The Lion and Gun

At the moment I'm wrapping up Doris Kearns Goodwin's excellent book. (Lest anybody accuse me of bandwagoning, let it be known that I purchased it and have been slowly reading it since long before Obama's victory and transition.) Obviously the book has gained popular currency recently, especially with buzz about President-elect Obama potentially pulling former rival Hillary Clinton into his cabinet as Secretary of State. (I've already made some preliminary remarks on the subject here.) 'Team of rivals' is a good way to describe such an administration -- but a poor philosophy for building it.

Cliché tells us those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it. And there's some truth in that. But it does not follow that those who understand history can repeat it at will: what has worked in the particular circumstances of the past usually fails in the particular, and different, circumstances of the present.

There were plenty of good reasons for Abraham Lincoln to bring his rivals into his administration -- a new and fragile Republican party, a fragile nation headed for war. Today's challenges are certainly great, but they are nothing like what faced the new President in 1861, and the Democratic party is much stronger and more unified than the Republicans under their first President. Lincoln's decision to tap the talents of Edward Bates, Henry Seward, and Salmon Chase was fueled by the daunting challenges facing his administration. I fear that Obama's decision to tap the talents of Hillary Clinton has been fueled by a best-selling book.

There are arguments in Clinton's favor. For one thing, she's smart as hell. She's tough and determined. She's relentless. All of these are good qualities for the face of the nation's foreign policy, and they should not be underestimated. There are other benefits as well, some of which haven't been given much attention elsewhere. But the appointment, assuming it comes to pass, brings with it some significant problems. And many of Clinton's attributes political bloggers stress strike me as being hollow or not particularly useful. (I also think it's interesting that, from what I've seen, bloggers whose primary interest is domestic policy or political process seem to be celebrating the decision, whereas bloggers more focused on foreign policy tend to have considerable reservations.)

Beyond her innate abilities, Hillary Clinton will bring a significant amount of political capital to the State Department. Obama might be crafting the kind of star-studded cabinet that will strike fear into the hearts of Republicans. Clinton will bring with her the good will of Congress, the Democratic party, and a significant chunk of the American populace. All of this will help to clear any domestic roadblocks to Obama's conduct of foreign policy.

Clinton's star-power will also raise the profile of the (already high-profile) State Department. If Obama intends to shift the fulcrum of foreign policy conduct further from Defense to State this is a good way to do it. With somebody as famously tough as Clinton at the reins, voters (and political rivals) will be less likely to accuse an Obama administration's focus on diplomacy as weak-kneed appeasement. For the President's domestic agenda, but also for much of his foreign policy, he'll have to rally his grassroots, twist arms in Congress, and convince the American people to get behind him. Clinton can help with that.

Senator Clinton's familiarity with the levers of power in Washington -- and, even more importantly, her high profile -- will allow Obama to concentrate more on the gargantuan domestic policy challenges facing the nation without sacrificing Americans' trust on his ability to handle myriad foreign crises and entanglements. This might be the most important reason for choosing Clinton. There are many other candidates who could manage delegated foreign policy and the State Department as well as, or better than, Hillary Clinton. But there are perhaps none that are better known and would be better trusted by the American people.

Here, however, is where we start getting into thornier problems. Does Obama really want to outsource foreign policymaking to a State Department run by Hillary Clinton? Probably not. Surely one of the lessons of the early Clinton years was that the most important political decision making takes place in the West Wing, not at Foggy Bottom. And in the primaries Clinton staked out a substantially different (and more hawkish) foreign policy vision than Obama. He'll have to keep her on a tight leash.

How will Clinton react to that? Obviously she desired to be President. It's not a well-kept secret that she feels herself more qualified than Obama, and there's been little love lost between them even since the convention. Will she work well in a subordinate role? In public surely she will, just as she heartily campaigned for Obama in the general election. She might not always be so happy to back down in private. Of course, disagreement within policy-making circles, if handled right, can be a good thing. But many of Clinton's advisers have more spleen and less to lose by venting to the press, and the Clintons have always presided over a leaky ship. Obama is famously averse to seeing behind-closed-doors backbiting splayed across the front pages of America's newspapers, but that's exactly what we saw in the final four months of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Of course if such disputes do end up leaking, as they probably will, it would prove embarrassing to Obama. (An un-amicable or forced resignation of his Secretary of State, taking with her a sizable chunk of the Democratic party, could potentially hobble his administration.) More importantly, they could seriously undermine the conduct of American foreign policy.

So, too, could the many (and possibly shady) dealings Bill Clinton has had with foreign leaders. I have written previously about this and won't belabor the point. Let me just stress that impropriety isn't the issue so much as the perception of impropriety. Bill's business connections and donor lists could cause serious (or perceived) conflicts of interest that further complicate American foreign policy. His ties in Kazakhstan, whose oil fields are jealously eyed by powerful neighbors, are especially problematic.

