Hillary Clinton and the perfect crime

And in the end, it all made perfect sense.

President-elect Barack Obama nominated Senator Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, even though he spent the better part of the campaign calling attention to her utter lack of experience and judgment about foreign policy.

Why did he do it? Was there a secret deal between them?

America Wants To Know doesn't think so.

At first, we thought the president-elect floated Senator Clinton's name as Secretary of State in order to help her raise money to retire her campaign debt. We wrote in "Hillary Clinton considered for post of Tooth Fairy" that it was likely a feint to allow Senator Clinton to shake contributions out of people seeking to become ambassadors or State Department contractors.

We were wrong about the feint but right about the shakedown. Reports this week from the Associated Press and Politico document the frenzied fundraising effort that Mrs. Clinton is making before federal ethics rules kick in on the day she's confirmed as Secretary of State.

Next we thought the president-elect was pretending to dangle the nomination in front of Senator Clinton in order to destroy former President Bill Clinton's global cash-for-favors business.

We were wrong about the pretense but right about the destruction. Peter Baker of the New York Times reported that President Clinton has been forced to agree to "nine conditions" imposed by the Obama team, "all of which go beyond the requirements of U.S. law." He will have to give up foreign donations to the Clinton Global Initiative and make the list of donors to his library and foundation public for the first time. The future secretary's husband also had to agree to clear his speeches and business deals with the Obama administration. It's enough to make a former president call a divorce lawyer, just to get out from under these humiliating O.J. Simpson-style restrictions on his earning power.

But then, on Friday, we saw the third and most compelling reason for the president-elect's nomination of Senator Clinton to be Secretary of State.

Caroline Kennedy wants that Senate seat.

Caroline Kennedy, the woman whose public endorsement of Barack Obama last January was a stake through the heart of the Clinton political machine. Caroline Kennedy, the one woman in America that the Clintons couldn't discredit or smear.

Caroline Kennedy would like to have Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, and President-elect Obama opened it up for her.

It's the perfect crime.

Hillary Clinton is flattered right out of the Senate, where she could have meddled with the new health care reform effort and plotted her comeback in 2012.

Bill Clinton is silenced and leashed, held to an ethics standard set by the Obama administration instead of the guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard that's kept him free so far.

Caroline Kennedy walks unscathed into the United States Senate, where she can run for re-election two years from now as a well-financed and much-beloved incumbent. Good luck to the Republican Party finding a candidate who thirsts for the chance to attack the last surviving member of President Kennedy's White House family.

It's perfect, all right.

The only problem is that Senator Hillary Clinton is still the person who thought the Iraq war was a good idea, still the person who uttered a dismissive "whatever" when she couldn't remember the name of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, still the person who fabricated a self-aggrandizing story about dodging sniper fire on a runway in Bosnia, and still the person whose ties to India led an Obama adviser to dub her "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)."

She's still the person whose management skills took a front-running presidential campaign awash in cash and turned it into a shark tank of bloodied, chewed-up factions drowning in debt.

She's still the person whose ethics, truthfulness and sensitivity to conflict-of-interest have been less than model virtues.

But she's going to be the next U.S. Secretary of State.

That's the crime.


Copyright 2008

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "Burying the Clintons" and "Burying the Clintons, Part II."

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