The Hillary Gamble

President-Elect Barack Obama has chosen Senator Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State (SS). She is the third woman to be chosen for the post out of the last four; Colin Powell was only male. She has eight years of experience in dealing with foreign leaders as First Lady plus almost another eight years of dealing with foreign policy issues as a senator. In addition, as a presidential candidate she issued foreign policy position papers and spoke out on numerous related issues. She is well prepared for the post, and her appointment could also go along way toward healing whatever animosity toward the winner that may remain among her erstwhile supporters .

Yet the appointment is fraught with risks. Here are three:

1. The Bill Factor
Bill Clinton is not only a former president, but an active author, speaker, and consultant. What he says and does is big news. Given his record for self-restraint, would you bet heavily that he will say and do nothing that might undermine or embarrass the Obama Administration in the next four years? Obama just did.

2. Presidential Ambition
Does Hillary Clinton still have hopes of becoming president someday?
Of course, she won't say so now, but my guess is that she has one eye on the year 2016.
Although in the early years of our Republic many Secretaries of State went on to become president, the last one who made it all the way was James Buchanan, elected in 1856. Former SS James G Blaine won the Republican nomination in 1884, but lost to Grover Cleveland. (1) The most recent SS to try for president, Alexander Haig in 1988, got nowhere. On the other hand, Colin Powell might have won the 2008 Republican nomination, but he has shown no interest in seeking elective office.
Like Hillary, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes and Edmund Muskie became SS after losing presidential campaigns, but they were then in the twilight of the their political careers, and I do not see Mrs Clinton as viewing herself that way now.
If Hillary wants a future Democratic nomination, she will have to avoid being associated with any seriously unpopular decisions or policies. If Obama someday wants to make a "Profiles in Courage" type of move, Hillary just might bolt out the door. ( A conflict of this type is far more likely to occur in a second Obama term than in the first, since presidents in their last term become more interested in their place in history than in current public approval. )

3. An irrevocable appointment
Barack Obama did not have to hire Hillary Clinton, but once he does it will be virtually impossible to fire her, especially since she is giving up a safe senate seat to the take the job. Most presidents dismiss one or more cabinet members per term, and usually nobody much cares. (Do you recall any massive protests the day Donald Rumsfeld was dumped?)
Unlike most cabinet members, Hillary Clinton has her own substantial base of supporters in the Democratic Party, and dumping her could ignite a firestorm of opposition that could split the party down the middle and trigger an insurgent challenge for the 2012 nomination.
President Truman had good cause to fire General Douglas MacArthur in 1950, but the decision cost him politically, even though the General was not especially popular among Democrats (2). Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all had problems with FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, but none of them had the temerity to oust him, even when he passed the statutory retirement age of 65.
Conclusion: Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State as long as she wants to be while the Democrats hold the White House. Live with it.

Of course Barack Obama knows all this, and is going ahead anyway. Maybe he is trying to reassure the Jews, many of whom were concerned that he would give major foreign policy roles to men like Robert Malley or Zbigniew Brzezinski, both considered hostile to Israel. If Hillary Clinton, elected with the blessing of the top rabbis in Brooklyn and Monsey (Rockland County), is not pro-Israel enough for some people, no one who could possibly become Secretary of State would be. I mean, whom were you expecting, Morton Klein or Daniel Pipes, maybe?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Blaine was the only Republican presidential nominee in fifty years (1856 to 1916) who never became president. (Benjamin Harrison and William Howard Taft won, then lost bids for a second term.)

(2) MacArthur permitted his name to be entered on some state Republican presidential primary ballots in 1948, but did not campaign and got nowhere.

Parallel Lives

"We all remember that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."
Sen. Hillary Clinton, May 23, 2008

Her point was (apparently) that the current primary campaign will continue into June, just as the 1968 contest did. The comparison was less than felicitous for Democrats, since the fractious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to the defeat of nominee Hubert Humphrey and eight years of Republican rule.

Yet the comparison is appropriate, since her career bears many uncanny parallels to that of the late Senator Robert F Kennedy . Here are 17 of them, with the references in parentheses pertaining first to Kennedy and then to Clinton :



1.Both were educated at Ivy League universities.
(Harvard College and Yale Law School)


2. Both wrote best selling books before becoming senators.
(The Enemy Within and
It Takes A Village: And Other Lessons that Children Teach Us)


3. Both worked as attorneys for investigative committees of the US Senate.
(Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices, (The Watergate Ctee.)

