Come On Up For The Rising

ATLANTA, Ga. — Nico Pitney FTW. He reports that — contrary to the previous item’s expectation — Obama has offered Hillary Rodham Clinton the secretary of state job. I guess Obama’s really serious about this team-of-rivals idea.

I said earlier that I think she has all the makings of an excellent secretary of state. She knows all there is to know about policy. She has a massive international reputation. She knows all about poor management techniques — in large part because of her primary campaign and her husband’s White House experience — and will have a chance to prove how to correct them. She has a record of building consensus in the Senate. And she has an iron will.

The pick — if it indeed happens — will be a test of Obama’s confidence in himself as an executive. HRC has a team of pathological maniacs around her, all of whom appear to be unable to stop undermining Obama and HRC, by accident, in the process. No one would ever offer a cabinet position to someone who wasn’t able to pick his or her own staff. So Obama is calculating that he can keep HRC on his team and implementing his agenda. 

And there we really don’t have enough information to judge that proposition. Obama isn’t Bush. He ran something close to a perfect campaign. But is he that good a manager? And can Hillary Rodham Clinton really serve someone else’s agenda when that someone isn’t a family member? These boil down to a simple question: can Obama convince Clinton to feel so invested in his agenda that it becomes her agenda?