Hillary as Sec. of State is a brilliant, though risky, move

Clinton might play bad cop to Obama's good cop
By Steve Clemons

EXCERPT: Clinton deploys ideas, tears them up when they don't work and relaunches them. She's tenaciously committed to results.

If Obama wants to change the strategic game on Iran, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Cuba, Russia and other challenges, he will need partners who are perceived as tough, smart, shrewd and even skeptical of the deals he wants to do. Clinton is all of these.

Clinton may be the bad cop to Obama's good cop. Because she is trusted by Pentagon-hugging national security conservatives, she may legitimize his desire to respond to this pivot point in American history with bold strokes rather than incremental ones.

Bush came into his job focused on making faith-based politics and tax cuts the hallmarks of his administration. He forfeited to Vice President Cheney and his team enormous latitude in defining Bush's national security agenda.

Obama seems like he has no intention of doing something similar. He intends to, in part, be his own secretary of state, focused on re-sculpting America's global social contract and working in partnership with a diverse team of hard-edged policy players like Clinton to make even his rivals do his direct bidding.

This could be a kind of proactive agenda-setting in foreign policy we haven't seen in decades. Obama does not want an ad hoc, reactive presidency -- and he wants to succeed.

Clinton has a lot of reasons to pull cooperatively with Obama and may want to help America achieve a new strategic direction and establish a new global equilibrium -- securing Obama's place in history, and her own.

For full article, see: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/19/clemons.hillary/