Prince of the South Side

So it should come as no surprise that Chicago tends not to produce world class politicians. The most recent I can think of (and I stand ready to be corrected) would be Paul Douglas, who served as a Democratic U.S. Senator from 1949 to 1967. Otherwise, the list of Chicago pols, even at the national level, is completely undistinguished. Until Barack Obama. Mr. Obama has proved you can take a high-octane version of Chicago politics to the national level, a high-octane version with an emphasis on the art of the deal. That's fine for figuring out how to build a highway overpass or getting salt on the streets in a snowstorm but wheeling and dealing can be a tricky thing. The problem with Chicago pols typically is that they lack a sense of boundaries: they don't make it outside Chicago because as they wheel and deal they don't believe in anything in particular and consequently won't stand up to entrenched interests. But at the national and international level standing up to entrenched interests is what the game's all about.

Is that Mr. Obama's problem, too? He talks a lot about his reverence for Abraham Lincoln, and cites Lincoln's practice of bringing adversaries into the cabinet, forgetting that there was a war on. Lincoln's job was to beat the tar out of the South, and he did. A few compromises along the way made sense. Lincoln didn't compromise for the sake of compromise. Where's Mr. Obama's war? He hasn't got one.

The notion of bringing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton into an Obama administration as Secretary of State, even if it never ultimately materializes, shows quite clearly that Barack Obama lacks vision regarding America's place in the world. Would Hillary do anything to help the Palestinians? Maybe when Hell freezes over. Would Hillary do anything that begins to correct the insanity of "free trade"? Not in a million years. Would Hillary have the nerve to insist on critical changes in the way Americans live in order to reduce carbon emissions? Not unless she has an epiphany on the way to Foggy Bottom. On foreign policy issue after issue Hillary has bad ideas — ideas, in fact, that are almost always the opposite of the direction we should be going.

So why pick Hillary? It's pure Machiavellian politics. It puts her out of the fund-raising business and preemptively staves off a primary challenge in 2012. It removes a potential harsh critic from the Senate. It co-opts the Hillary wing of the Democratic Party. Not least, it assuages the neo-cons. It's the Chicago way of doing things. But help construct a new American foreign policy, not so much...

In such a moment of great peril for the planet, with so much riding on a successful Obama presidency, a Hillary appointment presages, perhaps, the possibility of catastrophic failure.

The picture isn't entirely bleak. Obama on 60 Minutes yesterday said in unequivocal terms that he'll close Guantanamo and that he'll stop the practice of torture (merely putting it in those words has got to worry Cheney a lot, implying as it does criminal liability for past practices). Good for him! And having his great intelligence, with some more experience Obama may well rise to foreign policy challenges. But he's not there yet.