Hill Hearts Obama
And will date him. Heather heard it from Jenny and told Jessica, who told Pete and Helene on condition of anonymity. NYT:
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat to become secretary of state in the Obama administration, making her the public face to the world for the man who dashed her own hopes for the presidency, confidants of Mrs. Clinton said Friday.
The accord between the two leading figures of the Democratic Party was the culmination of a weeklong drama that riveted the nation’s capital. President-elect Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton fought perhaps the most polarizing nomination battle in decades, but in recruiting her for his cabinet, Mr. Obama chose to turn a rival into a partner, and she concluded she could have a greater impact by saying yes than by remaining in the Senate.
Her selection is still to be formalized and will not be announced until after Thanksgiving. It would be yet another direction in the unlikely journey of a onetime political spouse in Arkansas who went on to build a political base of her own and become a symbol of achievement to many women.
Which is a tad ironic, the charitable “political base of her own” observation not particularly withstanding, that the great feminist standard bearer’s high achievement is largely a result of standing by one man, and losing to another. To seriously consider her qualifications for Secretary of State, however, it must be noted that as Frist Lady she sipped many cups of tea with assorted satraps and nabobs and/or their wives, dodged sniper fire in Tuzla, and as a United States Senator was for Iraq before it became politically inconvenient, at which point she turned against Iraq, indicating the depth of her concern about U.S. interests in the world and her understanding of key strategic issues. Also important to note that many people, including most of those she grew up with in Chicago and was educated with at Wellesley, would consider Arkansas a foreign country.
Meanwhile, NYT thumbsucker sees the Obama appointments as signs he’ll govern from the “center-right of his party,” which is an odd way of putting. Makes it sound all right centrist. I tend to see it more as an explicit acknowledgement that he in fact came to the table not only without experience, but without a clue, and that his campaign was a farce. Does he understand that at this point, he’s moved beyond graciously sharing power with his political adversaries to surrendering to them? NYT news analysis puts it more charitably:
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.
Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury — suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.
The choices are as revealing of the new president as they are of his appointees — and suggest that, from its first days, an Obama White House will brim with big personalities and far more spirited debate than occurred among the largely like-minded advisers who populated President Bush’s first term.
They must mean the like-minded Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld.
But the names racing through the ether in Washington about the choices to follow also suggest that Mr. Obama continues to place a premium on deep experience. He is widely reported to be considering asking Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on for a year; and he is thinking about Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant, for national security adviser, and placing Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary whom Mr. Obama considered putting back in his old post, inside the White House as a senior economic adviser.
“This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,” David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Geithner’s appointments leaked. “It’s teaching us something about Obama: while he wants to bring new ideas to the game, he is working from the center space of American foreign policy.”
The reason, several of Mr. Obama’s transition team members say, is that they believe that the new administration will have no time for a learning curve. With the country facing a deep recession or worse, global market turmoil, chaos in Pakistan and a worsening war in Afghanistan, “there’s going to be no time for experimentation,” a member of the Obama foreign policy team said.
Put another way, he has no clue what he’s doing.
That explains Mr. Obama’s first selection: Rahm Emanuel, another centrist Democrat and former member of the Clinton White House, as his chief of staff.
In some ways, the choices made so far are reminiscent of the way the last senator to be elected president, John F. Kennedy, chose a cabinet. As president-elect, Kennedy soon picked three top officials significantly more conservative than he was: Dean Rusk as secretary of state, Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense and C. Douglas Dillon, a Republican, as secretary of the Treasury. They helped him navigate the Cuban missile crisis, but also got him bogged down in Vietnam.
Technically, I believe they got LBJ bogged down in Vietnam. Whatever. Fortunately, a point elided by NYT, George Bush is handing Obama the keys to wars rendered manageable.
Of all the choices Mr. Obama has made so far, it is the selection of Mrs. Clinton that appears the biggest gamble, in part because she has never had to engage in the give-and-take of high-stakes diplomacy, and in part because no one really knows how she will mesh with the Obama White House.
We’ve never had a coup in American politics. This is a curious one, as the chief plotter would appear to the guy with his head on the block. Talk about learning curves, Obama not only has to learn how to be in charge of stuff, he has to learn how to be in charge of other people’s stuff, while they’re still in charge of it.
NYDN: Obama enrages the seething, hateful Nutroots. “This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency.”
Meanwhile, Canada’s National Post on Bush’s legacy: Fat Chance.
Assessing his own legacy, George W. Bush has implied on a few occasions he shall be remembered as a leader who turned the course of history toward greater freedom.
“The work we’re doing takes patience,” he said in an interview early this year. “But most importantly, it takes faith in the universality of freedom that exists in every heart. As so, yes, I’m not only happy to defend decisions, I’m confident they will lead to a better tomorrow.”
It’s lucky for Mr. Bush that he is able to find some solace in that. For, fairly or not, his legacy likely won’t.
O ye of little faith. Crittenden at Weekly Standard on Obama’s Debt of Gratitude to George Bush.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:02 am on Saturday, November 22, 2008
3 Responses to “Hill Hearts Obama”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
November 22nd, 2008 at 10:37 am
Gee, no mention of this corrupt politician’s party. Wonder why that is. Couldn’t be because he’s a republican? No, if he were a republican it would be in the banner headline. I wonder, could he be a democrat. Impossible. Dems aren’t corrupt, only republicans are corrupt. I bet the story doesn’t even mention whether the majority of the legislative body is democrat or republican. The reporter wouldn’t want to tar the entire group of legislators with the sins of one ‘errant’ legislator. But if the body were republican, would the press be as reluctant to do so?
November 22nd, 2008 at 10:45 am
What the NYSlimes fails to mention is that the ‘center right’ of the democrap party is really comparable the left wing of the Republican party. The extreme right wing of the democrap party would be comparable to the center right of the republican party.
And there are too few in the democrap party who could be compared to extreme conservatives in the repub party.
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Excuse me while I indulge in some schadenfreude.
Okay, done. It should be no surprise that Obama is surrounding himself with people who have governing experience, considering that he himself has none. He’s under tremendous pressure, particularly as the first African-American in the office, not to screw things up. Whether he will or not remains to be seen.