Obama's Other Wife
by Tina Brown <http://www.thedailybeast.com/author/tina-brown/>
<javascript:void(0)>
<http://media.thedailybeast.com/ext/rss/author/tina-brown/rss_tina-brown.xml>
[image: Tina Brown]
<javascript:void(0)>| <javascript:void(0)>
|
<javascript:void(0)>
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-13/obamas-other-wife-1/full/>
|
<javascript:void(0)>
<javascript:void(0)>
*[image: Barack Obama, Putin]Alexey Druzhinin, AFP / Getty
Images<javascript:showCheatImage('http://www.tdbimg.com/files/2009/07/12/img-article---brown-clinton-obama-and-putin_22303941172.jpg')>Maybe
the hatchet isn't completely buried? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave
her first major address Wednesday as secretary of state, but President Obama
might have stolen the spotlight. At the same time that Clinton was laying
out her foreign-policy vision at the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama
appeared in the Rose Garden to make an announcement about health care. As
Jason Zengerle at The New Republic points
out<http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/07/15/battle-of-th%20e-cable-news-stars.aspx>,
"If the White House wants to put the kibosh on stories about Hillary being
hamstrung... this isn't going to help." Below, Tina Brown on how Clinton
became the invisible woman at the State Department over the past six months.
*
It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa.
Consider the president’s Moscow trip a week ago. In a cozy scene at Vladimir
Putin’s dacha, the boys enjoyed traditional Russian tea and breakfast on a
terrace. Sitting on Putin’s right was the Russian foreign minister, Sergei
Lavrov. Where was Lavrov’s counterpart? She was back home, left there with a
broken elbow to receive a visit from the ousted Honduran president, José
Manuel Zelaya.
It becomes clearer by the day how cleverly Obama checkmated both Clintons by
putting Hillary in the topmost Cabinet job.
Same thing last month, when the president stopped off to see King Abdullah
en route to his oratorical home run in Cairo: no Hillary. Nor was there any
sign of Middle East envoy George Mitchell or anyone else from the State
Department on the Saudi leg of the trip, even though its main mission was to
recruit Abdullah into a peace-making partnership with Israel. The king told
Obama no, by the way, so it’s fair to ask whether the president could have
used a bit more Foggy Bottom prep work. Jim Hoagland
noted<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002936.html>
in
Sunday’s Washington Post that the White House’s leak of Obama’s decision to
send an ambassador to Syria took Clinton’s State Department by surprise and
trumped State’s efforts to squeeze another concession or two out of Damascus
first.
Hillary finds herself in a familiar bind with a different twist. If she
allows daylight between herself and the president, she becomes the kind of
lame duck Colin Powell became once foreign powers realized the ex-general
was nowhere near Bush’s inner circle. It becomes clearer by the day how
brilliantly Obama checkmated both Clintons by putting Hillary in the topmost
Cabinet job. Secretary Clinton can’t be seen to differ from the president
without sabotaging her own power. And ex-President Clinton has been
uncharacteristically disciplined about not threatening the careful political
equilibrium his wife is trying to maintain. Besides, when Hillary had her
own deep misgivings about taking the job in the first place, it was Bill who
seconded Obama and encouraged her to accept.
The Big Dog’s sacrifice (and, maybe, Hillary’s revenge) is that he no longer
can behave like a roving superstar diplomat without a portfolio. He has been
curtailed in how freewheeling he can be running his successful Clinton
Global Initiative. It was an apt symbol when, in May, with the
administration’s approval, he was made U.N. special envoy to Haiti. Obama
hasn’t just dethroned the potential queen. He’s turned Bill Clinton into
Prince Philip—Port-au-Prince Philip, in fact.
Any discontent over this turn of events, however, is locked in the basement
of the Clintons’ house in Chappaqua. Hillary, with her usual iron discipline
about the big picture of power, is behaving like a stalwart team player.
Before she took the job, she was assured she could pick her own trusted
team. Yet she was overruled in appointing her own choice for deputy
secretary, Richard Holbrooke. Instead, she was made to take an Obama guy,
James Steinberg, who had originally been slated to become national-security
adviser. (Hillary took care of Holbrooke, one of diplomacy’s biggest stars,
by giving him the most explosive portfolio—Pakistan and Afghanistan.) She
lost the ability to dole out major ambassadorships, too. A lot of these
prizes are going to reward Obama fundraisers instead of knowledgeable
appointees like Harvard’s Joseph Nye, whom she wanted to send to Japan.
Even when there’s legitimate credit to be had, she remains invisible.
Contrary to administration spin that Joe Biden played a critical role in the
decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, the vice president stayed
opposed to Obama's strategy. It was Hillary, sources tell me, whom the
president relied on throughout the deliberations with principal
national-security advisers to support and successfully argue his point of
view. The need to paper over the difference between Obama and the vice
president meant Hillary’s role went unacknowledged.
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-13/obamas-other-wife-1/full/>Page:
1
2<http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-13/obamas-other-wife-1/2/>
[image:
Right]<http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-13/obamas-other-wife-1/2/>
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
