get the absolute finger/white glove treatment, and Hillary is off limits to the press?Lizza: Now you are not going to convince me that Hillary Clinton, who has been in politics a really long time, has not had her fair share of critical media. I mean, you know how these things go in waves, right? She’s not really, you know, she’s not in elected office right now, and she’s not running, so she’s in this in between phase where she’s getting some pretty soft coverage. As soon as she steps into the race, the same thing that happened in 2008’s going to happen, and so the coverage will be incredibly aggressive, just as it was, think back to her earliest days in the White House. She got…Hewitt: Let me ask you this, Ryan. Do you think, if I gave you fifteen minutes in the Google search engine…Lizza: Yeah.Hewitt: …that you could find a piece about Hillary Clinton from the last 20 years that is anywhere near as detailed as the one you’ve written about Chris Christie?Lizza: Yes, I absolutely think, you want me to take you up on that?Hewitt: Yeah, you can send it before show time. Any time you’ve got, you find it, because I don’t think this kind of Hillary’s rise story, this is fascinating, because it is Chris Christie’s rise. And I mean, there’s stuff…Lizza: I mean, here’s the thing, all right, here’s the thing about Hillary. She is set in stone. The people that don’t like her, don’t like her. And they’re never changing their mind. The people that love her, love her. They’re not going to change their mind about her. And it’s really hard to find new information about her that changes people’s opinions.Hewitt: Well, they are, but that’s not the question. The question is do people…Lizza: I’m not saying that’s an excuse…Hewitt: Do people dig? That’s what I asked. Let me ask you. What’s her accomplishment at State, Ryan Lizza? What did she get done at State?Lizza: I think that’s a good question. I think that her best case is that she came into the State Department during a period when the United States’ reputation had suffered at the end of the Bush years, and she tried to revive that reputation. I think the second thing she would brag about is this sort of soft containment strategy in China, right, opening up relations with some of China’s neighbors and trying to hem China in a little bit in that area of the world, and this whole pivot that the Obama folks talk about a lot, and sort of thinking of Asia as the most important region of the world for the next 50 years. But I agree with you, this is not, we don’t have any, you know, a lot of previous secretaries of State are judged on some breakthrough diplomatically, right, some kind of peace accord or treaty that they, that happened on their watch. That didn’t happen with her. I agree.
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