I was in Israel last week when I overheard some people talking
about rumors that Obama was offering Hillary Clinton the
Secretary of State job, and I dismissed it as idle gossip, or
perhaps another hyped media story with little basis in reality.
But now I come home and read that she was offered the job and
accepted it. If true, this is a stunning development on many
levels.
Politically, it doesn't make sense to me. Obama made the prudent
decision to snub Clinton for the VP slot, and despite a small
minority of disgruntled Hillary dead-enders, he was able to unify
the party. She campaigned for him merely to save her own
political hide. He won. The idea that he "owes" anything to
Clinton supporters is absurd. It's also much easier for Clinton
to wreak havoc from Foggy Bottom than it would be from the
Senate, undermining the administration, leaking information to
the press, and seeing herself as in charge of the nation's
foreign policy rather than as somebody who is serving the
president and representing his policies abroad. Then there are
the conflicts of interest posed by Bill's globetrotting and
foreign speaking fees.
Based on what we now know about how the Clinton campaign
functioned and how she led the charge for health care in her
husband's administration, Hillary Clinton is a terrible
executive, so that doesn't speak well for her ability to manage
thousands of employees at State, nor does she have any record
suggesting that she has skills as a diplomat, other than in her
own imagination.
Above all, what happened to change? Implicit in Obama's message
during the primaries was that electing him would move us beyond
the Bush-Clinton era, and yet, now he is staffing his
administration with a collection of Clinton retreads as well as
Hillary herself? Jim already
noted their differences on the Iraq War, but their foreign
policy disagreements were much more fundamental than that, at
least as Obama told it. According to Obama, Hillary Clinton
represented a continuation of "typical Washington thinking" on
foreign policy, an attitude that prevails even as the
administration changes from party to party. When Obama spoke of
meeting unconditonally with the world's worst dictators and later
of taking military action within Pakistan, he was mocked as naive
by Clinton, who eventually would talk in terms of "obliterating"
Iran. Now he wins, and he appoints her to the top foreign policy
post in his administration? Utterly puzzling.
