For the past nine years Haim Saban, an Israeli-American media and entertainment mogul, has held the annual Saban Forum. Almost always held in Washington, D.C., the Saban Forum is a prestigious gathering of mainly government officials (present and former), business elite, institute brainiacs, and a sprinkling of reporters. The forum runs typically three days, and is almost always off-the-record. This past Friday, however, was on the record as an impressive gathering of guests attended an event where Hillary Clinton was the main speaker. And it was what took place inside the Willard Hotel in Washington that night that has The New Yorker almost 100% certain that Hillary is definitely running for President in 2016. The following is a brief excerpt:
In a packed ballroom of the Willard Hotel, she was greeted with a standing ovation and then a short, adoring film, a video Festschrift testifying to her years as First Lady, senator, and, above all, secretary of state. The film, an expensive-looking production, went to the trouble of collecting interviews with Israeli politicians—Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni—and American colleagues, like John Kerry. Tony Blair, striking the moony futuristic note that was general in the hall, said, “I just have an instinct that the best is yet to come.” The film was like an international endorsement four years in advance of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. The tone was so reverential that it resembled the sort of film that the Central Committee of the Communist Party might have produced for Leonid Brezhnev’s retirement party if Leonid Brezhnev would only have retired and the Soviets had been in possession of advanced video technology.
You can read the entire story by visiting NewYorker.com, and be sure to follow the magazine’s brilliant team on Facebook and Twitter. You can watch the glowing Saban Forum tribute to Hillary Clinton in the red link below (I could not embed it myself), and check out her reaction and full speech in the YouTube clip below as well. I’ve also attached a terrific TODAY show profile of Hillary from earlier this year — a fascinating intimate look at one of the most remarkable women in the world (FYI: Did you know that Hillary Clinton was ranked as one the Top 100 Lawyers in the United States years before her husband ran for the Presidency himself in the early 1990s?).
YOU CAN WATCH THE SABAN FORUM’S TRIBUTE TO HILLARY CLINTON BY CLICKING HERE (IT IS THE SECOND VIDEO FROM THE TOP).
