Hillary Clinton is more popular than ever, and maybe that's because no one knows what she does. "What has she done?" is the gossip of the "international affairs set," according to Reuters Magazine's Susan B. Glasser. While President Obama might be nice to her face, he's kept her out of his foreign affairs inner circle. Glasser talks to  "one of Washington’s mandarins" who "reeled off a long strong of Important Global Issues, from Middle East peace to negotiating a political end to the long-running war in Afghanistan, from which Clinton appears to have been sidelined by the Obama White House, or is simply out of the picture." Apparently Clinton pushes a lot of feel-good issues, but she doesn't matter on things that really matter, per Glasser:

And it's true that if you travel with Clinton, every trip will include a seemingly endless procession of talking-points-ridden events at which the secretary smiles and nods while promoting cut-rate cookstoves for the developing world or hailing the work of women's empowerment initiatives. The members of the traveling press corps roll their eyes; her exhausted aides barely look up from their battered BlackBerries.

Clinton isn't a global statesman like Henry Kissinger, Glasser says, nor a presidential confidante like Condoleezza Rice, or popular with the foreign policy bureaucracy like Colin Powell. Instead, she's a politician, and when talking with world leaders, "she does not hesitate to discuss what they really care about: the acquisition and maintenance of power."

Read more from issue two of Reuters.

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Elspeth Reeve