Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported that Hillary is “agonizing” over the decision of whether to accept the position of Secretary of State that the Obama camp has not “officially” offered her yet, but for which it says it is “interested” in her and currently vetting her.  At stake for the junior Senator from New York State is her independence.  Obviously, she is well aware that being Secretary of State means that she does not set her own agenda, but instead executes the agenda of an Obama Administration.  As a Senator, she would be free to continue to carve her own path, draw her own conclusions, stake out her own policy positions.

Does anybody else find this somewhat distracting?

Certainly, as an initial matter, whoever it is that is leaking this information to the press needs to shut the hell up.  The continual speculation of “will she or won’t she” of “should she or shouldn’t she” is not helping anyone.  Not Hillary. Not Obama. Not the country.  At this point, the appointment has been talked to death to the point where even if you believe that it’s a good idea, there’s been so much speculation and opinion heaped upon it that it threatens to collapse under its own weight.

A number of well-respected pundits have weighed in on the wisdom of choosing Hillary for this job.  David Broder thinks that Obama doesn’t need someone who will try to tutor him on foreign policy. Thomas Friedman thinks that Hillary doesn’t have a strong enough relationship with Barack Obama to be effective in the position.  Our own Joan Walsh thinks that we should trust Obama, that if Clinton is good enough for him, she should be good enough for us.

I don’t know if it makes me a curmudgeon, but I disagree.  With everybody.

I think that Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State is basically like every tragic love story I have ever read.  At the heart of every tragic love story is the basic truth that love doesn’t always conquer things like bad timing and poor circumstances.  Don’t believe me?  Romeo and Juliet – a pair of lovers who would have just made it, had Romeo not been a Montague and had Juliet woken up from her potion-induced death-like trance only a few minutes earlier.  You can fall in love with anyone you like – and people do, all the time.  The problem is when you fall in love with someone who has so much attendant baggage that you’d need a C-4 cargo jet to haul it all (see MTN’s post re: Crazy Girls), or when you simply can’t ever get to a place where both of you are able to be free to see each other.  Indeed, the whole of the “Sex and the City” story line with Carrie and Mr. Big is built on the lack of timing between them.

Hillary would make a fantastic Secretary of State.  She is incredibly well-respected around the world, and has a keen expert’s grasp of the major foreign policy issues facing the United States.  She is disciplined and tough, and perfectly capable of towing the party line and not forcing her own agenda.  And were that everything to be known about Hillary Clinton, that would more than justify her selection for the job.

But Hillary comes with both baggage and timing issues that make being Secretary of State for her a “can’t get there from here” proposition.  In the baggage column – Bill.  And no, it’s not because of his foundation or the financial issues.  There are plenty of means to fix that, and Bill is being a remarkable husband by agreeing to them so readily.  He wants this to be her time, and he is bending over backwards to try and make it happen for her, which is a great example to successful couples everywhere.  But none of that is going to change the fact that Bill Clinton is a former President of the United States, and a very well-liked one both home and abroad at that. 

Bill is doing everything in his power to make himself a non-issue to Hillary’s selection, but the fact remains that as a practical matter, if Hillary is Secretary of State, Bill becomes the spouse of the Secretary of State.  He will wind up at state dinners, at conferences, and other events where spouses are expected to attend.  But unlike your ordinary spouse, this one used to have the same job as Hillary’s boss.  Even if he could restrain himself from offering his opinions and advice (and we all know Bill has always had some difficulty with restraint), would the world community be able to resist the urge to look to him for such things anyway?  Bill would be a constant distraction, a wild card that would undermine the discipline of an Obama-Clinton foreign policy team, and attract unwanted media attention in the wrong direction.

On the timing side of the equation is the fact that Hillary has just emerged from a very historic, epic and contentious run for the Presidency.  Hillary came within inches of being the Democratic nominee, and indeed, had she been, she would likely be in Obama’s shoes.  This naturally casts her in the role of senior party leader and potential successor to Obama.  From a timing perspective, going from peer and rival to Obama to being grateful servant to his Administration is a tough jump, unnatural even. 

Had it been even a year or two ago that such things happened, there might be enough time and distance from the event that everyone would be capable of dealing in the here and now, and Clinton could take the post without stirring any controversy.  But right now, there are too many people looking at this through the lens of Clinton’s very recent and failed primary run.  There is too much speculation about her own Presidential ambitions and recent failure to obtain them that it’s impossible to get through the noise of it.

In other words, the fact that Hillary is not the right choice has nothing to do with Hillary at all.  It has to do with the colossal amount of circumstance that attends the appointment.  Obama needs a seamless transition of power, the ability to focus like a laser on the salient points of his domestic and foreign policy agenda right out of the gate.  Clinton and her baggage turn every single episode in the execution of foreign policy into a process story about how Clinton is handling the job, whether she’s doing right by Obama, what Bill is doing, and whether she’s readying herself for another run at the Presidency.  Clinton’s actual competency, along with Obama’s agenda, will become lost in the media noise.  Making actual change for the United States’ reputation on the world stage is too important to get lost in process stories.

“It’s not you.  You’re great…..It’s me…..It’s the situation.”  Yeah, it sounds like a bad kiss-off to a tortured relationship.  But really, right now, it might be the best answer.