Kill Bill, Part III
President-elect Barack Obama is in a peculiar situation as he tries to fill the top slot at “Foggy Bottom.” Obama’s predicament: How to keep Senator Hillary Clinton as a close confidant while keeping former President Bill Clinton from being a distraction? Over the last week, it has been reported that Senator Clinton is being vetted for the position of Secretary of State. One of the hiccups in making this deal is finding out what Bill has been up to over the last eight years that could cause Obama a severe migraine during the confirmation process.
Personally, I am torn on offering Hillary Clinton any role in the new administration. It makes good political sense for Obama as he is able to have her as a part of his team. This decision follows the logic of having your friends close and your enemies closer. On the other hand, in the short term, any misstep by Bill is going to cause undue headaches for Obama. In the long term if Hillary stays at State for a couple of years, and can demonstrate a failure of leadership at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she will be better positioned to run against Obama in 2012. She will be free to say, “I supported President Obama but he was not up to the task of leading our country.”
As for Bill and Hillary, this continuing story reminds me of “Kill Bill, parts 1 and 2″. Uma Thurman spent most of those two movies fighting her way to be free of Bill’s (David Carradine) influence. For most of her adult life, Hillary Clinton has been Bill’s first lady in Little Rock and in Washington, D.C. Now she has the ability to put her stamp on the foreign policy of the United States of America…the only problem is the continued shadow of Bill. Unfortunately, there will not be any samurai swords involved, they would have made the vetting process more interesting.
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The simple answer here is that Hillary Clinton simply is not the best person for the job. There are several (perhaps dozens) of other influential men and women with more knowledge of foreign policy and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of foreign cultures. And as an added bonus, none of them come with the baggage of a presidential spouse. There are guys like Bill Richardson, Senators Lugar, Durbin, and Hagel, various members of the diplomatic corps, and numerous upper echelon university presidents with backgrounds in foreign affairs who would be better equipped to handle the job and far less controversial. I was discussing this with my dad over the weekend, and he said it would be a wise move for Obama to pick someone with a theological background, someone with a deeper understanding of the differences between Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurdish Islam and who could possibly figure out a compromise solution to the messy divide in Iraq.