team of hillarys

So, when I heard the news that Hillary Clinton was being considered for Secretary of State, I threw up in my mouth just a little bit. Not because I don't think Hillary would do a good job as SecState, but because I've grown so weary of her on the national stage. But then I thought about it a bit more, and here's what I now have to say about it.

When she (finally) conceded defeat in the democratic primary, I was so ready to not hear from Hillary for a long time. Though all politicians do it, I just couldn't take hearing Hillary's stump speech one more time where she offered a few different versions of the "rhetorical relationship" gag, where she highlights one of us peasants in a forced-sounding anecdote: Just like Hazel Simonton, a seamstress from Knoxville, Tennessee, who told me she was counting on me as she sewed stars on American flags bound for the middle east to be burned in anti-American protests...

I was so glad that Hillary was out of the picture. For a few days. Then I began to thirst for a renewal of HillaryNews: was she out there campaigning for Obama? Was she still raising money and siphoning her donors to the winning team? Did she show off any new pantsuits? It was then that I realized I kind of missed Hillary. Now that she is being considered for a place in Obama's administration (maybe State, maybe nothing...we'll see), I'm able to come to terms with the fact that Hillary might still be a major player with mucho national profile (and not merely one in a chorus line of 100 senators). And if she is being considered for State, props to Obama to consider including someone who disagreed (disagrees?!) with him so pointedly on foreign policy matters. This is what a team of rivals would really look like, I guess.

It looks like Maureen Dowd made a similar point in her column (of course, it was mixed in with a heavy dose of Bill Clinton-ness; ah, an oldie but a goodie). Perhaps we will have Hillary to kick around anymore.