hillary unveiled

Obama will be joined by Hillary Clinton in Chicago today for a press conference announcing her appointment to his cabinet as Secretary of State, along with some other key members of his team (including the scary-sounding - as in scarily impressive, and also probably scary if you find yourself in a fight with him -Jim Jones). The national security team is shaping up as impressively as the Treasury team.

Of course, this is all in theory. As Politico points out, there has to be a question mark over whether all these brilliant and accomplished men and women can possibly get along. It's not so much a team of rivals as a team of egos. Not necessarily the kind of egos that cause trouble - as in needy, insecure, verging on paranoid - but egos nonetheless. The biggest question mark, of course, is over Hillary herself. I'm optimistic on this point. I wouldn't recommend putting Bill Clinton into this kind of situation - he possesses the first kind of ego and has to be Big Dog or in a different kennel altogether. But I don't, as many commentators do, lump the two together as essentially one person. I think Hillary is a calmer personality, has a very strong sense of public service, and proved during her time in the Senate that she can work quietly with others to get things done without constantly lunging for the limelight. So as long as she can say, "I hear you, Big Dog" and then ignore her husband's advice from time to time, things ought to be just fine.

ps shouldn't they have held today's press conference at 3am?

Comments

[Emily Ng]

The stress on post-conflict reconstruction in Susan E Rice’s expertise, and in the general Obama approach to foreign and security policy, is very timely, and not only because of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some interesting sites on this include:

http://www.csis.org/isp/pcr/

http://www.iiss.org/conferences/global-strategic-review/global-strategic-review-2008/keynote-address/

and across the pond - http://www.stabilisationunit.gov.uk/

At this time when Keynes is flavor of the month in economic policy, it’s interesting to think how far our approach to post-conflict reconstruction has come since, at and after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, he had to argue against a veangeful “peace” (on this, see J M Keynes, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, 1919, and D Markwell, “John Maynard Keynes and International Relations”, 2006).

[peter]

We've been down the path before of having a team of very, very smart people in the White House -- JFK's team, which LBJ inherited -- McNamara, the Bundy bros, Ball, et al -- who took us, self-confidently and arrogantly, into the mess of Vietnam. Let us hope there's somebody in the Obama team with some humility.

[Ian]

Yes I think that's a good point. Although didn't JFK's team contain a lot of brilliant outsiders like Robert McNamara with limited or no experience of governing? In contrast to some of Obama's supporters, I like the dominance of heavyweight Washington players on his team - it's not a bunch of eggheads who think they're going to reinvent government overnight, Camelot-style.