Clinging, clinging to antipathy.

Always good for a column/post on a slow news day.  When you just make it up as you go along, there is reams of material to work with!  The only limits are taste and imagination...so I don't imagine CDS will end any time soon.

Brennan and others probably think it is terribly unfair for him to have been associated with policies he did not, in his words, create. And I'll stipulate that, yes, it's not one hundred percent fair, but appointments should never be a referendum on fairness or sympathy for the potential appointee.

That perspective on our torture regime needs to be stamped out.  Maybe it was just the few defenses of Brennan I read today that argued what he argued in his letter...maybe they are making me severe.  Trying to figure out exactly who created it - Bush, will no doubt be Tenet's answer - everyone who was there played a part. And my position is that if Brennan were appointed, getting a different answer than that would've been almost impossible...

BUT, I had not read this before -

The sources say that Brennan has begun to recruit a team he hopes to bring with him to the agency, and that he has been vetted. Brennan did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

That was a close one.

People who fret that Emanuel, having served in the Clinton White House and on Capitol Hill, doesn't represent "change" needn't worry. Emanuel is very close to Obama, was an adviser during the campaign, understands what he wants to do--and knows that his role is to serve the President.

Obama's meetings with Hillary Clinton and John McCain about playing important roles in his presidency indicated his imagination and his shrewdness,

The wise candidate, the one who sees long, will run the campaign as a preparation for the presidency.

One could argue that's what Hillary was initially criticized for.

Plus

Clinton, in particular, had kept her constituency intact (through HillPAC) and was planning her own Senate agenda, including her own health care program, no matter what Obama proposed.

What is the frickin point of being a Senator if you don't have your own plans?  Baucus, come before us, you dared to plan without permission!!!!!!

That he's "beholden" to Clinton cabinet officers could be used in a very sinister way to belittle Obama's abilities.  It's akin to the way we made fun of the Shrub--Darth Cheney's really runnin' the show etc etc for Ol' HW. Only less true in Obama's case of course. It sort of infantalizes the poor bugger. A resurrection of the Obambi idea floated by Dowd.  indeed their resident hmourist --Iowahawk--appears to have latched unto this narrative with his satire of Obama's appointments.

In Iowahawk's lastest piece Obama has appointed Bill Clinton as Chief Exectutive, where he will have presidential powers  and Obama has given himself the job of Assistant Undersecretary for Housing (a job he's qualified for!)

This is the richer vain for them--mockery about experience and the Clinton's running things behind his back.

Any liberal who bitches about the Clinton appointment is in my opinion is a nascient concern troll who will eventually show him/herself to be part of the GOP machine.

They're stuck in that 30% who are against it which is composed of people who will oppose anything that Obama does, Bush's mid-20s support, and then themselves.

It's a sad fact that this very vocal minority is probably outweighed in the numbers by McCain supporters who see it as a good choice.

She's the most capable for the job; Obama made a good choice in asking her to do it; that's all there is to it.

While I agree about the ridiculous Clinton 24/7 media circus, I'm not convinced that is a terrible thing for a Secretary of State.  The media attention will give Senator Clinton a stature that should help her when she deals with foreign leaders.

From a practical perspective, Obama owes Clinton big time and if the payoff is appointing Clinton Secratery of State, that's not a bad place to put her.  It's becoming clear that the economy and domestic policy will be the first and most important focus of Obama's early administration.  Keeping Clinton occupied on foreign policy will get her out of the way on health care and other economic issues.

Given her stature and the political debts Obama owes her, if Clinton stays in the Senate she would be expected to be given a very important role in generating or passing domestic policy such as health care reform.  Clinton's track record on health care the last time around may not inspire confidence that she would be a good fit to get health care reform actually enacted this time around.

Brad DeLong worked with Hillary Clinton on reforming health care in the Clinton Administration.  This is what he has to say about her performance:

Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate.

I think Clinton learned a lot from her failure and she is certainly much more experienced now that she was at that time, but, still, I can see how her 1993-94 performance may not raise concerns when it comes to her playing a major role in health care reform.  

Putting Clinton at State may be just the thing.  She is a strong personality, but then so is Barack Obama.  Many people think that Henry Kissinger ran U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon Administration.  As Rick Pearlstein makes clear in Nixonland, Kissinger may have been a gifted analyst and a strong National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, but it was Nixon who formulated and ran his own foreign policy.  Kissinger was a very able implementer of what Nixon wanted.

That is not a bad model for a working relationship between Hillary Clinton and President Obama.  Clinton is certainly as smart and hardworking as Kissinger ever was.  She has more experience at diplomacy than Kissinger had when he joined the Nixon Administration.  And Kissinger was at least as big a media whore as Clinton.  Who could forget the Kalb brothers' ridiculous wet kiss, "Super K".  Kissinger's media whoring wasn't much of a liability for Nixon.  It may have made him feel a little jealous and insecure, but the Kissinger media circus did no harm to Nixon's foreign policy.  And, unlike Nixon, "jealous" and "insecure" are not words that come to mind when thinking about Barack Obama.

Unlike Kissinger, Clinton is neither amoral nor a war criminal.  And Clinton did not have to commit treason to audition for the job.

If Clinton makes a spectacle of herself and screws things up -- something I doubt very much will happen -- she will be gone and will be prominently blamed for her own demise.  The media's hatred of her will prove useful.  If Clinton succeeds -- which I expect -- the media will certainly take notice and, the media being the media, they will probably award Obama with most of the credit.

Hey...there's an idea!

my good friend Al Giordano

Why was she better for the position than Bill Richardson, Chuck Hagel, John Kerry or Chris Dodd? Why will the reward be greater than the risk? How does Obama intend to use Bill Clinton and prevent him from becoming a distraction, liability and freelance diplomat? What will a "new" foreign policy look like under old hands?