Why is he doing it?

Word on the street is that Bill Clinton is finally opening the books on who donated to his Presidential Library to clear the way for Hillary to be fully vetted for Secretary of State. People keep going round and round as to why Mr. Obama is offering her the job and why she should take it.

I think Ms. Clinton is inclined to take the job because although she seems to be operating well in the Senate, she is stuck in lack of power positions. There is bad blood between the Clinton and Obama camps and the Democrats are not going to create an antagonistic Senate by vaulting her forward into a major leadership position. She can’t even move beyond Chuck Schumer since he is the senior senator from New York. She also can’t run for President in 2016 as she will be nearly 70 years old. The post at Foggy Bottom will provide her with both visibility and power at the moment and nothing about a cabinet position eliminates her from either returning to the Senate in a few years or running for Governor of New York in 2014.

The real question is why Mr. Obama is offering her the post. Mr. Obama is slowly filling both his cabinet and certain staff positions with Clinton veterans and now he is very close to putting them back in the light of one of their old captains. Through this move, Mr. Obama does come dangerously close to allowing his authority to be undermined and give rumors to a shadow presidency being run out of Foggy Bottom.

One possibility is that Mr. Obama is embracing the theory of keeping your enemies even closer than your friends. Another is that Mr. Obama wants the Clinton loyalists to pee out of the tent rather than in it as LBJ used to say. The third possibility (and one that I think is most likely) is that since most of the truly experienced people are Clinton veterans, Mr. Obama has no choice but to include Ms. Clinton just to keep these people in line and not try to undermine him from within before the people he likes get fully up to speed. However, this presumes that Ms. Clinton will follow the whims and dictates of Mr. Obama.

We don’t know how interested she is in playing ball and whether she is interested in being a good soldier or if she is interested in pushing the pieces around the board as the woman behind the curtain. If she accepts, it will make for a very interesting show.