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Britt Combs: Is Obama Sidelining Hillary?

Appointment of Clinton to State Department may be the best way to keep her out of mischief.

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By Britt Combs | The McDowell News

Published: December 2, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama appointed his nemesis, Sen. Hillary Clinton, secretary of State this week, among other cabinet appointments. Subject to Senate approval (a done deal, of course) she will become Washington's chief diplomat.
Of course, the appointment was suspected weeks in advance and there was endless fascination among the cable TV talking heads about who was leaking the news; Hillary's people or Obama's people.
Chris Matthews of MSNBC in particular devoted dozens of segments of his show to speculating on what Obama could be thinking. He, like so many of his competitors, drew endless comparisons to Abraham Lincoln's so-called "team of rivals," including the bloodthirsty war enthusiast, Secretary of State William Seward.
A better comparison might be Richard Nixon's appointment of William Rogers to that post. A long-time associate – Rogers had served as attorney general in the Eisenhower administration along with Vice President Nixon – Nixon killed several birds with one stone by putting him in at State.
For one, he owed Rogers a certain political debt, as all politicians do. He had deep disagreements with Rogers, however, on matters of foreign policy, according to PBS's "American Experience."
Installing Rogers at State allowed Nixon to preserve his image as a hard-line anti-communist. But Nixon and his friend Henry Kissinger had every intention of directing foreign policy from the Oval Office. Rogers having no credentials as a diplomat and no connection in diplomatic circles, Nixon thus achieved a weakened and disorganized State Department that could be made to stay out of the way.
With Kissinger as national security advisor, the president was able to circumvent diplomatic channels through State just as the circumvented Defense and the Pentagon. As the "American Experience" program noted, when the Oval Office launched their history-making overtures to Red China, State was kept in the dark.
Perhaps that's what Obama has in mind. Certainly, as he pointed out ad nauseum during the primaries, Hillary has no diplomatic experience whatsoever, no more that Obama himself has. As drunken intellectual Christopher Hitchens said recently, her foreign policy experience is limited to making a fool of herself by making up a ridiculous lie about getting shot at in the former Yugoslavia.
According to many pundits, Obama's choices for his national security team send a bold message. With Jim Jones as national security advisor, and the retention of Bush-holdover Bob Gates as secretary of Defense and Hillary at State, Obama has signaled a departure from his dovish, anti-Iraq War campaign stance, they say.
But whatever can be read into the Jones and Gates appointments, his Clinton choice may have had nothing to do with her hawkish position on the war.
Perhaps he intends to marginalize Clinton, shutting her in at State just as Nixon did with Rogers. By giving her nothing to do, and running the diplomatic show himself, he can relegate the most roguish Senator on Capitol Hill to the sidelines, making it difficult or impossible for her to pursue her ambitions of global domination.
Perhaps he even intends to sabotage her career, giving her some high-profile mission and then setting her up to fail. Only Obama knows, and he's inscrutable.
What else could he be thinking? She has only had one paid job in her life where she worked for someone else – at Arkansas' Rose Law Firm, where she did a lousy job and got everyone in trouble. She has never demonstrated any capacity for subordination or team play.
She and her husband will be subjected to a level of scrutiny of their finances and business relationships they have never endured before. Bill Clinton has promised to reveal the donors to his presidential library and to stop taking foreign donations, and to subject his speaking engagements to White House approval.
He is incapable of transparency. He lies even when the truth would do just fine, just to keep in shape. He will embarrass the new president repeatedly, habitually. And when he does, the Clinton machine and their apologists at MSNBC will call it a witch hunt and the politics of personal destruction. Watch for it.
Obama's cabinet announcement press conference Monday morning revealed a level of subtle irony I had not suspected before. In an echo of Bill Clinton's similar press event before his own inauguration, Clinton invited his appointments, such as Secretary of Labor Bob Reich, to speak to the press. In order to make himself appear tall, Clinton had appointed a bunch of shrimps. As each appointee disappeared behind the lectern and craned their necks to reach the microphone, Clinton appeared to be a giant of heroic stature.
Poor Hillary had to endure a similar humiliating posture when she made her comments Monday, behind a lectern sized just right for Obama. She looked like a child. Perhaps it was just an accident, but perhaps he did it on purpose. Anyway, it was funny.

McDowell News reporter Britt Combs has often said that coming up with witty taglines for his collumn each week is the hardest part of his job. His opinions appear each Wednesday (or most Wednesday, anyway) in The McDowell News. He welcomes your e-mails.