Hillary, the Great Right Hope

In the 2008 election cycle, brimful as it was of astounding surprises, unforeseeable twists, and shocking results, perhaps nothing was more jaw-dropping than the change of the viewpoint of conservatives towards Hillary Clinton.  As the campaign began, Jerry Falwell said that not even a presidential run by the Devil Himself would energize the religious right more than having Hillary as an opponent.  By its end, not only were people urged to actually cast a vote for Hillary by no less a conservative eminence than Rush Limbaugh, but there was no shortage of conservative wistfulness for Clintonian moderation and fiscal sanity as compared with Obamian neo-Marxism.

Yet a strange thing is happening as President-elect Obama puts together his staff.  We were expecting William Ayers for Secretary of Education, Noam Chomsky for Secretary of Commerce, and Cindy Sheehan for Secretary of Defense.  Instead, the list of Mr. Obama's appointments reads like a slate for, not a Carter administration redux, but a third Clinton term.  The voters who thought they were getting extreme-leftist Change must be having heartburn, assuming they're paying attention.

And top of the list is what appears to be Mr. Obama's choice for his highest-ranking appointment: the office of Secretary of State.  Hillary Clinton was infamously passed over for the vice-presidential slot; but if news reports are to be believed, it's looking pretty likely that she will rule over Foggy Bottom instead.  Her lawyers are preparing the various background information necessary for vetting her fitness for the post, and even Bill Clinton has said he's willing to do what's necessary in his own business affairs to make her acceptable.

It's sad that it's come to this, but for conservatives, the appointment of Hillary Clinton to the office of Secretary of State would be probably the best news we could hope for from the new Obama administration.

Hillary the Hun

James Carville, Democratic uber-strategist, famously said that "If [Hillary] gave [Obama] one of her cojones, they'd both have two."  This is a crude way of saying what a lot of people have discovered, in many cases to their sorrow: the Clintons, and Hillary in particular, do not like to lose, and will do almost whatever it takes to win.

Isn't this a characteristic that we want in a Secretary of State?  Consider: we are in two hot wars, and at least one (perhaps as many as three depending on how you count) cold war.  Now is not the time for Obamian unicorns and rainbows; now is the time for knocking together heads that ask for it, wielding the iron fist in the velvet glove, and not worrying if the velvet glove tears off so that the iron shows through.

Hillary has always had an iron fist.  Bill, for his part, is pretty good at the velvet glove shtick, and, at the tail end of her campaign, Hillary finally seemed to be learning that soft art as well.  The Clintons are masters of making nice when it works and making nasty when the situation demands it - just what the times call for.

Contrary to the belief of some, the Clintons do seem to have at least some core beliefs, not all of which are anathema to the right.  For the first half of the primary season when Iraq was going poorly and Mr. Obama was rising to victory on the back of the antiwar left, every political pressure was in favor of Hillary disavowing her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion - and she wouldn't.

She danced around, saying that she hadn't really intended Bush to handle things the way he did (doubtless true, Mr. Bush probably didn't intend things to work out that way either); that she vehemently opposed his incompetent early conduct of the war (she's surely not alone there); and that we needed to be more multilateral - all defensible positions.  Never once did she flat out say that her vote was a mistake or that the world would be a better place with Saddam Hussein still in it, even at the cost of the nomination.

It's pretty clear that, when you come right down to it, the Clintons don't really want the United States to be defeated in a war any more than the right does.  Would Hillary, like John McCain, rather lose an election than lose a war?  One can argue that, in fact, she did.

We cannot hope for a more hard-nosed, realistic Secretary of State from the Obama administration; we could do far worse.  When the phone rings at 3AM in the White House, alas, we know who'll be answering it; just as well to have someone with a realistic world view taking calls at the State Department.

It Takes a Woman to Clean House

For many years, the Department of State has distinguished itself by its almost total independence from the President's nominal authority and its willingness to sabotage and torpedo Presidential strategies with which the bureaucratic mandarins do not agree.  This problem contributed greatly to the early failures in Iraq, but its history goes back much further.  The Secretary of State needs to be someone who is not willing to take No for an answer - and also, someone who is not willing to take Yes for an answer when the Yes is a lie, even an adroitly-delivered one.

Hillary herself does not have a great deal of experience with whipping recalcitrant bureaucracies into shape, but actually running the DoS hierarchy is not really the Secretary's job; there's an undersecretary for that.  What Hillary brings to the tale is a forceful temper and a massive address book of people who do know how to get the job done.  We don't know exactly who she would appoint as her assistants, but again, we can be sure they're more likely to actually a) care about our national security and b) be able to effectively pursue sane policies than those of other possible Obama picks.

The Knife in the Back

There's one more reason why conservatives should applaud this choice: the Clintons hate Mr. Obama.  They are too politically astute to say so openly, of course, or even to act so; whereas we expected Hillary to campaign for Mr. Obama in as negligent and ineffective a way as possible, she actually hit the trail with sufficient vim as to forever squelch any accusation of being a traitor to the cause.  She did her Democratic duty in full measure; no Joe Lieberman she.

This doesn't mean Mr. Obama can rest easy on his pillow.  If there's one art of politics at which the Clintons excel, it's the strategic knife in the back.

Bill and Hillary not only know what to do for maximum impact, and when; they know how.  There will come a time, sooner than later, where Mr. Obama will wish to pursue a foreign policy that would, in explainable fact, be disastrous for American security.  This will be the moment that Hillary chooses to execute her own foreign policy, save the day for America, take the credit, and discredit Mr. Obama's incompetent leadership.

Is that the way our government should be run?  No.  It is not.

To the contrary, it's a sign of the dire straits we are in that the very possibility is a source of relief.  But if we are to be led down a dangerous road, there needs to be somebody standing athwart it yelling "Stop".  It won't be the conservatives; nobody listens to them anymore.  So let it be Hillary.

Who knows?  We may yet wind up voting for her.  These days, the strange and the bizarre seem positively normal.