It could be Hillary making that 3am call

Published 04 December 2008

"The heat of a campaign": this was the phrase Barack Obama used to swat away a reporter's question about how he could pick Hillary Clinton to serve as US secretary of state after all that he had said about her. "During campaigns or during the course of election season," Mr Obama said, as his one-time rival stood smiling awkwardly beside him, "differences get magnified."

Magnified is an understatement. For 16 months, Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton traded barbs and insults, hurled accusations back and forth and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads about each other. He dismissed her foreign policy credentials as consisting of little more than sipping tea with ambassadors while she was first lady; she accused him of plagiarism in his much-vaunted speeches. He described her hawkish approach to diplomacy as "Bush-Cheney lite"; she called him "irresponsible and frankly naive" for wanting to meet with the president of Iran. And, in that infamous TV commercial, she played on his supposed inexperience. The ad featured a red phone ringing loudly while children slept in their beds. An ominous voice said it was 3am and the phone was ringing in the White House: "Who do you want answering the phone?"

The supreme irony is not that we now know that Mr Obama, as commander-in-chief, would be the one to answer the phone, but that, in all likelihood, at the other end of the line would be none other than Hillary herself, calling her boss.

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1 comment from readers

max caulfield
09 December 2008 at 03:37

All these seem look set to disabuse the starry-eyed among us of illusions; meantime we shall credit Obama with an accomplished act of politiking. Doubtness we have been too carried away with such nebulous variables as hope and change to see properly that the man is basically just another typical product of his success-driven culture, albeit his strategies so far seems failure-proof.

Granted the abruptness of the credit collapse has intruded to upset his game plan, the politican in Obama still would not have likely taken any odds on faithfully translating foreign affairs promise made on his campaigns into policies. He would in fact be aware all along of the difference between getting the votes and getting to work with the nomenclature.

That is where that Clinton woman comes into. For beside her position would fit into an overall U.S-centric world order, she delivers on primetime attention; with the right spin from on-side media, this particular piece of stagecraft would distract the home audience's perception and graft on a sense of authorship of Clinton (despite disclaimer Bill has his part to play), and hence ultimate responsibility and blame.

The arrangement should work well for both: for all the pretence, Clinton is finished as a presidential prospect and is now poised to go out in a final blaze of glory, and Obama, left to his domestic agenda, can still claim a modicum of a change president.