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I have no doubt Hillary Clinton is conflicted about the SoS job! She can't take it and run against him in four years.
Hillary knows well all the things that can go wrong in four years. If he is a dismal failure early on, not only can she resign SoS and run against him in four years, I would say she has a duty to do so.
However, let us hope that that doesn't happen. I hope Obama's presidency will be a great sucess -- even though he faces some of the most difficult circumstances of our time.
She may be too old to run in eight years.
Or not. She will be only 68 -- which is younger for women than it is for men. If she is in vigorously good mental and physical health and has done good service, she will emerge with undeniable foreign policy experience. If Obama has two terms of great success and she has done well, he may even endorse a run by her.
She certainly can't sit around in the senate being obstructionist.
Well, she could, but I don't think she would be good at this. She is essentially a team player.
They're both neutralized. They get on board or they get out of national politics.
Has Hillary shown any recent indication of not being on board. The worst Hillary-hater (Crumbs entire archive here is Hillary hate) cannot deny the vigorous campaigning that Hillary and Bill have done for Obama. Also, she is hardly neutralized -- if by that you mean without her own power -- for other reasons.
1. The Clintons are political powers in their own right. They have position, history, money, and connections.
2. Those 18 million voters. Go to The Daily Beast and read their little survey about how angry women still are about sexism in the media. If Clinton decides to run in 2016, there will be enormous pent-up feelings about "Now it's our turn." If the media continues to treat women candidates as they have, they could actually contribute to an enormous women's backlash.
But never forget who the boss man is. The boss man is *in charge*.
Well ... not always. For instance, it would be fairly easy to argue that in Bush's first term, Cheney was in charge.
I think its hilarious that people (right, left and, er, Clintonista) think that because he is a nice, polite, well spoken and articulate man, everyone assumes Obama is not a bare-knuckled politician.
Oh, I think Obama can be bare-knuckled ugly -- or at least he can get people to do this on his behalf, but four to eight years and even the most blushing and innocent bride (the public) realizes that her man can be sort of farty and stinky in the morning.
Most Clintonistas -- as you call them -- complained that Obama lacked national-level experience and did not complain that he was nice, full of integrity, or below using scurrilous charges spread by others to advance his own agenda. In other words, unlike most of the idealistic left, we never had any idealism about him to lose.
I was disgusted by the way he deserted his integrity to support the bad FISA bill and to voted diametrically opposed to his previous promise on telecom immunity. Obama voted for telecom immunity. Senator Clinton voted against it.
Obama has used, cleverly, the tendency of people to actually see him as Obambi and to rush to protect the poor little deer. He won't have that anymore. Few people believe he is Bambi anymore. He's a grown up now. He's that stag on the bluff. Everyone (the media and competitors beyond Clinton) will be eager to knock him off of it.
And the drama goes on. The mistake is assuming that the drama is created by the Clintons. The drama -- as we should have been able to glean this last week -- is created by the media. You can read may conflicting accounts from so-called reliable sources from multiple sides on the SoS drama. Neither the Obama camp or the Clinton camp needed to create it.
We did. We, the people, created it and we keep feeding it. Moreover, we like it when we are treated to near-imaginary sources. We gobble outright lies. We ignore the political intentions and the corporate backing of the media. We have eagerly enjoyed the celebrification of our politicians. It is we, the people, who continue to make possible the salivating pronouncemnts of people like Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly.
Such is our yearning to believe.
"There's a sucker born every minute." -- P.T. Barnum
