What's On Hillary Clinton's Mind?

So what are we to make of Hillary’s outburst?

“My husband is not Secretary of State, I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.”

On the surface, it’s obvious. Hillary Clinton is an ambitious woman with a huge ego. But for most of her career, she has been obscured by her husband’s shadow. With Bill being praised for his solving the North Korea journalist situation, a situation that normally would fall within the purview of her current position, her outburst could merely represent her frustration at being shown up, once again, by her buffoonish husband.

But there is something much deeper here, both for Hillary and for the Democratic party. This outburst likely represent the realization that Hillary has made a huge mistake by agreeing to join Obama’s administration, because she has been minimized, marginalized, and irrelevant-ized. Indeed, by all appearances, she is the least independent, least powerful, and least relevant Secretary of State the country has known in our lifetimes. And, in politics, appearance is everything. Thus, her mistake likely has killed off any chance she has of being elected President.

This situation actually has its roots in 1992. When Bill was elected President, Hillary thought she had been given carte blanche to exercise Bill’s power as a co-president. But her attempts to exercise that power disintegrated under a wave of public criticism that she had not been elected, only Bill had been elected.

Thus, once Bill was safely out of the way, she set out to claim an electoral mandate of her own so that she herself could one day exercise power. And she chose to get that mandate by becoming a United States Senator from New York. But her ultimate goal was always to become the President, not merely a junior senator. Thus, she subsumed her ideological desires to gain a reputation in the Senate as a moderate, in the belief that this would make her palatable to the majority of the American people by defusing the image of her as a socialist, an image that was formed in the health care taskforce debacle.

What she did not count on, however, was that her party would go insane and would seek to nominate not the most experienced or most reasonable or most electable candidate, but would reach out to the candidate promising the most extreme left-wing policies. Thus, while she sold herself as an electable moderate, Obama ran far to her left and knocked off her lethargic campaign. He then went on to defeat John McCain who, to this day, has never been able to articulate a reason for anyone to vote for him.

After this shocking upset, Hillary made her next mistake: she listened to the press, which circulated the idea that she had lost because she had no foreign policy experience. Thus, when Obama offered her the position as Secretary of State, she saw an opportunity to check that box on her resume. Sadly, for her, she did not see the danger.

For Obama, it turns out, is perhaps the most Machiavellian politician the United States has ever produced. He saw the appointment of Hillary as an opportunity to eliminate a possible competitor by stripping his party of a leader that could oppose his agenda. Thus, he appointed her, and promptly tucked her away into the bowels of the State Department, far away from her former political organization and without the power to raise funds or speak her mind. Moreover, to prevent her from gaining the experience she sought and then leaving to lead an opposition, he immediately set about stripping her position of all useful authority. No sooner had her rear end hit the chair, than Obama began appointing special envoys to handled all of the complex and high-profile foreign policy matters normally handled by the Secretary of State. Even Biden was sent to key meetings instead of Hillary. . . slow Joe Biden.

Finally, to solve the North Korea issue, a relatively minor issue in the diplomatic scheme of things, Obama sent Bill Clinton, the very man whose shadow Hillary had been trying to escape, to very publicly achieve what she could not. Obama and Clinton further praised this as a purely private effort, even though it was not, wrongly suggesting that the State Department was irrelevant to resolving this matter.

Thus, not only has Obama stripped Hillary of her political organization, of her base, of her fund raising ability, and of her political voice, but he deprived her of the foreign policy experience she craved and he shoved her right back into Bill Clinton’s shadow. Effectively, Obama has smothered her political aspirations.

But Hillary is not alone. One by one, Obama has co-opted each of the people who might challenge him and made them disappear into the machinery. Governors, Congressmen, and even a few Republicans have all vanished into the bureaucracy. The effect on the Democratic party is actually quite corrosive. While this means initially that they are more unified than is their custom, it also means that they no longer have any leaders waiting in the wings to replace Obama when his term expires. Indeed, if Obama chose to leave politics today, ask yourself who among the Democrats has the stature to run a national campaign to replace him.

It is an odd strategy to destroy your friends to keep them from becoming your enemies, but that seems to be the planning coming from the White House.

Moreover, the Obama people seem quite content to risk the political careers of many young moderate Democrats by forcing votes on issues like cap and trade and the absurd health care reform, which will not satisfy their base but will enrage everyone to the right of Nancy Pelosi. One must wonder, whether Obama would not rather see these moderates -- natural opponents to his agenda -- fail and be replaced by Republicans than to face dissent from his own party? Perhaps, so long as he can keep a workable majority of liberals, he thinks it’s wise to cull these moderate friends?

Whatever is going on, now is not a good time to be an Friend Of Obama.


** As an aside, it turns out that the questioner did not ask about Bill's opinion; the question was mistranslated. He asked about Obama's opinion. I guess the universe does love a good joke now and then. . . Bill, by the way, spent his birthday in Vegas, without Hillary.