By CNN's Jill Dougherty
WASHINGTON (CNN) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers a major foreign policy speech and some Washington political observers ask: "Is she trying to get back in the spotlight?"
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/07/15/art.clinton.getty.jpg caption="Supporters of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insist she is not being sidelined."]
Since she slipped and broke her elbow last month, the secretary has had to cancel an international trip, and some inside-the-Beltway types are reading the tea leaves. Is it another step in the process of keeping Secretary Clinton from the real foreign policy decision-making in the Obama administration?
"The Daily Beast's" Tina Brown writes: "Left behind on major presidential trips, overruled in choosing her own staff - Hillary Clinton is the invisible woman at State."
"It's time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa," she said.
The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland said it's President Obama's inner circle, advisers such as chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod, who are controlling the president's foreign policy message. He predicts "tensions will emerge instead between the close-in advisers and the Cabinet secretaries who have been chosen to sell and implement policies more than to decide them."
Clinton aides say charges that the secretary is being "back-benched" are "wholly false."