I’m really, really late to the Secretary of State Clinton speculation, and many others already have covered it (props to Steve Clemons, btw, for breaking the story). But tardiness has never stopped me before, so permit me to offer some (not-so-brief) observations on the notion of Hillary as Secretary of State.
1. The “Secretaries of State don’t run for President” question. Although Nate Silver is correct when he notes that no Secretary of State since Buchanan has won the Presidency, that doesn’t, in itself, mean that a Secretary of State could not get elected President today. After all, Powell would have remained a strong candidate to succeed Bush had his term as Secretary gone better, and a number of folks in the Republican Party (particularly neoconservatives) pushed for Condoleezza Rice to run. Before that, some pundits pushed the notion that James Baker should run, and Alexander Haig liked to think he could be a candidate.
Furthermore, despite the fact that the Secretary of State’s influence and power have waned over the past few decades the position remains the most senior in the Cabinet. It carries great prestige in its own right, and it also is fifth in the line of succession (until the 25th Amendment came into force, it was third, not fifth). Just because recent Secretaries have not had the desire to run doesn’t mean that the office lacks the prestige to permit a run.
2. The “this will hurt Hillary’s chances to be President” theory. Hillary needs to ask is whether taking the job will help or hinder her desire to become President someday. If Obama is not a success, a Republican running against Hillary in ‘16 could tar Secretary Clinton as too close to an unpopular President, much in the same way that Obama managed to connect McCain to Bush. But that will be true even if Hillary doesn’t take the job — assuming she doesn’t start bucking Obama (and her party) in an effort to look like a (ahem) maverick.
There are four possible outcomes here: she takes the job and he is successful, making her the leading candidate to secure the Democratic nomination in ‘16; she doesn’t take the job and he is successful, still leaving her the leading candidate in ‘16; she takes the job and he stumbles (or she does), damaging her prospects and perhaps ending her career; and she doesn’t take the job and he stumbles, which still leaves her the leading candidate in ‘16.
I think Hillary will look at those four scenarios and conclude that the position involves considerable risks with few rewards. Not taking the job has few long-term downsides.
3. The political circus challenge vetting Bill challenge. If Hillary accepts the nomination, she still will have to go through a public vetting and a (hopefully successful) confirmation. At first blush, that may not look like a major concern: after all, as Hillary herself has noted, few people have been as thoroughly vetted as she has over the past sixteen years. That said, her assertion does not mean that there are no skeletons.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there necessarily are, but there certainly are a number of rumors about Bill’s post-Presidential behavior, as well as questions about his business dealings and his unwillingness to release the names of those who donated to his Presidential library. The Obama campaign chose not to raise these during the primaries, but had she won, McCain may have done so. The reality is that we don’t know what opposition research the Republicans have, or whether they are willing to use it.
The Republicans could decide to turn her confirmation into a huge and potentially distracting sideshow, much as the Democrats did with G.H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower to serve as Secretary of Defense. Given the significant majority the Democrats now hold in the Senate, Republicans are unlikely to succeed in derailing Hillary, but they could make both her and Obama miserable for a while. Obama has run a tight ship up to now, so I presume that his senior staff already has vetted her (if the offer is serious) and has concluded that she can weather such a storm.
(UPDATE: This is more than merely a question of Bill raking in the Benjamins. His business ventures could conflict directly with an Obama Administration and even with Hillary’s own positions. As the NYT story linked above notes, Clinton praised Kazakhstan’s dictator President, Nursultan Nazarbayev and promoted Kazakhstan’s efforts to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He did it despite the fact that both the Bush Administration and Hillary opposed the bid. Despite that, Bill told the NYT that he saw no contradiction between his and Hillary’s positions. It’s one thing for that to happen during the primaries, but it’s an entirely different matter should it happen when his wife is Secretary of State.)
