Not what she signed up for

Dick Morris writes in The Hill:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding that her job description is dissolving under her feet, leaving her with only a vestige of the power she must have thought she acquired when she signed on to be President Obama’s chief Cabinet officer.

Since her designation:

• Vice President Biden has moved vigorously to stake out foreign policy as his turf. His visit to Afghanistan, right before the Inauguration, could not but send a signal to Hillary that he would conduct foreign policy in the new administration, leaving Hillary in the role of backup.

• Richard Holbrooke, the former Balkan negotiator and U.N. ambassador, has been named special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He insisted on direct access to the president, a privilege he was denied during much of the Clinton years.

• Former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine), negotiator of the Irish Peace Accords, was appointed to be the administration’s point man on Arab-Israeli negotiations.

• Samantha Power, Obama’s former campaign aide, who once called Hillary a “monster,” has been appointed to the National Security Council (NSC) as director of “multilateral affairs.”

• Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s new national security adviser, has announced an expansion of the membership and role of the NSC. He pledges to eliminate “back channels” to the president and wants to grow the NSC’s role to accommodate the “dramatically different” challenges of the current world situation.

• Susan Rice, Obama’s new United Nations ambassador, insisted upon and got Cabinet rank for her portfolio, and she will presumably also have the same kind of access to Obama that she had as his chief foreign policy adviser during the campaign.

So where does all this leave Secretary of State Clinton?

While sympathy for Mrs. Clinton is outside the normal fare of these columns, one cannot help but feel that she is surrounded by people who are, at best, strangers and, at worst, enemies. The competition that has historically occupied secretaries of State and national security advisers seems poised to ratchet up to a new level in the current administration.

Hillary’s essential problem is that she is an outsider in the current mix. She was the adversary in the campaign, and Rice and Powers — at the very least — know it well, having helped to run the campaign that dethroned her. Can they — and she — be devoid of bitterness or at least of normal human trepidation? Not very likely.

The fact is that the power of the secretary of State is not statutory, nor does it flow from the prestige of the post’s occupant. Former Gen. Al Haig, once supreme commander of NATO and chief of staff to President Nixon, found that out when he was undercut as secretary by the White House troika of Mike Deaver, James Baker and Ed Meese. Bill Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general and Nixon’s California confidant, found himself on the outs from the moment he became secretary of State, with Henry Kissinger soaking up all the power through his direct access to Nixon as national security adviser.

The power of the secretary of State flows directly from the president. But Hillary does not have the inside track with Obama. Rice and Powers, close advisers in the campaign, and Gen. Jones — whose office is in the White House — all may have superior access. Holbrooke and Mitchell will have more immediate information about the world’s trouble spots.

So what is Hillary’s mandate? Of what is she secretary of State? If you take the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan out of the equation, what is left? One would have to assume that the old North Korea hands in the government would monopolize that theater of action. What, precisely, is it that Hillary is to do? The question lingers.

And for this she gave up a Senate seat?

Mr. Obama obviously heeded the ancient wisdom of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" in offering Hillary the post of Secretary of State.

I have no doubt that he was very much aware that of all the people who have a vested interest in seeing him fail Hillary stands at the head of the list. If his performance is so dismal in his first term that he chooses not to humiliate himself by waging an unwinnable campaign for reelection he knows that she is the most likely Democrat to pick up the baton and run in 2012.

By taking Hillary into the administration he denies her an independent platform from which to criticize him and makes it impossible for her to organize any kind of public effort to gain support for a 2012 run.

However I am also certain that Mr. Obama is very much aware of the way in which a treasonous shadow government consisting of elements of the Pentagon, State Department and CIA worked behind the scenes to undermine the Bush administration.

With such a clear and recent example of how dangerous it is to have enemies working against you from within your own administration even someone with much duller political instincts than Mr. Obama could hardly fail to learn the lesson.

Thus the president has sought to transfer most of the important duties of the Secretary of State to other, more reliable, members of his administration. This leaves the Secretary of State's job a mostly ceremonial one. Mrs. Clinton will find herself spending the next four years having tea and dumplings with various heads of state while other men and women do the actual heavy lifting of America's foreign policy.

As for why Hillary would give up a Senate seat for the job I can only guess that she also learned the lessons of what happened to George W Bush and wished to have a position which would allow her to operate against Obama from behind the scenes. I imagine that she thought that if she could sufficiently damage him in his first two years in office that he would have little or no chance of reelection that she could resign early in the third year. This would disassociate herself from the Obama debacle and give herself plenty of time for a 2012 or 2016 run.

I think she also assumed that the large number of Clinton administration veterans in the Obama administration would make her the primary object of their allegiance rather than Mr. Obama. I doubt that she thought it necessary to have an office in the White House when Rahm Emanuel, once a senior adviser to her husband, was going to be his chief of staff with an office right next to the Oval Office.

I would imagine that the fact that Mr. Emanuel is not going to be her spy and surrogate in the White House came as something of a nasty shock to her - just as the knowledge that all the other Clinton administration retreads have transferred their loyalty to the new guy must have.

The lesson here is that payback is a bitch especially when you are being paid back for being a bitch. Hillary spent her eight years in the White House calling the Secret Service agents who were sworn to lay down their lives protecting her and her family as "trained pigs" and flying into a rage if any low level employee committed the gross offense of simply looking directly at her.

Because Hillary genuinely believes herself to be a special breed, truly better than her fellow citizens it will never occur to her that this kind of behavior does not attract loyalty. Like Hitler raging at his generals for betraying him by losing the war when they had only followed his orders, given against their advice, Hillary will feel herself knifed in the back by a pack of ungrateful Judases.

How all this will affect her conduct in office and the behavior of her ex-president husband, who already has a severe impulse control problem, remains to be seen.

Expect hijinks.