WHAT WOULD PRESIDENT HILARY DO?

I voted for Barack Obama for president. Today, I still like the guy, still admire him, have high hopes for him, and believe he could do a great job. But the truth is, when I had to choose between him and Hilary Clinton in the New York primary, I voted for Hilary. Why? Experience. I understand that neither of them had all that much time in the Senate, but I don’t think a person spends eight years living in the White House with the president of the United States, plus all those years in the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock, without learning a lot about governing

At this point, it’s hard to give Obama a grade. He did the impossible and passed the impassable bill–health care reform–but it did not include a public option. He passed a stimulus package that stopped the recession from getting worse but that wasn’t enough to turn the thing around; economically speaking, he violated the sacred Colin Powell rule, and did not enter with overwhelming force. He’s waging a war in Afghanistan for ill-defined objectives and without a defined constituency. He got a financial reform bill passed, but it doesn’t include the Volcker Rule, and perhaps even more damaging, has not become an instrument that has enabled to claim the narrative of the financial crisis. Instead, he has allowed the administration to be portrayed as incompetent, and even worse, hostage to the party’s exhausted response, big government deficit spending. And then he keeps getting slapped with problems unexpected and odd–the oil spill, the Shirley Sherrod mess.  “There is something loose and jittery about the atmosphere round Obama at the moment of which [Agriculture Secretary] Vilsack‘s clumsy over-reaction gives us a whiff,” writes Tina Brown in The Daily Beast. “ It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation. The president’s cerebral goals aren’t supposed to be jostled by the coarse irrelevance of media bandits and ideological saboteurs. Except they are. Maybe recognition of this fact is what made Bill Clinton, at almost the same moment in his first mid-term elections in 1994, shove aside purists on his team like George Stephanopoulos and return to his devilish former consigliere, Dick Morris. Clinton knew he had to fight fire with fire, or sleaze with sleaze, that was more deft, more cunning.”

Or, in the stinging schoolyard  words of Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

I don’t think the second President Clinton–we could call her 44–would have been so cerebral. I’m pretty sure the Clinton playbook is pretty Chicago school (“If he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”) and it’s applied to friends as well as foes. Somehow I don’t think a Clinton operation would have allowed Martha Coakley to run such a passive, brain-dead campaign that cost the Democrats an important Senate vote. I don’t think the White House would have been so above the fray and allowed Republicans such a wide-open free-fire zone.  I certainly don’t think the old “It’s the economy, stupid” gang would have failed to take ownership of the economy. This isn’t to say everything would have been better. I’m inclined to think 44 might not even have attempted health care reform, and I don’t really think she’d have pulled us out of Afghanistan because if Bambi has something to prove about his ability to wage war, a woman would have as much if not more.

But most of all, 44 would have shaken things up, just as Brown advises. If somebody wants to demonstrate to  me that Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett are doing a good job, I’d like to see the proof; in the meantime, I’d start looking for the Republican James Baker, the smoothest White House chief of staff of my life. (On the other hand, Hillary’s campaign staff kind of sucked, particularly the brainy but not brilliant strategist Mark Penn.) I’m afraid Robert Gibbs’s soft-spoken whine needs to go; he’s not forceful, and he counterpunches poorly. Where have you gone, Mike McCurry?

Time to retool and refuel: at this time in his presidency, Clinton began shedding (in one way or another) not only Stephanopoulos, but also  Dee Dee Myers, Bernie Nussbaum, Lloyd Benstsen, Les Aspin, Mack McLarty, and adding people like David Gergen, Lloyd Cutler, McCurry, and the indispensable Leon Panetta. If I were Obama, I’d move heaven and earth to convince ardent Hillary supporter  Ed Rendell to leave his cushy job governing the Keystone State and come serve as White House Chief of Staff.