James Baker, former Secretary of State under Bush Snr. and a very wise old bird, agrees with Thomas Friedman that the central question about Obama's appointment of Hillary Clinton is, will they/can they form the relationship to make this work? Here's what he said on Meet The Press yesterday:
With respect to Senator Clinton, she's got the qualifications. She's
extraordinarily intelligent. Her appointment, should it come,
will be well-received by a lot of people around the world... But the key is going to be
whether or not she and her president are seamless in their approach to
foreign policy issues. As I think Tom Friedman wrote in a column last
week, a, a foreign leader can see daylight between a president and his
secretary of state from a thousand miles away. So she will
be successful depending upon how seamless she is with her president and
how they operate together and how he protects her back and vice-versa,
how he formulates foreign policy, she picks up on that formulation, and
she implements it.
You can pretty much forget all the other speculation about how this will work out. This question is really the only one that matters. And it's one that only two people can answer with any authority.
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