With Senator Hillary Clinton now Secretary of State Designate Hillary Clinton, the never-ending narrative of "No Drama Obama and the American Evita" is seemingly poised to enter a new season.

Can Barack "control" Hillary? Will she "go rogue"? Is she, in the words of one HuffPo commenter "Mommy Dearest on the Pepsi board" all over again? Or, by giving her this position, has the President-Elect cannily "neutralized" this mortal political enemy AND her troublesome still-husband Bill? Is this the "end of Hillary?" one writer asks. "Will she no longer be the bright star, blazing her own path across the political skies?" And so on.

For most of the past two decades, Hillary Clinton has been portrayed by Republicans and assorted others, along with a large swath of media, as an unstoppable force of nature -- like a thunderstorm, or a busted sewer line. The hysteria with which she had viewed over the years is hard to capture in words. The saga of Hillary the Harridan, the Human Nutcracker, has long since developed a life of its own.

As we saw during the primaries, she has somehow become the living embodiment of those things we fear about women and power, and we reflect those fears back on to her in much the same way we reflect our hopes and dreams back on Barack Obama. It has less to do with who they are as actual living, breathing human beings than what they represent to us as a culture.  

There were dozens of articles and blog posts over the last few weeks warning the President-Elect not to let himself become caught up in the soap opera that is the Clintons. These two are so egotistical, the refrain generally goes, that when they walk into a room, all the attention turns on them. (The nerve.. You would expect a gregarious, popular ex-president-turned-philanthropist and a former First- Lady-turned-senator-who-came-within-a-few-million-votes-of-becoming-the-first-woman-president-in-history would just blend right into the woodwork.)

The "soap opera" narrative was played out in all its three-act glory over the last month, as the President-Elect began to fill his Cabinet.

First, there were those undisciplined Clinton people, leaking the story that Obama had asked her to be Secretary of State before he really had. It's a little hazy as to how that is Senator Clinton's fault, but like a lot of soap opera plots, you just have to overlook the holes. This was widely interpreted as power-play, an attempt to shoulder her way into a Cabinet position by making Obama look petty for NOT asking her. (Interestingly, John Kerry and Bill Richardson were openly lobbying for a nomination to State, and nobody said boo about it. But, then, we attach roughly the same excitement to Kerry and Richardson that we usually reserve for a flu shot.)

Now, it had been clear for some time that Clinton was going to be offered some big post; her name had already been floated as possible head of Health and Human Services, or Supreme Court Justice. The Democratic leadership was getting ready to dangle some juicy positions within the Senate. Everyone knew something was coming, and since gossip is the life's-blood of politics, it's no wonder someone blabbed.

Then there was the protracted "will she or won't she?" dance after the offer was truly made. The subtext was that she was just playing hard-to-get. Because the decision to give up a seat in one of the world's most august deliberative bodies -- a seat that she probably could keep, without much effort, until she slumped over dead in the middle of a subcommittee hearing at the age of 99 -- for a chance to spend the next four to eight years diplomatically stomping out fires and trying to solve the world's unsolvable problems....that requires no thought or reflection. You just jump at it -- but not TOO fast, lest you look "entitled."      

This was paired by the obligatory "will he or won't he?" over Bill's role in the process. That too was pretty drama-free when you get right down to it. He signaled early on that he was ready to do what he had to do if she decided to take the offer. But people who has been through as many legal struggles as Bill and Hillary Clinton are going to spend a good long time talking to lawyers and advisers about their exposure before throwing open records. Is that dramatic, or is that just prudent?      

In the final act before the official roll-out on Monday, there were the similarly obligatory stories that Senator Clinton had "demanded" the right to select her own senior staff. Again: is that really an over-the-top "demand"? She's looking at heading up a department filled with career staffers who have their own turf wars and their own agendas. (There's already a battle between the Secret Service and the Diplomatic Security Service over whose jurisdiction the new Madame Secretary would fall under.) Walking into that environment, wouldn't you want your closest staff to be people you knew you could trust?        

The undramatic truth is that Hillary Clinton didn't kill Vince Foster. She and Obama kind of like each other. While her marriage to Bill Clinton may not be the stuff of epic poetry, they have managed to keep an imperfect union together for going on 35 years and are unlikely to give up on it now. She's an "American Idol" fan. When she's stressed out, she likes to re-organize closets. She's exactly as human as the rest of us, and just as contradictory.   

And, like her or hate her, Barack Obama has assigned her the task of rebuilding our global diplomatic bridges after nearly a decade of abuse and neglect, and of striking the right tone of toughness and pragmatism in an era when we no longer look like the biggest, baddest kids of the block.

It's an enormous job, and there IS something we can do to help: we can turn off the soap opera. Not by casting Hillary Clinton out of government -- that serves no one -- but by not treating her like a bomb that's about to go off, or a train that's lost its breaks. By treating her, finally, with the respect that we want the world to reflect back on us.