Picking Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State is taken as a sign of Obama’s maturity as a leader, as well as a tribute to the democratic system: whatever the fights on the campaign trail, opponents come together from wings of a party and even from across party lines to provide America with a government of talent, especially during a critical time that would seem to demand no less. The election is over, and now it is time for everybody to join together to carry out what has to be done.

I have my misgivings about this appointment. It isn’t that Hillary isn’t qualified for the jobs, though her credentials for it are unprecedented. Great and near great secretaries of state usually have prior executive branch or cabinet level experience. Kissinger was the National Security Advisor and all but the Secretary of State before he inherited the large office. Baker and Schultz had been Secretaries of the Treasury before promotion to the most senior cabinet position. Madeline Albright had been tried out as Ambassador to the United Nations and Colin Powell had been a familiar at the White House in many senior roles. Moreover, most Secretaries of State who really do the job rather than serve as figureheads for other people have serious credentials and have reputations for being tough negotiators. Albright was a professor, though not as professorial as Kissinger, and Dean Rusk had been on the inside of foreign policy for a generation. Not that everything is credentials. Condi Rice was both academic and a former National Security Director, though she never had the reputation of the tough negotiator that were the credentials Baker brought to the office, skills he used after he left office to give the 2000 election to Bush.

Hillary’s credentials are different. We don’t know if she is a good negotiator. She didn’t, after all, get Congress to do what she wanted about health care. She has no formal training in international relations and she has held no formal cabinet or executive position. Her claim to be other than a token figure, a big name to fill what is really a quite technical position, in that it requires a sense of the history of foreign relations and of the theory of how nations can influence one another as well as detailed familiarity with any number of topics from arms control to democratic movements in central Asia, is not that she has been on the Armed Services Committee for eight years because there are a number of senators who have longer experience than that and have carried more weight than she in Congress. It is rather that she was a First Lady, the first First Lady to get involved in something more significant than highway beautification or reading programs for children. She was the administration’s major mover on health care and was the person who was in bed with the person who was awakened by three am phone calls. That counts for a lot, and reading into it a credential of experience just shows how much of a transitional figure Hillary is. It is an impressive credential however much it is unprecedented and it will never again be a credential because the next generation of women in politics will have gotten there on their own. You and I might think Abigail Adams would have made a great Secretary of State, but it would never have happened.

No, the misgivings about Clinton as Secretary of State are different from the ones that concern her gender or her capacities. It has to do with the downside of this grand alliance of the two key competitors for the Democratic nomination. Yes, Joe Biden was selected as Vice President, but his candidacy for the Presidency was short lived and did nothing but enhance his reputation as someone who knew what he was talking about when it came to foreign policy, however much people also used his garrulousness as the object of jokes.  But here were Clinton and Obama going after one another precisely on the issue of who was capable of wisely conducting foreign policy. Does that make no difference? Is it all just water under the bridge? If that is the case, then what were we voting about in the primaries? I thought Clinton saying Obama was not experienced made sense; I also thought that his remarks about negotiations were jejeune. It doesn’t matter he showed other skills and matured during the course of the campaign. Yet what was wrong with his candidacy does not go away. The question is whether, as a political matter, one just accepts the fact that the situation has changed: he is in office; she is not, and so there is nothing wrong with her accepting that fact and finding a role for herself to play. If that is the case, then the debate over issues was just an opportunity to examine the characters of the candidates. There stands on issues get stale as circumstances change. The Iraq situation is different than it was a year ago. But, then again, is it? The three sides in Iraq still can’t get along and Americans are still dying for God knows what and Obama still claims he is going to bring the troops home sooner than later. Democratic voters preferred his judgments to her’s.

Another problem. Hillary has an independent political base. That was the case with Secretaries of State up through the Civil War. It has not been the case recently, each Secretary knowing he had only one client, the President. They tended, in the past century, to be technicians. So why the talk of political stars, like Kerry and Clinton? I hope it was just clever stage management by Obama who might well think Clinton the best qualified, even though she may continue to think herself still more sophisticated than Obama about foreign policy and therefore not trust his judgment, never mind his authority, to be greater than hers. That would be a repeat of the Bush Administration where everyone of those in on foreign policy decision making thought his or her self more able than the President. It took a while for Lincoln to demonstrate he was the wisest and most politically savvy guy in the room. It never happened with Bush 43.

So Obama does not need Hillary, nor the American people looking over his should to find out if there is a tug of power between them. Keep it clean, Barack. Go for Holbrooke and the professional diplomatic background rather than the politician you would like to corral. Andrea Mitchell, who broke the story of Hillary as a possible Secretary of State, could not get over thinking about its political advantages, in that it robs Hillary of a power base in the Senate, and makes her subject to Obama more than any other position she might take while still appeasing those who supported her. The real issue is what kind of team it will make when you wonder who the leader is and who is the leader apparent. Mitchell and others provide too much political analysis and not enough analysis of statecraft.

Well, at least we won’t have Sarah Palin to kick around any more. Even the Republican leadership decided that there were certain minimum qualifications for high office. Palin’s demise was accomplished by Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, who interrupted her press conference at the Republican Governors Meeting after the third question to say she would take only one more. As I saw it, she got flustered by a question about how the Republicans were going to go after the Hispanic and African American vote. She hesitated, rather than just filling up the space with loosely lined associations of words and phrases, and then said we should treat everyone with respect regardless of their backgrounds. That was enough for Perry. I don’t know whether Palin was about to break down; I do know that any politician can give that an easy answer, that we have to work and “outreach” to get those votes, though I do not know a Republican that gives the hard answer, which is that we have to appeal to those constituencies by taking their side on some issues or forming plans on immigration or poverty that can appeal to them, rather than just saying we want them in our tent. Not being able to do that, to do what a bread and butter politician does, is more damaging to Palin than her inability to pass a fifth grade social studies or geography test. (I’m not sure Reagan or Bush 43 could do that either). Or at least I hope that the Republicans have stopped their rush to the bottom of the apple barrel.