Once Hillary is confirmed, the challenges don’t end. A lot of it centers on Bill’s role — particularly if he continues the informal diplomacy that has characterized his post-Presidential years. There also are protocol and security issues. Would Bill go on trips with Hillary? And if he did, would his status as a former POTUS affect how she would be welcomed and how she would do her job? To put it another way, how does she negotiate with Medvedev and Putin when a former President is down the hall? (For the record, I’m not being sexist here. If the tables were turned, the same question would be relevant.) And what about the conflicting priorities of Diplomatic Security (who would protect Hillary) and the Secret Service (who protect Bill)? Normally the latter would take priority, but in this case it might have to defer, which in in turn could produce real conflict. All these questions need to be worked out in advance.
4. The appointments issue. During the primaries, the Clinton campaign asked foreign policy experts to remain “exclusive” to Hillary (meaning they could not also offer advice to other candidates). That’s not an unreasonable position, even if the other leading candidates (including Obama) chose not to follow suit. I know many people in the foreign policy community who volunteered for the Clinton campaign because they thought she was the best candidate. But I also know a few who, because of ambition, felt that they had to work for her even though they preferred another candidate. When Obama ultimately won, all of them were welcomed by his campaign and integrated into Obama’s existing campaign apparatus.
If Hillary were to become Secretary of State, I presume that she, like most Secretaries, would be given significant leeway in picking most (if not all) of her senior advisors (meaning in the case of State the two Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and those Assistant Secretary postions not assigned to career foreign service officers). It would be logical (and not unreasonable) to conclude that she probably would favor those who served her during the primaries.
But doing so could create two problems. First, the team of rivals could turn into rival fiefdoms, with Obama supporters dominating the NSC (and Defense) and Clinton supporters dominating State. Given the fact that the next Administration urgently needs to reintegrate State into existing foreign policy structures (and give it the resources both to achieve its mission and play a more robust role in intra-agency negotiations), Obama needs to end existing inter-agency rivalries, not create new ones.
Second, there was no love lost among the two camps’ advisors during the primaries. The Clintons attacked those it viewed as disloyal (such as Bill Richardson and Gregory Craig), which angered many in the Obama campaign. In addition, I heard from more than one friend that they were warned that they could forget about a role in a Clinton administration should they not support Hillary during the primaries. Given those realities, Obama risks angering those who did support him, and some of his supporters may regard Hillary’s likely selection of her loyalists to senior posts as a betrayal.
5. The “team of rivals” meme. I’m a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals; if you have not yet read it, I strongly encourage you to do so — but not because Hillary might be Secretary of State. It’s a marvelous portrayal of Lincoln and his Cabinet, particularly William H. Seward (State) and Edwin M. Stanton (War), both of whom had little or no respect for Lincoln before joining the Cabinet. Both later became among his closest friends and advisors.
But just because it worked back then doesn’t mean it will work now. In Lincoln’s (and Seward’s) day, the President and Secretary of State had few deputies, and met virtually daily As time went on and Seward’s respect for Lincoln grew, he became a trusted advisor and a close friend. Seward’s office was very close to Lincoln, as was his home. Both Seward and Lincoln would walk over to the other’s home/office to talk, and they often were guests at each other’s homes.
Today, it’s a long seven blocks from Foggy Bottom to the White House, and even regular phone calls are unlikely to replicate the proximity that bred intimacy in Lincoln’s time. Hillary simply won’t have the opportunity to watch (and advise) Obama the way that Seward did with Lincoln. Seward ultimately gave up his ambitions to be President in favor of loyally serving his President. I doubt that Hillary would (or necessarily should) do the same.
In addition, modern Presidents (and Secretaries of State) can’t operate without vast numbers of advisors and support staff — they require far more personnel than in Lincoln’s time. Even most small-government conservatives (witht the possible exception of Grover Norquist) do not favor reducing the size of the federal government to what it was in the mid-19th Century. To put it another way, the inter-agency process would inhibit both proximity and intimacy.
