Fighting Liberals
The way Obama won the election IS impressive. Grassroots personified.
But the reality checks are starting to set in, and with Clinton's selection as Secretary of State, It's highly likely that he's begun the process of becoming a one-term president.
Patricia DeGennaro nails it, on Huffpo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
pa...y_b_145250.html
Picking a SecState who has been nearly diametrically opposed to the basic tenet of his campaign, that being that dragging us into a bloody, worse-than-useless war with
Iraq was a horrible mistake, is worse than just a brainfart. It's a piece of stupidity that most of the people who supported him are going to rue, to the depth of their bone marrow.
One more time; his speech back in October of 2002, spoken into the teeth of an agitprop campaign by bushCo that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush, showed the mettle of the man. It took intelligence to perceive the things that Obama warned about, and courage; MUCH courage, to utter them.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ba...a'
s_Iraq_Speech
It was made 8 days before Hillary Clinton helped hand George Bush a blank check for the worst foreign-policy decision by an American president since Vietnam.
Not only IS Clinton (NOT "was) way more hawkish on Iraq, and in fact, most foreign policy issues, than is Obama, anyone who hasn't been living under a bridge knows that her sense of entitlement to be the leader of the democratic party (with ever-present help from Bubba) is practically genetic. It's in her DNA.
The notion that she is going to repair to Foggy Bottom and loyally work for Obama's agenda of getting us the fuck out of Iraq (assuming he will really HAVE that agenda...very much not a given at this point...) is, I think, fair to pronounce as the stuff of idiocy.
"Hopeful" doesn't begin to describe his selection of Clinton. Prayerful would be a better word. If she signed a witnessed paper saying:
"I will do nothing to degrade the president's power and influence", it would be worth about what it was written on.
Most depressing about this is the utterly nonsensical idea that he's giving her tent-residency to stop her from pissing IN, to use the old LBJ meme.
A sophomore poli-sci major should know that the Clinton's have less power now than at any time since they left the white house in 2000. She blew the nomination by literally, betting on the success of bush's loon crusade, while throwing her natural constituency, the progressive wing of the party, under the bus, to go haring off after right wing support. The term "politically savvy" should now be consigned to the media toilet, at least relative to Hillary Clinton.
In the Senate, she would be powerless to hurt him. The only people who would buy into a renewal of anything remotely resembling her despicable campaign tactics against him, would be the bloggers now whooping it up with th
the Clinton rehab posse. The Senate leadership would never stand for her trying to undercut him from her Senate seat. That nice, new, majority they will have, is sitting squarely on Barack Obama's coattails.
I don't know why he did this, or perhaps, more accurately, why he allowed it to be DONE to himself.
She will be far more of a political liability inside his administration than she will be, out of it.
Hillary Clinton, just like Joe Lieberman, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of AIPAC, Inc., at the top of whose agenda, is keeping us trapped in Iraq. She has no business being within a mile of Obama's foreign policy.
If he nominates her, it will probably mean two things:
In the mid-terms two years from now, we will lose most of the gains we made this year.
And, he will probably be a one-term president.
I think it highly likely that, at some point in the first two years of his administration, he will either have to fire her, with the political fallout from that, or he will have to tolerate having a rogue Secretary of State manipulating and interfering with his foreign policy decisions. And that will make him look like a presidential eunuch.
I just don't believe that he can control Clinton, nor Bill. And if he can't, the damage they can do to him from having her as head of the State Department, will be astounding.
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