Hillary's Moment

Inside the Obama administration, a debate is raging. In the face of the uprisings in the Middle East, Barack Obama has opted to sit on his hands. He has a talent for that. Robert Gates, who is extremely wary – one might even say, excessively wary – of commitments abroad, is happy about the President’s passivity; Hillary Clinton, who had hoped that we would act to tip the balance in Libya, is not. It would not be hard to imagine her resigning from the cabinet over this issue. The tensions are starting to mount.

In his comedy routine last week at the Gridiron Club, the President reportedly delivered remarks that had a certain edge. “I’ve dispatched Hillary to the Middle East to talk about how these countries can transition to new leaders – though, I’ve got to be honest, she’s gotten a little passionate about the subject,” he is said to have remarked. “These past few weeks it’s been tough falling asleep with Hillary out there on Pennsylvania Avenue shouting, throwing rocks at the window.” And in an interview yesterday with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, when Mrs. Clinton was asked four times whether she would agree to serve in any post under Barack Obama if he were re-elected in 2012, she responded on each occasion in the negative and refused further comment.

Here is what The Daily Caller reports: “Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretary of States — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”

Clinton is said to be especially peeved with the president’s waffling over how to encourage the kinds of Arab uprisings that have recently toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and in particular his refusal to back a no-fly zone over Libya.

Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly expressed a disinclination to serve as President Obama’s running mate, and she has more than once said that she will not herself run for the Presidency and that the office the she currently holds will be her “last position” in the United States government. This may simply be true, but I have my doubts – and I have not in the past been slow to express them. It is hard to believe that the engine of ambition has fallen silent within the wife of William Jefferson Clinton. She certainly has no reason to be loyal to Mr. Obama. Nor does her husband.

Some time ago, I suggested that Mrs. Clinton would find an occasion to resign her position as Secretary of State on a matter of principle and then, after a decent interval, announce that she is a candidate for her party’s presidential nomination. By refusing to do his job as President – by remaining silent with regard to the crisis in Japan, by twiddling his fingers while Libya burns, by concentrating instead on the prospects of the various teams competing in the upcoming basketball tournament, and by ostentatiously preparing for his upcoming jaunt in Rio – Mr. Obama has given Mrs. Clinton an opening. If she has any ambition left and any self-respect, she will seize this opportunity. “There is,” as Brutus said to Cassius, “a tide in the affairs of men.”

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

This is Hillary’s moment – and I, for one, hope that she lays hold of it. In such a circumstance, I would not expect her to win the nomination. I suspect that President Obama has not been behindhand in that particular matter and that the fix is already in. What I have in mind is the future of the Democratic Party.

There is – or, at least, there once was – an adult wing in the Democratic Party. Their presence meant that the election of a Kennedy or a Johnson or a Carter or a Clinton was not apt to be fatal to our well-being. The new President might be wrong-headed; he might to some degree neglect the public interest in order to grease the palms of members of one or another of the constituencies in his party. But he would not be utterly irresponsible; he would not sell us out entirely. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid do not come from this wing of the party, and they are doing everything in their power to remake the Democratic Party in their own image. Yesterday’s fringe is now mainstream – and the long-term consequences are grim. Hillary Clinton is now in a position to do some good – for her party and ultimately for the country as well – by staking out a position within the Democratic Party more or less consistent with the national interest and arguing forcefully for it.