The problem with Hillary

It has been leaked that Barack Obama will soon nominate Hillary Clinton – who just months ago berated his policy of opening talks with Iran as “irresponsible and, frankly, naive” – to serve as his secretary of state. When American presidents bring arch-rivals into their service, the fallout can be fateful. The US arguably owes its possession of Alaska to Abraham Lincoln’s choice of William Seward as secretary of state, and its Medicare and Medicaid entitlements to John F. Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Johnson as vice-president. Ronald Reagan offers the closest parallel to Mr. Obama’s expected move. After his insurgency won the primary in 1980, Reagan reached out to the very political establishment he had trounced and discredited. The consequences of his vice-presidential choice – George H. W. Bush, who had ridiculed Reagan’s domestic policy as “voodoo economics” – reverberate even today.

Many bloggers, noting the heavy representation of Clinton administration veterans among Mr. Obama’s nominees, complain that he has abandoned his message of change. This is foolish. Bill Clinton is the only other Democrat to have been elected president since the 1970s. Any non-geriatric Democrat with executive-branch experience will be a veteran of his administration. “Understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost,” Mr. Obama said this week in Chicago. “It comes from me.” Right on. The prospect of Mrs. Clinton’s ascent pleases 66 per cent of Americans, according to an ABC poll. The nomination makes Mr. Obama look strong, not weak writes Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times.

The problem is that Bill and Hillary Clinton are strong, too. The power they accumulated during Mr. Clinton’s presidency has not dissipated and it has been personalized in a way that may be inappropriate for a country’s top diplomat. The Clintons, like the Bushes, captured their party’s financing apparatus and put it in the service of their family’s advancement. That is a shame, but it is not a diplomatic disqualification.

Mr. Clinton’s post-presidential activities are a trickier matter. He earned more than $10m from speeches last year, some of it from foreign governments. He directs a global charity with 800 employees, making him, in the words of The Washington Post, “something akin to the world’s philanthropist in chief”. Words like “philanthropist” and “charity” do not do justice to the power thus accumulated. Mr. Clinton reaps huge rewards from setting up alternative systems of governance. It is not inevitable that these interests converge with those of the US state department. In becoming a diplomat, or the spouse of a diplomat, a 21st-century charity mogul faces as much potential for conflict of interest as a 19th-century rubber or mining or railroad baron. Mr. Clinton has given the Obama campaign a list of 200,000 donors to his presidential library and foundation. Many members of the Bush administration, including the president and vice-president, owe part of their fortunes to business interests linked to foreign governments. But that was not supposed to be the Obama administration’s standard.

There is no question that Mrs. Clinton has sufficient celebrity to command the attention of the world’s leaders. She is “a global brand,” as The New York Times puts it. But the question of whether she has any real diplomatic experience at all is still as contentious as it was in the primaries. Greg Craig, the former Clinton State Department official and incoming White House counsel, described her travel on behalf of her husband as “largely ceremonial.” A more generous interpretation is that she used “soft power” in matters ranging from international abortion rights to micro-credit. Perhaps she was foolish to pass these initiatives off as grand diplomacy, but they are not nothing.

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