Hillary Clinton wasn't a great Secretary of State, Americans say

Hillary Clinton left the State Department with a sky-high approval rating. A little over a year later, and that has changed significantly.

Only 14 percent of voters say Clinton's tenure as secretary of state was "excellent," according to a new Politico poll. Meanwhile, one-third describe it as "poor" and another 21 percent say it was merely "fair."

So what happened to Clinton's once-sterling record?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

As others have already pointed out, the endless "Benghazi" brouhaha on the right has tainted Clinton's reputation; a Pew poll earlier this year found that Benghazi was the most-cited knock against her. Given Clinton's infamous "reset" moment with Russia, it's likely that the growing crisis in Ukraine is turning the public off to her a bit, too. And then there's the simple fact that Clinton's favorability rating was so high before that it was bound to dip sooner or later.

The latest poll numbers aren't jaw-droppingly terrible for Clinton, but they do suggest a real weakness often glossed over in the assumptions that she has the Democratic presidential nomination — if not the White House — already locked up.