Hitchens Hates Hillary

Christopher Hitchens at Slate wants the Senate to reject Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He says:

"Why is Sen. Clinton, the spouse of the great influence-peddler, being nominated in the first place? In exchange for giving the painful impression that our State Department will be an attractive destination for lobbyists and donors, what exactly are we getting? George Marshall? Dean Acheson? Even Madeleine Albright? No, we are getting a notoriously ambitious woman who made a fool of herself over Bosnia, at the time and during the recent campaign, and who otherwise has no command of foreign affairs except what she's picked up second-hand from an impeached ex-president, a disbarred lawyer, and a renter of the Lincoln Bedroom."

The guy has a point. I’ve never been a big fan of H.C., and her ridiculous performance in this election cycle didn’t win me over. That being said, I think Hitchens underestimates Hillary’s abilities and overestimates Bill Clinton’s potential influence on Obama’s administration.

Since when does the Secretary of State dictate foreign policy? Condoleeza Rice is an extreme example of how impotent a Secretary can be. I doubt Hillary will be as toothless, but I can’t imagine her openly defying Obama on questions of importance. He’s the boss, and if she’s openly insubordinate to a successful and popular president, she’s not going to win herself any votes in 2012 or 2016. She’s smart enough to realize that, and so is Obama, and so is Bill.

I don’t think Obama’s team is, as Hitchens puts it, “wide eyed.” They dealt with the bad Bill Clinton during the primary, after all (I’m thinking of the “race card” incident). They know he has uncomfortably close ties with all kinds of shady foreign characters. Obama was adept at handling both Clinton’s during the primaries when he was their rival. What makes Hitchens so sure that he’ll be unable to manage them when he’s the Boss Man?

Clinton Was Part of the Problem!

In 1997 Bill Clinton passed a law that nearly eliminated capital gains taxes on real estate. The result:

"…many economists say that the law had a noticeable impact, allowing home sales to become tax-free windfalls. A recent study of the provision by an economist at the Federal Reserve suggests that the number of homes sold was almost 17 percent higher over the last decade than it would have been without the law."

Are we all still sure that we want to hold Clintonism up as the ideal economic model?

Obama's Economic Appointments

A close friend of mine told me this morning that he “wished he had voted for Hillary.” Why Hillary? “At least we would have known what to expect,” was his answer. He was upset at Obama’s recent appointments to high level economic positions within his administration. "Where is Krugman?" my friend wondered. He believes that Bill Clinton bears a portion of the blame for the current economic disaster. After all, his main economic advisor was Alan Greenspan and if we’re going to blame “the last 30 years” of economic policy for our current predicament, we can’t arbitrarily ignore eight of them.

Because Clinton and his faintly neo-liberal economic team bear at least some blame for our current mess, my friend argued, then the last thing we should be doing is putting the same guys back in power to fix the problem that they had a hand in creating.

That’s a fair point, but only if you believe that economic policymakers are the ones who are going to fix the economy by themselves. As my Dad pointed out, one of the primary responsibilities of political leadership in a crisis is to instill confidence, and to banish fear. It was FDR who said in 1933, after all, that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Even if you have a sound economic framework, it’s not going to be ok unless people are willing to spend and invest their money. And they’re not going to do that unless they’re confident that they’ll be protected.

So Obama has two priorities for the next several months: first, to ease people’s fear; second, to appoint people who are capable of fixing the structural problems.

The calm and deliberate manner in which he’s made his economic appointments will go far in easing people’s fears. When Joe Shmoe turns on the TV and sees that several Clinton advisors are back in power, he’ll think “well I didn’t do so badly during the 90s. Maybe things aren’t as bleak as I had feared.” The hope is that at some point in the not-so-distant future, Joe Shmoe and the rest of us will start investing and spending again.

That being said, my friend’s concerns about the structural changes that will be made to the economy in the next six months are well-founded. As my friend put it, if your drunk friend just drove your car into a wall, you wouldn’t let him drive it again just because he promised he was sober. You’d get the DD.

So is it a good idea to bring in the people who helped screw things up to help fix everything? Obama seems to think so, and from what I’ve read in interviews and short biographies, these guys seem to recognize that times have changed and that their economic ideologies need tweaking. Will it be enough? Or will we shortly revert to free-market ideologies that help the rich and screw everyone else? Who knows, but I’m 100% certain that we have a better chance with Obama than we ever would have had with McCain. Or Hillary for that matter.

At the very least, I hope I persuaded my friend to give Obama a chance to be inaugurated and make policy before he jumps ship. Was I successful? And are there other already-disillusioned Obamacons out there? We’ll see on both counts.

Hillary @ State

It looks like Obama's going to offer H. Clinton the Secretary of State cabinet position. Andrew Sullivan, for one, likes the idea. I'm not so sure. It would be hard for any politician, especially one as self-assured and ambitious as Clinton, to become suddenly obsequious when you've just come off a hard fought and bitter campaign. Especially when you were passed over for VP.

As for Obama, it will be nice to have someone of Clinton's stature negotiating with foreign powers, although Bill Clinton's ties to multinational corporations and shady foreign leaders makes me nervous. Plus, I thought the whole point of Obama winning the primaries was that we wouldn't have to deal with the Clintons in the White House this year. So Obama had better be a really good people-manager if he wants to take advantage of Clinton's leverage without sabotaging his own position.

And in all honesty, I really wanted to see Bill Richardson get State. I think he's a straight up guy, he was an early supporter of Obama after he dropped out of the race in spite of his close ties to the Clintons, and he's a link to the Latino demographic that helped get Obama New Mexico and Colorado.

Maybe the final question for Obama was where he wanted his biggest rival: in the Senate, where he'd have little control over what she did but where her attacking position might be limited; or in the White House, where he could control her more effectively but where she has the potential to do some real damage.