Shouldn’t this have been the first task on Team Hillary’s agenda — starting immediately after her exit from the State Department? More than two years later, with her time as Secretary of State the only executive experience on her resumé, Hillary Clinton and her advisers are now “starting to formulate” a narrative on that record, The Hill’s Niall Strange reports. Part of that strategy is to offer a rerun of Barack Obama’s braggadocio from 2012 on Osama bin Laden, but another is to say as little as possible:

She is less inclined to focus on any specific achievement than to weave her time at Foggy Bottom into a larger narrative about her experience and toughness.

“I’ve stood up to adversaries like [Russia President Vladimir] Putin and reinforced allies like Israel,” she said in her speech on Saturday at Roosevelt Island in New York City. “I was in the Situation Room on the day we got [Osama] bin Laden.”

The general nature of those remarks points to a potential vulnerability for Clinton. Her critics argue that she achieved little of substance as secretary of State. And they expand that critique to suggest that her public life more broadly has been marked by talk over action.

Ah yes, the old I got Bin Laden boast. Except in this case, any credit that doesn’t go to the military for that operation belongs entirely to the Commander in Chief, not the Secretary of State. The State Department doesn’t play a role in military operations, and its only role in intelligence is focused on diplomacy, not covert operations and certainly not military operations. Yes, Hillary was in the Situation Room as a spectator when we got bin Laden. I was in a hotel room in Rome. So?

On the other two points, it would have been better for Hillary if all that had happened was talk. This picture sums up how Hillary stood up to Putin and Russia:

In the four years of Hillary’s term as Secretary of State, the US retreated from missile defense in eastern Europe and practically handed over American policy on Syria to Moscow. Obama and Hillary became so obsessed with nuclear-weapons reductions as some sort of credibility issue in dealing with Iran that they turned a blind eye to Putin’s neo-imperialism. And of course on that point, they blamed George Bush — which was the impetus for the craven “reset button” idiocy that started Hillary’s career at State.

And Israel? Ask the Israelis how they view the policy of the Obama-Hillary years, especially their decision to make housing expansion in Jerusalem a flash point with the Palestinians. The US thumbed their noses at the Netanyahu administration, only to get rebuked when the Israelis decided that Netanyahu had the better part of the argument.

In both of those cases, Hillary was more than just “in the room.” Those foreign-policy decisions are part of her record, too. And that doesn’t even include Hillary’s war on Moammar Qaddafi and the transformation of Libya into a failed state teeming with terror networks. That’s why Team Hillary would prefer not to talk about it at all:

At Roosevelt Island, only a few hundred words were devoted to foreign policy in an address that weighed in at around 5,000 words.

At the same time, however, Clinton can hardly skip over her most recent experience of holding public office, which stretched across the entirety of Obama’s first term.

Want to bet? She’s going to stay as far away from her record as possible, except to mention where she happened to be watching television on the day Osama bin Laden was killed. Her tenure at State began with a humiliation, ended with a humiliation, and made the US and the world far less safe than when she took office. Hillary can’t possibly defend the disaster she left behind, and she and her team will do their best to pretend it never existed.