Commentary by Margaret Carlson Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Washington is the most hierarchical city. Regardless of which private school the Obamas choose for their children, they will soon learn that any fifth-grader can discern the difference between a deputy secretary versus an assistant secretary of defense, of the gulf between those who have portal-to-portal limos and those officials limited to the at-work pool of subcompacts without cup holders.
So why would Senator Hillary Clinton put out word yesterday that she’s perfectly happy to remain 68th in seniority in the 111th Congress, junior to Charles Schumer, in the greatest yet slowest deliberative body in the world?
It will be a long time, if ever, before she becomes majority leader. Health-care reform, even in partnership with Senator Ted Kennedy, is less likely to be carried out than is progress in talking Iran down from a nuclear bomb.
Sure, Iran’s president is almost as tough as the insurance industry, but in the current financial crisis, the likely domestic agenda over the next few years is to save the economy.
As for Clinton holding onto her presidential ambitions, in 2016, whether she’s a senator or Cabinet secretary, she will be approaching 70. I hate to be the one to say this, but in politics and TV, women age in dog years. She will be seven times as old as John McCain, and he was considered too old.
In contrast to being senator, to be secretary of State is to be one of one, not one of 100. You whisper in the president’s ear and he in yours. You are royalty abroad, meeting, with or without conditions, with heads of state around the globe. You fly on an Air Force Boeing jet configured to your specifications. Trumpets herald your entrance, governments hang on dispatches from your “full and frank” discussions.
Dicey Process
One wonders if Hillary’s avowed happiness on Capitol Hill has anything to do with conditions that Barack Obama imposed before making a hard offer of the job. Bill Clinton mightily resisted revealing information about his many enterprises during his wife’s presidential run. Would he do it now to secure his wife a Cabinet job?
It’s a dicey process, and lawyers for Clinton are working hard on it. The Clintons, who file taxes jointly, have made truckloads of money since leaving the White House, when they were so strapped for cash they took furniture that wasn’t theirs.
The minimum disclosure Obama wants would have Bill clear all paid speeches with the White House, and make public major past contributors and all donors of any sort going forward. He would also have to disclose any business ventures. This means his complicated dealings with billionaire superbachelor Ron Burkle will remain secret, but that any future ventures will not.
Escape Hatch
Hillary might want an escape hatch if Bill balks for other reasons. He’s used his former presidency to recreate himself not just as a man of financial mystery but as a shadow secretary of State with his Clinton Global Initiative, his foundation and his presidential library. He reports to no one, much less to Obama, who still rankles him.
It’s one thing to have Obama become the real first black president after comparing Clinton’s legacy unfavorably to Ronald Reagan’s. It’s salt on an open wound to have his wife working for the usurper. Bill is still hurt, if not petulant about the whole thing.
Hillary brings baggage other than her husband. She’s not a good manager, as her campaign’s turnover and cash shortfall revealed. While she will have people to actually run the department and its thousands of employees, it won’t go smoothly if she chooses people like Mark Penn and the since-forgotten Ira Magaziner, who shepherded her health-care initiative to its death in 1994.
Nobody Rolls Hillary
Still, Bill Curry, former counsel to President Clinton and candidate for governor of Connecticut, points out how useful it is to have someone in the job who is a peer of other foreign leaders as well as White House staff.
“Secretaries of State can be rolled by national security advisers playing palace politics inside the White House, as Warren Christopher and Cyrus Vance were. Nobody’s going to roll Hillary.” Curry adds that with Hillary at his side, Obama won’t need Defense Secretary Robert Gates “to back him up on drawing down forces in Iraq. In the future, he could send in Hillary in lieu of an actual invasion.”
Despite the no-drama-Obama ethic, the president-elect has the best of both worlds by proposing Hillary for the job: Offering it to a rival pleases independents and burnishes his reputation for self-confidence; not having to give it to her, pleases the base and netroots who can’t forgive her for the war or her claim that she was under sniper fire in Bosnia.
Too Big to Fire?
To the difficulty of firing someone so prominent, if George W. Bush could quickly accept the pro-forma resignation of Colin Powell, one of the most highly regarded people in America at the time, Obama could do the same with Clinton.
For Hillary, I don’t see a downside. One of the criticisms that stung her most since leaving the White House was that her power was merely derivative of Bill’s. She couldn’t have become senator from a state she’d only visited as a tourist had she not been a first lady whose favorability rating climbed to 60 percent from the very low-40s only after Monicagate. It’s hard to imagine anyone who has gained more from sexual favors she didn’t dispense than Hillary Clinton.
After a grueling, tenacious campaign that came close to making her the first female presidential nominee, Hillary became her own woman. Leaving the Senate for a world stage would confirm it.
(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
