Madame Secretary: Hillary at State

Of all the possible outcomes of the Obama-Clinton primary battle, one that I'm sure hardly anyone expected was that Hillary would end up as one of the most highly regarded Secretaries of State in US history. Foreign Policy has a big feature on her tenure this week, focusing on the quiet way she arranged for the US to shelter Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng without upsetting US-China relations. According to FP, the professionals at State love her, and I just heard the same from an old acquaintance of mine, a Republican who has worked his whole career in Foggy Bottom and says Hillary is the best Secretary in 25 years. She has meanwhile achieved a new sort of media celebrity, appearing on numerous magazine covers, being followed by obsessive bloggers, and being the focus of a brief twitter craze. She is clearly a remarkable woman, and a remarkably hard worker.

I suspect, though, that Secretary of State is a better job for her than President would have been. She is not a natural politician like her husband, nor an orator like Obama, and her public pronouncements often leave people scratching their heads. While running for Senate in New York she said she had always been a Yankees fan, and this led to a chorus of disbelieving hoots, even though it is true: she has always been a Yankees fan. A better politician would have told this story in a way that helped rather than hurt her campaign. She also seems to lack the whatever-it-is (gravitas? stature? megalomania?) required to pose convincingly as leader of the free world.

If not for her fatal error in letting George W. Bush intimidate her into voting for his Iraq war, she probably would have been President. To me, though, that was no small slip. She never had a good explanation for the vote, leaving everyone to think that she was just hoping the war would be a quick success, thus avoiding any blemish on her career. It smacked of wanting someone else to take the hard decisions, or of being too worried about any taint of feminine weakness to do the really strong thing by standing up to stupid militarism.

But how many people would make good Presidents? Vanishingly few, it seems. At State Hillary has found a job that uses her strengths, and I cheer her success.