Collins on Hillary for Secretary of State

Funny but serious

Op-Ed Columnist
Hillary for Secretary?
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By GAIL COLLINS
Published: November 15, 2008
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Is she going to be Barack Obama’s secretary of state?
It’s been quite a while since we’ve had an opportunity to discuss the Clinton-Obama dynamic, and it does feel good to be back. Forget bankrupt automakers and retail sales numbers. It’s May, and we’re in Indiana arguing about gas prices.
Barack and Joe and Hillary, together again. Just like the YouTube debate, only with more maps.
Obama invited Clinton to Chicago this week for a talk. It isn’t entirely clear whether he offered her the job. But if it was just a courtesy get-together, he really should have tried texting. Now he’s got her fans geared up all over again.
On Friday, a speaker at the City University of New York Women’s Leadership Conference mentioned the story about Hillary’s possible appointment and several hundred women burst into applause. All around the country, the news reminded old Hillary supporters of a nagging pang of disappointment, the feeling that the great election bandwagon had left something behind.
Good luck telling them that it’s actually going to be John Kerry.
While there are many excellent arguments for offering Clinton the job, one of the best is that until now, Senator Kerry was supposed to be the front-runner for State. Does that sound right, people? When one is out searching for the nation’s top diplomat, does it make sense to pick a guy who gets low scores in sociability? Although Kerry has many excellent qualities and his children appear to be very fond of him, if there was a contest for Senator You Would Least Want to Have a Cup of Coffee With, he would be a good bet for top 10. Politicians often brag that they never forget a name, but Kerry is one of those guys who can’t even remember a face.
Clinton is the exact opposite. Plunk her down anywhere and she’ll catch sight of somebody who she met at the Conference of Concerned Problem-Solvers and engage them in a spirited dialogue on what’s going on with that muskrat preservation project in East Engorvia. And she can do that abroad, too, since — as was mentioned a time or two during her campaign — she has already visited 82 countries.
True, there’s 112 countries to go before she runs the table. All the more incentive for her to make sure Obama gets a second term. And on a slightly more elevated level, there’s the fact that the rest of the world would be thrilled with her appointment. She would give our diplomatic outreach a power and gravitas that it hasn’t had for years.
I know, my little Obama hyperpartisans. You spent a year of your lives trying to keep Hillary out of the White House because she voted to let the Bush administration invade Iraq. And now, your man is talking about letting her be the point person on foreign policy. What happened to the transformative change?
We have been through all this before. Candidates who promise to bring everybody together are talking about meeting in the middle. The only people who think Barack Obama is a radical are you and Joe the Plumber.
On Friday, the junior senator from New York was keeping her own counsel. She made a scheduled appearance at the New York State Public Transit Industry Fall Conference in Albany and assured the unexpectedly large delegation of reporters that she was not going to say anything that they would be interested in hearing.
While that did not exactly move the story forward, the event did throw some light on one surprising part of the nation’s current political dynamic. Has anybody noticed how eager Democratic senators seem to be to get out of the Senate? Really, we were under the impression that a safe Senate seat was quite a cushy gig.
The thing is that although there are indeed occasional perks, like fawning staff and an official three-day workweek, a senator’s calendar does tend to get crammed with many variations on the theme of Public Transit Industry Fall Conference. Secretaries of state also go to a lot of boring meetings; however, very few of them take place at an Albany Holiday Inn.
But I digress. Here are four good reasons why Hillary Clinton would be a great pick for secretary of state:
1. She would not let the vice president run our foreign policy. Joe Biden is no Dick Cheney, but we just do not want to go there again. We have scars.
2. Obama could live out his fantasy of following the Abraham Lincoln model and filling his cabinet with a team of rivals without having to make Sarah Palin secretary of commerce.
3. Clinton already has a supply of pantsuits sufficient to get her through six months of peace negotiations in the Middle East without coming home for a change of clothes.
4. She might do a terrific job.