Hillary Clinton To Accept Sec. State Position: Guardian

Talks were heating up that Hillary Clinton may become the next Secretary of State. Since word leaked out Obama and Hillary met in Chicago, neither camp has moved to dispel the rumors.

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

Obama’s advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton’s foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.

Clinton would be well placed to become the country’s dominant voice in foreign affairs, replacing Condoleezza Rice. Since being elected senator for New York, she has specialised in foreign affairs and defence. Although she supported the war in Iraq, she and Obama basically agree on a withdrawal of American troops.

Clinton, who still harbours hopes of a future presidential run, had to weigh up whether she would be better placed by staying in the Senate, which offers a platform for life, or making the more uncertain career move to the secretary of state job.

At the moment, the Guardian is the only news outlet reporting this story and other sources, such as CNN and The Washington Post are still saying that the Obama campaign is simply vetting both Clinton’s as part of Obama’s decision-making process.

If it’s true, though, I’ve got to agree with Joe Gandelman’s assessment that it is a smart pick on Obama’s part:

From a policy standpoint, a Clinton choice makes great sense.

She has a built in reservoir of good-will throughout the world and during the primaries she was at her best during debates when she talked in detail about foreign issues. And if she has ambitions? It would mean she’d work all the more harder to help formulate and implement sound policies. Plus: she knows how to build coalitions.

Gandelman also links to this Bob Shrum essay about what a “Team of Rivals” Obama Presidency might mean:

Obama may not be Lincoln—no one is. But thankfully he isn’t plagued by the insecurities and self-doubts that have crippled other chief executives. A self-possessed John F. Kennedy could tap his previously far more powerful rival, Lyndon Johnson, for vice president and appoint prominent Republicans to his administration.

Johnson, on the other hand, could hardly bear to be in the same room with Robert Kennedy. After Johnson assumed the presidency, he didn’t even want RFK in the same White House. Whether he would have heeded Kennedy’s doubts about Vietnam is unknowable. But it is undeniable that Johnson stoked a rivalry because he could not abide a team.

Also on the weak side of the ledger is Richard Nixon, who was alternately paranoid about and disdainful of Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller; and Jimmy Carter, who appeared to take a self-defeating satisfaction in alienating Ted Kennedy. One thing we know for sure: if your vice president is Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle, you have a towel carrier, not a teammate. (On the other hand, if your vice president acts like you’re a nuisance and sends signals that he runs the government, you have a different sort of problem.)

On the strong side, Ronald Reagan not only picked George Bush, Sr. as his running mate after a long primary battle, he also tapped Bush’s campaign manager, Jim Baker, as White House Chief of Staff. Bill Clinton elevated his long-time southern rival Al Gore to the vice presidency.

However, no one in our time has taken up the notion of a team of rivals as fully as Barack Obama, perhaps because no one had crystallized it in the American imagination until Goodwin wrote her book. Still, what Obama is doing is not the product of a book, but of his character. He repeatedly returned to the idea of Clinton as a possible vice presidential nominee before turning to the Senate’s senior Democrat on foreign policy, Joe Biden. Virtually no one took the idea of Secretary of State Clinton seriously until Obama quietly, surprisingly, made the possibility real. Obama is unafraid to be surrounded not only by the best talent, but by the brightest stars. He does not fear being outshone.

While I generally agree with Shrum, he is wrong in one respect — there is simply no evidence that Hillary Clinton was ever under serious consideration as a Vice Presidential running mate, especially considering the fact that she was never seriously vetted for the job the way she apparently is being vetted for Secretary of State.

That said, I generally agree with Shrum that Obama’s apparently willingness to consider bringing rivals, and bitter rivals at that, into his Administration displays something we don’t always see in President’s.

Whether it will work is another question.

As anyone who has read Team Of Rivals will tell you, relationships among the various members of Lincoln’s Cabinet were not always good. At times, it seemed that the rivalries that had existed among the men in the fight for the Republican nomination in 1860 had not gone away, and seemed to harbor ambitions of unseating Lincoln 1864. It was only the “fierce urgency” of a crisis that threatened to tear apart the Union, combined with Lincoln’s strength of character and political skill, that kept the Administration from descending into chaos. Time will tell if Barack Obama faces similar challenges.

Written and reported by Doug Mataconis of Below The Beltway.