Meanwhile, the qualities most observers have focused on strike me as being overestimated or not particularly useful. The first, and most easily dispensed with, is that Clinton will heal divisions within the Democratic party. What divisions? Didn't Barack Obama just win the election? Any divisions that remains, obviously not fatal, will be erased (if they can at all be erased) by his conduct as President. If there are any voters who refuse to vote for Barack Obama four years from now because he had the temerity to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 primaries, they either have serious attachment issues or other (more or less legitimate) reasons that are really causing their opposition.

The second, and perhaps most often-mentioned, attribute is Clinton's worldwide popularity. I question, first of all, the veracity of this statement. I don't mean to deny Clinton's popularity, simply its degree. On this point I'm genuinely uncertain, but it seems to me that it was her husband who was really popular overseas. At any rate, I can remember seeing polling during the primaries (I can't recall the source, I'm afraid) showing that, out of a number of foreign democracies, Obama was supported over Clinton by wide margins in all countries save Israel and Britain. Certainly Clinton couldn't draw a crowd of 400,000 at the Victory Column in Berlin.

More importantly, I question the usefulness of having a popular Secretary of State. Sure, it will improve America's reputation abroad, but I think the returns are pretty marginal considering how much and how quickly Obama's election has done that already. Which is as it should be: it's the President who should be popular worldwide, not the Secretary of State. She needs to be the bad cop. Henry Kissinger, arguably the most successful Secretary of State of the post-war period, did not exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feeling worldwide.

Of course, Hillary can be (and often has been) a bad cop. That's another of her supposed qualities, in fact -- she'll be a tough and shrewd negotiator. And I don't doubt her toughness, but I do her diplomatic skills. So far in Clinton's political life her two greatest endeavors, health care and an election campaign, both failed in large part because of her inability to fruitfully resolve conflicts. Building a 1,300 page fait accompli without involving any of the stakeholders is exactly the wrong way to manage a huge a complex negotiation, but that's what was done with health care in 1994. More recently, Clinton's inability to forge a working relationship between the strong personalities on her own campaign team was at the heart of its failure. (And those were all people dedicated to a single goal!) It was, above all else, Clinton's indecisiveness and unwillingness to fire problematic advisers that had her campaign vacillating between different tactics and messages and leaking angry conversations all over the place. This raises doubts about both her ability to lead the huge bureaucracy she'd be placed in charge of as well as her ability to conduct fruitful negotiations between recalcitrant parties.

Others have vaunted Clinton's foreign policy experience and working relationships with foreign leaders. But today's crop of foreign leaders has changed from what she and her husband dealt with in the 1990s, and the extent to which she had a serious working relationship with any of them has been exaggerated by her partisans. So too is her vaunted experience. What experience? I thought that was revealed as bullshit during the primaries. Certainly Clinton has plenty of political experience doing plenty of political things, but foreign policy? She's never been a diplomat, she's never negotiated foreign treaties, she's never studied or written about international relations or foreign policy. The closest she's come (and this is really not so very close) is her seat on the Armed Services Committee.

And, I suppose, the sniper fire in Bosnia.

In all seriousness, this is the claim that I take the most issue with. The received wisdom of Clinton's experience stems from a mostly uncritical acceptance of a carefully crafted political narrative. Clinton has had more experience than Obama, yes, but not more than most professional politicians in their early sixties. And very little of her experience is relevant to a potential position at the head of State. She is, for all intents and purposes, a neophyte, and this was revealed in some of her foreign policy stances and statements (extending America's nuclear shield over its Middle Eastern allies!) during the campaign.

This is one myth I wish would be slayed.

Finally, there's been plenty of attention paid to what this will mean for Clinton's political prospects, or else how it plays politically for Obama. Does it remove a potential problem for his agenda in the Senate? Possibly, but I doubt Clinton would have (or could have) posed much of a threat from the Upper House. She could certainly do more damage, intentionally or not, to Obama's administration from the State Department; more importantly, she could do more damage to America's foreign policy than she could from the Upper Chamber. On the other hand, as I've said, she'll bring with her a store of political capital for Obama to share, so I think that's a wash. And as for Clinton's own ambitions, as Ezra Klein suggests, they are probably realistically at an end. 2016 will be the year for Mark Warner or Brian Schweitzer or someone yet to emerge. Hillary's star hasn't faded yet, but it will. If she still thinks she has a chance, Governor of New York would be a better place to build her movement. If she doesn't, Secretary of State could be her crowning achievement and lasting legacy.

As Barron YoungSmith points out at The Plank, Barack Obama's own national security adviser-in-waiting, Jim Steinberg, warns against this kind of choice in an upcoming book:

"An examination of how [post-WW II] national security teams functioned suggests some general conclusions about the do's-and-don't's of the appointments process. On the whole, decisions to appoint all-stars or worthies without significant previous personal connection to the candidates has, with the important exception of Kissinger, proved problematic. At best, they have been marginalized or ignored in the decision-making process ... at worst, they have caused significant disruption as a result of being seen as not team players."

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Have errands left over from the weekend; will be back and blogging this evening.