So if I were Hillary, I would not to take the job. There’s just too much that could go wrong — and too much risk to her own future. Although she would make an excellent Secretary of State, she can still strongly support Obama’s agenda from the Senate — and do so without sacrificing her legitimate desire to succeed him one day.
UPDATE: Both the NYT and WaPo have stories this morning raising some of the same questions I have. First and foremost is the Bill issue. First, the NYT:
President-elect Barack Obama’s advisers have begun reviewing former President Bill Clinton’s finances and activities to see whether they would preclude the appointment of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state, Democrats close to the situation said Sunday. The examination of the former president suggests how seriously Mr. Obama is considering bringing his onetime rival for the Democratic presidential nomination into his cabinet. . . .
A team of lawyers trying to facilitate the potential nomination spent the weekend looking into Mr. Clinton’s philanthropic organization, interactions with foreign governments and ties to pharmaceutical companies, a Democrat close to both camps said. While Mr. Clinton has used his foundation to champion efforts to fight AIDS, poverty and climate change around the world, he has also taken millions in speaking fees and contributions from foreign officials and businesses with interests in American governmental policies.
Now here’s WaPo on the same issue:
Since leaving the White House, Bill Clinton has used his connections with world leaders to position himself as something akin to the world’s philanthropist in chief — and become rich in the process by collecting huge sums from foreign companies eager to hear him speak. That arrangement could be complicated, though, by his wife joining the Obama administration, with the prospect of questions about any conflict of interest or attempts to curry influence. . . .
The choice of Clinton would present other potential problems for Obama. He would be investing his fortunes not only with his former rival for the presidency but also in an outsize figure on the global scene who has been conducting a kind of privately financed foreign policy all his own since leaving office. Obama and the former president have also continued to share a somewhat strained relationship since the end of the Democratic nominating contest.
Bill Clinton’s web of personal financial ties and public policy pronouncements about the world’s challenges would instantly become a source of possible discord with a new Obama administration as his wife travels the same world circuit as America’s official emissary.
“He’s a former president of the United States. He’s been traveling around the world, and he’s got his foundation and a lot of foreign policy efforts going on,” said Leon Panetta, Clinton’s former chief of staff and now a professor of public policy. “What they will have to obviously be careful of are the potential conflicts that might appear.”. . .
By taking the Cabinet post, Hillary Clinton would also force new scrutiny of her husband’s charitable activities and his private financial dealings. Bill Clinton has raised millions of dollars for his foundation but has declined to publicly disclose its benefactors. Likewise, most of the donors who helped bankroll his presidential library in Little Rock have never been disclosed.
The Times story goes a bit further, noting the challenge of bringing together the Obama and Clinton foreign policy camps:
One sign that many said pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s possible selection was the news that Gregory B. Craig would be White House counsel instead of national security adviser or deputy secretary of state, as some had expected. A law school friend of the Clintons who represented Mr. Clinton during impeachment, Mr. Craig backed Mr. Obama from the start of the campaign and was a scathing critic of Mrs. Clinton’s claims to foreign policy experience. Although some advisers saw no connection, others said putting him in a foreign policy job would be untenable if Mrs. Clinton were secretary of state.
If Craig was named White House Consul in order to assuage the Clintons, that’s not a good sign. After all, if Obama can appoint a rival to a key post, why can’t Hillary? Were Hillary to get the nod, her choice of Craig as Deputy Secretary would have demonstrated her own willingness to bury the hatchet and build a coherent team. That’s not to say that she still could not appoint an Obama loyalist (say Susan Rice) as Deputy, but Craig would have represented an especially powerful effort to promote unity.
When I wrote the original piece, I forgot to note one other factor that points to Hillary getting the job: the people leading the State Department component of the transition (h/t The Agonist):
Tom Donilon is a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers and serves on the firm’s global governing committee. Tom served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of State during the Clinton Administration. Since leaving the Department he has remained deeply involved in the national security arena. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, the National Security Advisory Group to the Congressional Leadership, the Brookings Institution Board of Trustees, the Miller Center of Public Affairs Governing Council, and the Trilateral Commission.
