The Clintons For Secretary of State!

As the US and global economy continue to melt down, and a clean break with the past is urgently required, Barack Obama is looking backward, inveigling the Clintons to be his Secretary of State duo.

Invoking Abraham Lincoln once again, Barack Obama recently said “There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president.” But appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State is not wisdom, it’s ‘too smart by half.’

For as Hillary can attest, there is a gulf as wide as Bill Clinton’s ego between shrewdness and wisdom. Does Barack realize that shrewdness is not the same as wisdom, and self-confidence is not the same as humility?

In some ways, Barack Obama reminds me of Paul Kagame, the brilliant Tutsi rebel strategist (and now president of Rwanda) operating from outside the slaughter in his country in 1994. When Romeo Dallaire, the UN peacekeeping commander in Rwanda at the time, pleaded with Kagame to intervene more quickly and forcefully to save lives in his country, the preternaturally cool Kagame replied that the time wasn’t right.

From a military and political point of view, he turned out to be right. But since the genocide ended in Rwanda, millions more have died in neighboring Congo, fueled by the Hutu genocidaires that Kagame drove out of the country. Pressured by the Clinton Administration, the Security Council did nothing, just as they are doing nothing again while both sides kill, rape, and loot in the Congo as Obama speaks about the American economy.

Clinton apologized directly to the Rwandan people, but has barely uttered a peep about the genocides that are occurring as he gallivants around the world giving half million-dollar speeches. And Hillary, who knew full well what was happening in Rwanda during that summer of slaughter, is now going to be the better half of the Secretary of State twosome that Obama is appointing.

By making the Clintons his Secretary of State, is Obama subconsciously signaling that it will be genocide as usual under his administration?

Barack Obama says America has only one president at a time. But President Bush isn’t just a lame duck but a legless and flightless duck. Therefore Obama’s voice and leadership are desperately needed now to beef up the hapless, UN-mandated MONUC force in the misnomer of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At the domestic level, appointing the Clintons to Secretary of State pulls the rug out from under Obama’s strongest supporters, leaves those unsure about him shaking their heads, and receives approving nods from Republicans.

It would have been a wise and magnanimous decision to ask Hillary to serve in another cabinet post, such as Health or Attorney General. It’s one thing to get all your ducks in a row; it’s another to sling albatrosses around your neck.

When Hillary supplants Bill as the globetrotting face of American foreign policy, people will ask, ‘Where’s Bill?’ And if Bill travels with her, people will ask, ‘Who’s calling the shots?’ Either way, the co-dependent team of the amoral Clintons cannot restore America’s moral authority and leadership in the world.

Barack Obama believes that America went off the rails with the Bush Administration, and that the Clinton Administration was on the right track. But in truth the venality, superficiality, greed, and willful blindness of the Clinton era gave rise to Bush-Cheney.

Evil has ruled America for the last eight years, and darkness saturated the country for eight years before that. Without a reckoning, the ‘best and brightest’ will not be able to change the nation’s basic course. Especially when the best and brightest of them all wins on the promise of “fundamental change,” and then promptly goes ‘back to the future’ of Clintonia.

Nothing kills the spirit like false hope realized. (False hope, ironically, was the Clinton’s charge against Obama during the primaries.) Wanting a president to succeed is not enough. The people have to awaken and demand true change, or a leader (who is actually the people’s follower in a democracy), cannot change anything.

Politics is the art of the possible by its practitioners. But in a democracy, politics is the expression of the people’s will, or lack thereof.

It looks like the best we can hope for now is that the “transformational president,” who was able to capture the imagination of America and the world, will be a transitional president for America and the world.

If there isn’t a true world order now, “what rough beast…slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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