Really, WHO do YOU Want Answering That 3 AM Call? – Patriot Action Network

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Wake Up Mr. President – Yahoo! News UK

Wake Up Mr. President

Mon Apr 06 10:21AM

You have to wonder what Hillary Clinton was thinking.

More than a year after she warned that then Democratic rival Barack Obama was too inexperienced to take a 3 a.m. alarm call on a major foreign policy crisis, the inevitable happened. The presidential telephone started to ring in the dead of night.

It was 4:30 am Prague time, not 3 am as Clinton warned in her famous attack ad, when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put a call through to his boss to alert him of North Korea’s rocket launch over Japan. Pyongyang’s timing was impeccable. Obama was in the Czech capital on the latest stage of his European trip to give a speech on … you guessed it, the dangerous proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

If it wasn’t so serious it would be amusing. But it’s hard not to appreciate the irony that, according to Gibbs, Clinton, who is now Obama’s secretary of state, was also woken, and the two former rivals chatted about what to do.

This foreign crisis, which many policy experts see as intractable, is one that Obama and Clinton are going to have to sort out together. Who predicted that a year ago?

In this blog, reporters and editors for global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Stephen Collinson is AFP White House correspondent.

via Around The World – Yahoo! News UK.