Media reports are suggesting that the Barack Obama transition team is mulling over none other than Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Other candidates include Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar and Governor Bill Richardson.
Hillary Clinton might be a good fit for Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton has some foreign policy experience as Senator and before that First Lady. But there are some factors mitigating against Hillary Clinton being offered the job of Secretary of State or having been offered the job her accepting it.
Senator Hillary Clinton is just sixty one, with the prospect of perhaps twenty or more years in the Senate if she so chooses. She might even become a candidate for President again in 2012 should Barack Obama stumble. The job of Secretary of State is considered the cap of a successful career in public service. It is true that three early Secretaries of State, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, subsequently become President, but none have in the modern age.
Rumor has had it that Senator Hillary Clinton had been in line for a Barack Obama Supreme Court nomination. A Supreme Court appointment, unlike that of Secretary of State, is a life time job with the prospect of decades of influence. The term of Secretary of State would only run a few years.
Even though she doesn't come from an academic or foreign service background, Hillary Clinton would be a good pick, from a Democratic perspective, as Secretary of State. Barack Obama also may think he will have eliminated a rival for 2012, just in case he should become less popular then than he is now. That may not be the case as there is no barrier, constitutional or otherwise, for a Secretary of State resigning and then running for President.
Barack Obama may also want to consider that Hillary Clinton, still somewhat ambitious, might be a poor fit for a job like Secretary of State that would require her to subordinate her policy preferences to that of the President of the United States. Senator Hillary Clinton attacked Barack Obama for being "naïve" on foreign policy issues. If she believes that would Hillary Clinton be willing to execute that same foreign policy naiveté as Barack Obama's Secretary of State?
The State Department bureaucracy has often served a role of undermining the foreign policy of the President it technically answers to. Bill Gertz, in his latest book The Failure Factory, documents how the State Department bureaucracy, among others, helped to undermine President Bush's War on Terror. Imagine a State Department with a Secretary of State with her own foreign policy ideas following a course independent of that of the President. It would be a prescription for chaos and uncertainty. People are already apprehensive about Barack Obama's tendency to appeasement. Barack Obama does not need even the possibility of a rogue Secretary of State, especially one like Hillary Clinton, who might still want his job.
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