Fighting Liberals
"rivals" implies competition for the same thing. Hillary and Lieberman compete for the other side. This is not a team of rivals but a team of enemies. Not the same thing.
The simple truth is that in fairly short order, Obama is going to have to make some monumentally tough foreign policy decisions, and he is going to need all the unity in his administration that he can possibly muster.
He cannot afford to be using his appointments to, in some fearful and perverse "bipartisan" attempt to ward off the "too librul" stick, reward the very people who, like Hillary, helped get us into this mess.
We've already heard the "too librul" shreiks. They will continue. That is going to happen if he picks Attila the Hun for his Secretary of State.
The fact is, Hillary Clinton has been part a substantial part of the problems that we, and Obama, are now dealing with. Putting her in as SecState and expecting her to be part of the solution is the stuff of idiocy.
Obama has NO obligation to do re-hab on her. (and Bill) She needs him a lot worse than he needs her, which is why she's now openly pushing for the job. That alone, should tell O. all he needs to know about what she'll be doing at Foggy Bottom.
Hillary Clinton is easily capable of setting up her own little fief at State. If, as is being talked about on the 'net, he has to fire her, it will be a PR disaster for him. And one he can avoid by the simple expedient of choosing someone else.
The costs of rescuing her from her position as a junior senator who is in process of becoming an historical footnote for her shocking loss of a nomination that was practically in her grasp, will far outweigh any "benefits" from picking her.
The old LBJ analogy doesn't work here. With the new democratic majority coming in, if Obama leaves her in the senate, her ability to piss INTO his administration tent will be very limited. He needn't worry about that. She used up any slack she had to go after him, in the wretched campaign she ran against him. The Senate leadership won't tolerate her hammering on him any more. But if he brings her in, himself, and then has to deal with someone who, in her marrow, believes that he has something that belongs to her, that being the Oval Office, then there could be no end to the damage she can do to him.
Which is precisely why the very people who are most responsible for our problems, the conservatives and the neo-cons, are pissing themselves with joy at the prospect that she, with AIPAC credentials that won't whoa, could wind up with the State Department in her hands.
As Myrtle June points out, he has been fending off Hillary and her unprincipled crap for what seems like forever. First in the primaries, and then with she (and Bill's) back-and-forth nonsense in the general.
Let's not forget that, when her dear friend and fundraiser par-excellence, the baroness de Rothschild, in the middle of the general election, made a big show of coming out for McCain; and demonstrated her terminal irony deficiency by parroting the McCain idiocy about Obama's being "elitist", Hillary had
jackshit to say about it. A word from her, a sentence, to the effect of:
"She's my friend but we disagree on this", would have helped neutralize the effect of that. If one was spoken, I didn't see it.
If Obama hands her State, she could root in like some malignant boll-weevil. With all the problems that he's facing, he doesn't need to be dealing with a rogue Secretary of State who's been showing her foreign-policy spots for years now. How realistic is it to expect her to change them overnight?
With her support for Bush's insanity and with her abysmal choice of campaign tactics, Hillary Clinton has made her own political bed.
For God's sake, let's let her sleep in it, instead of giving her the State Department in which to raise hell and further her ambitions.
And here's Oliphant, weighing in. :o)
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/ucl...o_uc/
po20081117
This whole "Team of Rivals" sounds cute and of course, the DC weenie circuit is pimping it like mad. But, the FACT is that it's very hard to pull off without lots of problems coming to the fore as some really good researchers are pointing out on various blogs.
The appointment of Clinton along with the acceptance of Lieberman makes me believe that Obama thinks he can control a lot of difficult people at once. I think he's got some really "tough love" to learn. We'll see.
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