Wendy R. Sherman is a Principal of The Albright Group LLC and of Albright Capital Management LLC. Ambassador Sherman served as Counselor and chief troubleshooter for the State Department, as well as Special Advisor to President Clinton and Policy Coordinator on North Korea. Sherman is a recognized expert on national security issues and serves as a frequent analyst in major news outlets. She was recently appointed by Congressional Leadership to serve on the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism.
Both are Clinton Administration veterans — Donilon during Warren Christopher’s time, Sherman during Albright’s — although I could not find anything pointing to their loyalties during the primary season. Given Sherman’s tenure at Albright’s consulting group, I’d be surprised if she did not support Clinton.
Donilon and Sherman are excellent choices to lead the transition at State — they’re both smart, thoughtful, and able to look at both the big picture and get in the weeds. Their appointments could have everything to do with the capabilities and nothing at all to do with their loyalties. As others have noted, most of Democrats in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who have experience in government had to have worked in the Clinton Administration, given the fact that it was the only game in town for the past three decades. (Full disclosure: that is true of me as well.)
But given the fact that we’ve already seen questions around Craig’s appointment, it would be interesting to know whether they both did, in fact, support Hillary before joining the Obama team. As I noted above, the last thing either Obama or Hillary need is for the team of rivals to turn into competing fiefdoms.
UPDATE #2: What do you think? Vote in our new poll, located in the left-hand column.
UPDATE #3: It appears that most of the buzz around the Hillary boomlet is being generated by — surprise! — the Clinton camp. Via Mike Allen at Politico:
Team Obama, after all but offering SecState to Senator Clinton, is expressing EXASPERATION with the Clinton camp for the difficulty in getting a clean vet on President Bill Clinton’s many entanglements. “The ball is very much in her court, but the president’s finances have been a major point of sensitivity from day one,” a Democratic official said. (“Day One!”) “Given that everyone’s mystified by how deliberately public the Clintons have made this once secret process, the assumption is either that the Clintons are trying to use the public buzz to steamroll their way in, create a sense of inevitability that overcomes those concerns, or that it’s just a matter of time before they … satisfy vetting somehow, some way. Otherwise, after all this speculation, there’ll be a permanent dark cloud hanging over her finances. … But generally the sense among the no-drama Obama world is: This is well on its way to winning best Oscar for drama.” . . .A neutral Democrat tells Playbook: “I doubt that they are looking for an excuse to pick someone else but rather are genuinely concerned that Bill Clinton’s work, while worthy, would be greatly complicating if she were SecState.”
UPDATE #4: Ambinder says that the vetting is ongoing, and that SecState was not the only position discussed:
Sources close to the process have said that Obama and Clinton discussed a variety of possible roles she could play in a new administration, including Secretary of State. If Clinton is offered a cabinet spot and decides to accept it, it’s not unreasonable to expect her to want to think about her options and spend time discussing the offer with her close friends and advisers.
As it happens, three of her top advisers — former campaign manager Maggie Williams, chief legal adviser Cheryl Mills, and President Clinton — were out of the country late last week. Mills, who was Abu Dhabi, has always played a central role on any matters related to the Clinton’s joint finances or the presidents’ foundation work. Any vet of Clinton’s finances would run through Mills.
Bill and Hillary would be called upon to make decisions about transparency together, and since the former president was in Europe and Kuwait through Sunday, it’s not unreasonable to expect Hillary Clinton to want to cogitate with her husband in person.
People close to the Obama transition say they understand all this — they understood all this last week — and that there’s been no delaying, there’s been no acrimony, and that Clinton and her team have acted professionally and appropriately.
I’ve also heard from some sources close to Richardson that he is being vetted as well. It looks like Obama is not placing all his bets on one horse.
UPDATE #5: The Guardian is reporting that Clinton is planning to accept the offer. That said, the report is pretty thinly sourced and mainly focuses on the fact that the Obama team is vetting Bill.
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