Hillary Clinton, the Teflon secretary

At the end of her tenure as secretary of state, she alone has emerged virtually unscathed — the lone superstar of the president’s first term. A recent poll has her numbers well above the president’s and exceeded only by — you guessed it — her husband Bill. And those high favorability ratings have remained pretty consistent since 2008. …

Unlike Obama, she also appears to have racked up almost no deficits. Nothing seems to stick — not Benghazi, not Syria, and not the fact that she never managed to lead and succeed on a single consequential foreign policy issue. Last week, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza nailed it: Hillary, he wrote, was “the new Teflon Clinton.” …

1. Everybody Loves a Star: With the exception of Colin Powell, no secretary of state in American history came to the office with more visibility, fame, fewer asterisks, and more good will than Hillary Clinton. She’s even got Thomas Jefferson beat.

After all, how many of the nation’s top diplomats had already been in the White House for eight years, missed being her party’s presidential nominee by a hair, and had a readymade fan base of as many as 18 million Americans who cast votes for her in the primaries before she even settled into the State Department’s 7th floor?