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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Clinton's Presidential SOS

I'll call these splattered speculations, since they're even looser than the usual scattered ones. Eric and I have been puzzling over the noises about Obama's possible offer to Clinton of the position of Secretary of State, and, more puzzling initially, noises about Clinton's possible acceptance of it.

Given what we know of the no drama Obama's machine discipline from the campaign, the first thing to discount is any sense that we know enough to know anything if what we know is said to have "leaked" from Obama's direction.

But assuming the information is good or at any rate goodish, and that the offer were to be made, and Clinton were to accept, what exactly are the players thinking here? In a nutshell, my calculation is nudging along these lines:

In a reasonably successful and hence spectacularly popular 8 year Obama Administration, SOS is a higher profile and more Presidential position than Clinton is likely to wangle otherwise as Junior Senator from NY, a position from which to launch her own bid for 2016 as at once a continuation of a successful and popular Administration with which she is strongly associated while at once recapturing the energy of an historic Presidential election (no doubt calling to mind the joy of our moment). Biden is likely too old to harbor Presidential hopes to stand in her way. Everything else equal, it's incomparable positioning for Clinton -- if what she's positioning for is specifically Presidential, rather than, you know, simply doing great good as a public servant, which she could also clearly do as Senator.

But it occurs to me that SOS positions Clinton well in other scenarios we might contemplate as well as the rosy one I sketched already and hope for. If the troubles Obama confronts yield especially painful reckonings -- as they so easily might do, the scale of inherited Killer Clown clusterfuckery considered -- if his Administration gets pitched as less successful and less popular, it occurs to me that Obama could do far worse than to switch Biden to SOS and Clinton to VP to re-energize the base for a tougher battle in 2012.

I think even a difficult and less popular Obama will be hard to beat, especially since I don't think Republicans will have had time to adjust to changed circumstances. Their socially reactionary base will demand red meat and that will translate to electoral dead meat for Republicans for the foreseeable future in an ever larger majority secular multicultural America.

But I think Clinton can recalibrate her image through SOS to appeal to some of the "independents" who might otherwise peel off a less successful Obama while retaining the high-energy of her loyalists. Even continued difficulties in a second term won't alter the fact that as VP she is frontrunner for 2016, and given my sense of America's demographics and the world situation in 2016 the White House would very much be hers to lose. From Obama's position the choice gives him a measure of desirable control over Clinton, not to mention, to be less cynical, a consummate politician with a lot to admire among other things.

While the leaks caught me very much by surprise when they occurred, and seemed quite puzzling to me initially -- and I still don't think they're gospel, even of the aprocryphal variety -- things look a bit more plausible to me this afternoon. We'll see.

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