4. Both fought to keep Richard Nixon from the White House.
(1960 presidential campaign and the Watergate investigation.)

5. Both played a key role in the election of a family member as President of the United States.

6. Both became close advisors to the President, and were given major responsibilities.
(Attorney General and manager of the Americare health plan.)

7. While the family member was President, both suffered the loss of a close friend to suicide.
(Marilyn Monroe and Vincent Foster)

8. Both were elected to the same seat in the US Senate from New York.
(The sequence of senators: Robert Kennedy, Charles Goodell, James Buckley, Daniel Moynihan and Hillary Clinton.)

9. Neither lived in New York state the year before running for senator.
(Legal residences: Massachusetts and Arkansas.
Actual homes: Virginia and District of Columbia)

10. While both were junior senators from New York, the senior senator was Jewish.
(Jacob Javits and Charles Schumer) (1)

11. Both senators championed determined groups of activists.
(Migrant farm-workers and feminists)

12. Both senators opposed a war they had originally supported.
(Vietnam and Iraq)

13. Both sought the Democratic presidential nomination in a year ending in "8".

14. Both faced tough primary battles with a midwestern senator who had previously been a professor.
(Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota at St Johns College and
Barack Obama of Illinois at University of Chicago Law School)

15. Both won primaries in California and Indiana, but lost Oregon.

16. Both enjoyed greater support among the working class than among the more affluent Democrats.

17. Senator Clinton was embraced by Palestinian First Lady Suha Arafat.
Senator Kennedy was killed by Palestinian Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Not much of a coincidence? Only one other Jew (Herbert H Lehman) was ever elected senator from New York.

Hillary Echoes JFK

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon a nation in this hemisphere launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."
President John F Kennedy, October, 1962

" (If Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons) we will attack Iran....we would be able to totally obliterate them."
Senator Hillary Clinton, May, 2008 (1)

"It is not the language we need right now."
Senator Barrack Obama, May, 2008 (1)

For those pundits who have said that there are no real policy differences between Democratic candidates Clinton and Obama, the real difference cited above must have come as a shock. Mrs. Clinton, who once promised retaliation as her first response to another terrorist attack on the US, is clearly positioning herself as the more hawkish contender. Perhaps she is overcompensating for the presumption that a female president would be less likely to use military force. If so, it is working.

Despite the obvious similarity to the warning made by President Kennedy, Barrack Obama characterized her threat as "language reflective of George Bush." To have compared her to fellow Democrat John F Kennedy might have solidified her standing with those Democrats who never accepted the McGovern/Carter preference for appeasement over confrontation. The Illinois senator, who favors a dialogue with Iran, Syria and other Middle East powers, has aligned himself with the dovish wing of his party.

Obama should have pondered the consequences of President Kennedy's threat to retaliate upon the Soviet Union. Like many Americans of the time, I was apprehensive during the week following the Kennedy speech. But then the missiles were withdrawn from Cuba, within a year the US concluded a treaty with the Soviets banning tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, then the architect of the Cuban missile initiative (Nikita Khrushchev) was deposed, and an era of detente followed. As it turned out, Kennedy's threat was precisely "the language we need(ed)" at that time.

Iran, to paraphrase the late Lloyd Bentsen, is no Soviet Union. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union had rough parity with the US in both nuclear weapons and missiles. (2) Today, Iran has no nuclear weapons, and its nuclear development program is about where the Soviet Union's was around 1947. Moreover, Iran's efforts are under close scrutiny by both the US and Israel; it is more likely that Iran's nuclear facilities will be destroyed than it is that Iran will actually build atomic weapons.

Even if Hillary Clinton is not nominated for President, her threat to Iran is likely to become an issue in the presidential election; the nominees are sure to be asked about it during the debates. I believe that the ultimate powers in Iran (the Guardian Council and Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini) are now paying close attention to the American presidential campaign. If either John McCain or Hillary Clinton is elected President, look for the Iranian powers to dump President Ahmadinejad in 2009 in favor of a less bellicose leader. He is just too dangerous.

