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I really hate it when readers make ad feminam attacks on Joan Walsh for her supposed personal responsibility for some of the crap published on Salon, but this here takes the biscuit and it is from her own keyboard, is it not?
Like this: she had an international portfolio as first lady. The primary campaign showed pretty conclusively that Hillary had no substantive role in foreign policy as First Lady, since the best she could come up with was that she had been sent to an airbase in Serbia where it was too dangerous for the president to travel, even though he had been there in person two months earlier and survived.
According to Joan the foreign policy differences between Hillary C. and Obama, like the invasion of Iraq and having diplomatic contacts with certain "rogue" nations was overplayed for the purposes of making a good debate in the primaries.
This is BS. These fundamental differences on foreign policy were what the whole debate was about and part of the reason Clinton lost was that the electorate wanted change, and because her claims to eight years of substantive foreign policy as First Lady were shown to be a complete sham when the Bosnia episode and some wildly exaggerated claims about her role in the Northern Ireland peace settlement were the best she could offer.
If Obama offers her the Secretary of State position, it will be as a symbolic gesture towards her wing of the Democratic Party and as a type of affirmative action for women by having at least one in a very high office.
In my opinion Hillary C. would be unwise to turn down the post if offered. She turned 61 years old in October, and has succeeded in parlaying her status as First Lady into an independent political career as the junior senator from New York and has run for the presidential nomination. Four years, or maybe eight as Secretary of State would be a fine conclusion to her late-blooming political career and if she is successful in negotiating the shark-infested foreign policy waters of the present era, the nation will be very grateful and her name will be firmly written down in the history books.
