Where’s Hillary?
For the first time in my memory…and my memory goes back a long-long way…a non-administration lawmaker appears to be calling the foreign policy shots of the United States rather than the administration elected to do so. Yesterday Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, took center stage to declare that 4-star general Stanley McChrystal’s plan for adding 40,000 troops in Afghanistan “goes too far, too fast.”
Furthermore, last week, Kerry, the defeated 2004 presidential candidate was the White House’s point man during climactic talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Kerry’s stunning emergence leads to the question “where’s Hillary,” the woman who was made secretary of state? Indeed, where has she been on Middle East questions? The White House is being represented there by former senator George Mitchell. All the while, the ostensible Prince Hamlet in these matters…the one voters elected as commander-in-chief…is largely silent, promising not to hurry with his assessment of reinforcements which has already taken him many weeks to ponder… even though Gen. McChrystal termed it necessary to have an immediate decision. Her non-involvement makes the nation’s leading Hilary will be the 22-year-old actress, model and song-writer, the woman whose first name has one “l” and is surnamed Duff.
Several conclusions that can be drawn by Kerry’s precipitate move to center spotlight:
1. As usual, Obama is more worried about the political temperature of the Left in this country than the nation’s possibly losing a war. Kerry is a favored spokesman for the Left, centerpiece of Obama’s base and his media appeal. Kerry’s role is obviously to soothe the rabble.
2. Hillary Clinton made the most devastatingly wrong decision of her life to abandon the Senate where she had independence and a tremendous forum. Now she’s being treated like another foreign service official instead of a policy-maker. She’s not even in control of her own future and can be relieved at any time at Obama’s pleasure.
3. It’s clear that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod) are influencing crucial decisions on foreign-military policy, decisions neither one of them have the background to make. Rosencrantz told Prince Hamlet (Obama) that if he approves major reinforcements to Afghanistan, he will “own” the war in the same way LBJ came to “own” the war in Vietnam after Kennedy’s death. And Prince Hamlet is loathe to decide. He wants to test the waters with the all-important Left by using Kerry to send signals…the self-same Kerry whose Vietnam record he had soiled by testifying against his fellow U. S. soldiers, accusing them of committing atrocities…and whom was later found to be lying when he had written that he ventured to Cambodia as a soldier.
4. And the distinct disapproval of the electorate as seen by the polls has likely caused Hamlet to disapprove of his advisers—particularly Guildenstern (Axelrod). The scenario last night on “60 Minutes” which had Axelrod full of misgiving by not being home in Chicago to tend his epileptic daughter gives a subliminal message. While no one doubts the daughter is ill—and sympathy should be extended to the Axelrods—the fact remains that he knew from the outset when he took the White House job that he couldn’t spend the time he wished with her.
Ergo: it would be best all around—for the ill daughter, the Axelrods and the country—if he left the White House. You can judge that the hint given on the compliant CBS was made to pave the way for his departure—before next year’s elections which may well serve as a repudiation of an administration whose highlight concluded on Inauguration Day…everything else having turned to ashes. That would leave Rosencrantz (Emanuel) who does not have to make an excuse for leaving because his departure would be seen as an epiphany for whatever resurgence the administration might find within itself to propel.
5. Of all of them, Hillary Clinton is distinctive because it’s clear
that in contradistinction to the president, Emanuel and Axelrod, she is an American patriot. (I would include Vice President Biden in that category but his erraticism is so pronounced…proposing to divide Iraq into thirds for example…that his instability and inability to distinguish between roundhouse bar bravado and the truth makes his patriotism useless). It would be wise of her to resign her post and return to New York and prepare to run for the governorship.
The salivating heir apparent-wannabe to the highly incompetent David Paterson who said originally that he had never wished to be governor is Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the lean and hungry Cassius. Hillary Clinton could likely take the nomination from Cuomo. If elected governor, she would be in a much better situation from which to be a valuable independent critic of the hugely incompetent Obama. Age 62 now, she could make a run for the presidential nomination in 2012 against Obama when she would be 65. Or if she chose to be decorously loyal, she could run against a likely Republican president in 2016 when she would be 69—just under the age Ronald Reagan was when he took the oath the first time: 70.
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