Posted November 19, 2008 | 09:59 AM (EST)
Courtesy Of The Huffington Post
It is said that Barack Obama has read Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, about the war cabinet of Abraham Lincoln. It is said Obama wants to constitute his cabinet out of former rivals because he liked the book and he models himself on Lincoln.
Implausible as it sounds, this is the best explanation anyone has given of the offer of the position of secretary of state to Hillary Clinton. Lincoln took William Seward at State, and Seward was a rival indeed, but he had fought for Lincoln with ferocious loyalty and all his eloquence throughout the campaign, and he put his considerable vote-getting power at Lincoln's disposal. What can be said for Hillary Clinton? She fought against Obama until the last possible moment, and on the way exploited, for the purpose of discrediting him, most of the devices the Republicans would later tap in the general election. She said Obama had not shown himself fit to be commander-in-chief. She pretended not to know for sure whether or not he was a Muslim.
Team of Rivals is a pleasant work of popular history, only harmful to the extent that you weave fantasies around it. Anyone who cares about Obama's fortunes after his first large public mistake (for even to offer Clinton the position was a mistake) should close his copy of Goodwin and open the actual words of Hillary Clinton on Iraq, and the things Barack Obama said about those words.
It may seem an incidental detail but none of the people in Lincoln's cabinet had a husband who was a former president with a pronounced need to be at the center of the national stage at all times. Why not repeat the truth? Barack Obama's election was a real breakthrough, without precedent--something he did by himself with the help of a million workers who were not working for Hillary Clinton. When the reading is done and the analogies played out, we should also admit that no two situations in history are much alike.
The wars President Bush has involved this country in, awful as they are, don't in any way resemble the Civil War: not in magnitude, not in necessity, and not in the domestic threats that can be supposed to attend them.
Is Obama's misstep part of a larger pattern? Signs going as far back as July, and as near as yesterday, from persons "close to Barack Obama" ranging from Patrick Leahy to Cass Sunstein, have suggested there ought to be no serious investigation of crimes around domestic surveillance and torture. What of the hundreds of Bush appointees sown throughout the departments and the agencies? These people's ideas of right and wrong will come in part from what the new administration shows itself to care about and what it prefers to disregard. Indifference in this setting is not magnanimity.
Tuesday the Democrats voted to allow Joe Lieberman to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. Lieberman did his worst to tear down Barack Obama in 2008 by questioning his love of his country and his fitness to lead a secure government. Compare Lieberman and Clinton now with another person who has been mentioned for secretary of state, Chuck Hagel. Hagel accompanied Obama on his foreign tour even as Lieberman accompanied McCain. That we are not now at war with Iran may also be owed in part to a courageous letter that Hagel wrote to Admiral Fallon last October, on the recklessness of American saber rattling--this, when Clinton and Lieberman were voting the AIPAC line and saying, with docility, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was a terrorist organization. They hoped if there was a war it would be over by the election.
Any president needs around him people of courage, judgment, and competence who share his fundamental views. If Hillary Clinton all along fit that description for Obama, why did he not tell us so? A party in control must in some respects resemble any other institution that hopes to maintain itself. Reward those who sap and undermine, and you likewise discourage those who are loyal. People will practice the bad arts that they see are profitable. And who that voted in 2008 was looking to have a government of reconciliation without truth?
No comments:
Post a Comment