A lot of talk has been going on over Hillary Clinton’s appointment to Obama’s Secretary of State Office. Kimberley Strassell of the Wall Street Journal says it is all political. Read it here [1]. Excerpts below:
The actual motivation? Short term, Mr. Obama understands his real struggles are going to be in the Senate, where he will need 60 votes. Left there with nothing but a potential future run against Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton would be tempted to use her position to highlight her differences with the sitting president. Even as a junior senator, she could gum up his works. Mr. Obama does not need that. The job at State all but eliminates this threat. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton will be barred, both by law and by custom, from partisan politics. She’ll have to dismantle her extensive political operation, and end the patronage that has earned her continued loyalty. There’s arguably also not enough time for Mrs. Clinton to make her mark as secretary of state, and find a reason to break with her boss, and piece back together her empire, and get into a presidential race….
His onetime rival will also have plenty of leeway to go rogue. The State Department is traditionally hard to rein in, and Mrs. Clinton has insisted she also be free of traditional constraints. She’s demanded the right to staff her department with her own people. And while national security advisers are often more powerful than secretaries of state, she wants the ability to circumvent that position and go directly to Mr. Obama. This is the stuff ugly internal disputes are made of….
The Obama team is combing through the hundreds of thousands of donors to Mr. Clinton’s foundation. Those papers surely contain compromising conflicts. There was good reason the Clintons have always refused to make that information public.