If the vitriolic Iranian President could get his hands on an Indiana Democratic primary ballot, I bet he would cast it for Barrack Obama.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Associated Press, May 5, 2008.

(2) Before being elected President, Kennedy claimed that the Soviet Union was actually ahead of the United States in missile technology.

Does Race Still Matter?

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.
And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position.
He happens to be very lucky to be who he is."
Geraldine Ferraro, 1984 Democratic nominee for Vice President

The former New York congresswoman was obliged to resign as a leader on Senator Hillary Clinton's finance committee because of this comment: not because it was false, but because it was politically incorrect. But is there any truth to it?

Barack Obama is an African-American, but in a different sense than the vast majority of black people in this country. His father was a Kenyan, and his mother a white Kansan. None of his ancestors were slaves in America. He never even lived in a predominantly black neighborhood until after college, when he took a job as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago.

Although his first elective office was as an Illinois state senator from a largely black district, he was never a "racial politician" like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. His record of co-operation with white colleagues made it possible for him to win the Illinois Democratic Senate primary in 2004. Just as Senator John F Kennedy famously remarked in 1960 that "I am not the Catholic candidate for President; I am the Democratic candidate for President who happens to be a Catholic", Obama is a Democratic senator and presidential candidate who happens to be bi-racial.

But even though Obama has never "played the race card", might he still benefit from it politically, as Ferraro speculated?

Consider the results of the March 11 Mississippi Democratic presidential primary. The Illinois senator won the primary by taking 90% of the black vote and 25% of the white vote. (1) Since Hillary got only about 10% of the black vote, whites were about two-and-a-half times more willing to vote for a black candidate than blacks were willing to vote for a white candidate. And this is in Mississippi, where in 1964 people got killed just trying to register black voters!

Early in this campaign many important black politicians declared their support for Senator Clinton. But once Obama started winning primaries, these same officials began to switch to his side. No matter who wins the nomination, these politicos could not afford to be perceived as supporting a white candidate when an African-American had a real chance of winning.

Overwhelming black support has also been crucial in Obama's victories in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana.

But Obama has also won in states like Iowa, Wisconsin and Vermont, where the black vote has not been a significant factor. Were these victories due entirely to the senator's positions, youthful good looks and articulate elocution, or was his bi-racial identity also a factor in attracting the votes of white Democrats?

I think the key to the answer that well-educated and upper-income whites choose the Democratic Party because it is the party that stands for justice for the poor and minorities. Upscale white voters know that Democratic policies such as welfare, government-paid health care, and affirmative action programs do not benefit them very much; those who vote Democratic are not voting their self-interest but their concern for the less fortunate. (Democratic support for legal abortion is an exception-----that benefits the middle and upper classes more than the poor.)

Among the field of about ten candidates that originally sought the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama's positions did not stand out as the most liberal; John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich were clearly to his left. In fact, Obama (along with Clinton, Richardson, Biden and Dodd) was always in the center of the Democratic field. But by voting for Obama, the only African-American in the field, the voter was affirming his commitment to racial equality in a way that could not be duplicated by backing any one of the other contenders.

By the same token, a vote for Hillary Clinton affirmed the voter's feminism in way that could not be matched by voting for a man who was equally committed to women's rights. It is no wonder that the two living emblems of identity-politics, Obama and Clinton, have emerged as the surviving contenders for the Democratic nomination.

But what about Ferraro's speculation that "if (Obama) was a woman, he would not be in this position"? But then "he" would be "she".

The best answer is the Yiddish adage:
"If my grandmother would have been a male, she would have been my grandfather!" (2)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1)Associated Press, March 12, 2008

(2) The original "Oib meine bobeh volt gehat ayer, volt ze geven mein zadeh!" has been intentionally toned down in the translation.

Lyrics for Liberals

Older readers will recall how the tune "High Hopes" (1) embodied John F Kennedy's optimism and help propel him to the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Even old readers will recall that "Happy Days Are Here Again" swept FDR into the White House in 1932.

Today's candidates need snappy jingles for their campaigns too; as a public service, the Glazerbeam hereby provides at no charge lyrics for campaign songs for three Democratic contenders. (Some of the music may still be protected by copyright, however.) So sing along with your favorite candidate.

Republican songs are coming soon!

