04:57 pm
Why Hillary Still Might Say No
David Frum makes a good point today on why Hillary Clinton might sitll have doubts about becoming Barack Obama’s Secretary of State:
[If Hillary] says yes—poof, there vanishes her independent power base. She serves at the pleasure of the president. More consequential still, in order to pass the vetting process, she must open to Obama’s team all the tangled financial records of the Clinton family. If there is any part of her that imagines, say, a primary challenge to Obama in 2012, or even a campaign to replace Biden on the ticket in the VP slot, that hope diminishes with the opening of the files. She will have done Obama’s oppo research for him. From then on, she is utterly exposed and vulnerable. She gets only what Obama chooses to give.
Karen Tumulty and Massimo Calabresi report that some of her friends and advisors are urging her not to take the job:
Her allies point out that the move would not be without its negatives. Friends like New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter are counseling her not to take the job. They say she would be giving up important work in the Senate, particularly on the health-care-reform cause that is her passion. Others warn that her job description at Foggy Bottom would mean she’d lose her own voice.
Ultimately this may come down to Clinton’s sense of her place in history. Her run helped make both Obama’s candidacy — and even Sarah Palin’s — possible. But no matter how historic it may have been, I have to believe that Hillary wants more than to to be the first woman to mount a competitive campaign: she wants to be the first to win.
If that’s the case, then how does taking this job in an Obama administration move her closer to that goal? Albright and Rice already shattered that particular glass ceiling. There is nothing historic about being the third woman to serve as Secretary of State.
Were she to achieve some momentous breakthrough — say a permanent Middle East peace — the job could help advance her cause. But how much, really? Over the past several decades, foreign policy achievements (e.g. G.H.W. Bush, whose tenure included both the end of communism and the successful prosecution of the Gulf War) haven’t translated into electoral success. In contrast, foreign policy disasters (e.g. Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, G.W. Bush and Iraq) have helped ended Presidencies.
I may be wrong. Hillary may see this as a rare opportunity to help Obama move the country (and the world) away from the disasters of the past eight years. It may be that, like many before her, she is willing to set aside her ambition to serve loyally the man who defeated her.
Hillary isn’t just any other candidate. If she were, the conventional wisdom would say that she should take the job, just as Biden agreed to be Vice President despite his supposed reservations and Tom Daschle has now agreed to be HHS Secretary after being passed over for the position of chief of staff.
Hillary is anything but conventional. Her place in history may be secure, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t (or shouldn’t) want more. And Barack Obama, more than anyone else out there, will understand why if she decides to say no.