1. Tune of "Bye, Bye, Blackbird"

Hillary's the candidate
The Democrats should nominate
Vote for Clinton!

She can win ev'ry debate
And will carry ev'ry state
Vote for Clinton!

Other politicians want to lead us,
But in between elections they don't need us!

So, Hillary for President
And White House resident,
Clinton, OK!

2. Tune of "Black & White" by 3-Dog Night

His pa was black!
His ma was white!
And everyone says he's very bright!

Some says he' wrong.
We say he's right
The right man to win----this political fight!

3. Tune of "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels

John Edwards' back!
This time he'll win the nomination!
Hey folks, hey folks, John Edwards' back!
John Edwards' back!
He's gonna govern this great nation!
Hey folks, hey folks, John Edwards' back!

He cares for the poor
Even though he's very rich, ah-ooooo,
He can beat Barack Obama.
He can even beat the
blonde senator from New York! (2)
Hey, folks, just wait and see!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) A non-political version of the song was recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1960 and became a big hit. Another version with lyrics like
"Everybody likes Jack,
"Cause Jack is on the right track"
was used at campaign events.
The Kennedys subsequently dumped Sinatra when his mob-ties became too notorious.

(2) Rhymes not always guaranteed.

Talking With Enemies

During a Democratic candidate forum (I won't call it a "debate") last week a "You-Tube" participant asked if the next president should meet with the leaders of "rogue nations" such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela during the first year in office. (This question illustrates how more questions of real substance come from the general public than from reporters)

Sen. Barack Obama said he would, and Sen. Hillary Clinton said she would not be used for "propaganda purposes". Obama cited the examples of former Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, both of whom met with Soviet leaders.

At first, it might seem like the Illinois senator has it right: after all, why not talk with your adversaries? It can't hurt, and you might solve some problems and establish friendlier relations.

A closer look indicates that an ill-conceived summit meeting can hurt, and the examples of Kennedy and Reagan do not make Obama's case at all.

Every President from Franklin Roosevelt to George H W Bush met with Soviet leaders, but the USSR was then a world power of comparable size and strength to the United States. It made sense for American presidents to deal with Nikita Khruschev and Leonid Brezhnev as equals in the international arena. However, none of the "rogue nations" today are in any sense another Soviet Union; for a future US President to have a "summit" with Castro (whichever one is well enough to attend) or Kim Jong-Il would confer upon the rogue leader an unearned status as the equal of an American president. Hillary Clinton correctly noted that this would be a propaganda coup for the rogue.

Since the President of the United States does not routinely meet with the leaders of every nation on earth, a meeting with a rogue leader might be perversely portrayed as a reward for bad behavior. Certainly some foreign politicians, such as President Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, trumpet their contempt for this country as source of acclaim from anti-Americans the world over. A public meeting with such a politician might be an occasion for him to scold the President of the United States before the international press.

The record of past summit meetings is not entirely benign, as Obama apparently believes, but is actually quite mixed. For example, the Vienna meeting between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khruschev in the Spring of 1961 was disastrous: the Soviet dictator perceived our young president as weak, and proceeded to place missiles in Cuba within the next few months. On the other hand, President Lyndon Johnson's meeting with Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, N J, after the Six Day War did cool down tensions between the two great powers. Similarly, President Nixon's state visit to Mao Tse Tung (aka Mao Ze Dong) in Peking ( aka Beijing) in 1972 opened the way to a drastic improvement in US-Chinese relations, which continues today.

For the next President to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is especially problematical, since the latter is not really the highest authority in Iran! The true boss is Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the head of the Guardian Council, who is not known to receive foreign visitors at all. A true summit with Iran may not be possible.

Still, it might bet worthwhile for the next President to meet with Ahmadinejad if the Prime Minister of Israel would be a full-participant in the talks. There is historical precedent for such a 3-way summit: President Carter brought Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin to Camp David in 1977, and the result was a peace treaty that has already lasted 30 years. Getting peace talks going between Israel and Iran is much more important than arranging them with the Palestinian Authority, although it might also be much harder. Since Iran is willing to talk to the US, but not to Israel, the next president could play a useful role in bringing them together.

Meeting between the US President and foreign leaders can be productive, but there must be an agreed agenda and the real potential for substantive progress on specific issues. Otherwise, such gabfests are no more than photo opportunities and public posturing.