Hillary's Hard Choices and Ours

She’ll run. She has to. She is driven by duty and destiny. The question is, should we let her?

Her new book “Hard Choices”, chronicles her submersion into the world of international crises and the maddening complexity of international decision-making. The revelations on jockeying between and within conflicting agendas, the importance of nuances in language when agreement is reached … it’s all here. She convinced me that I do not have the personality or patience to be an effective diplomat. Still, the skill required to do that work, the excitement that must come from being in the thick of momentous events, the terrifying implications of choosing the wrong course, all this permeate the story and make it a valuable read. This is the story of a woman devoted to public service, vilified by the right-wing political machine, humiliated by her husband, then spurned by voters in favor of an inexperienced upstart, who still accepted the call one last time to make a difference. Her nomination as Secretary of State seemed like a miserable consolation prize to many of her devotees. High risk, low reward; a recipe for invisibility, or failure, or both.

Unless you are a Washington insider, you probably don’t know much about the inner workings of the Department of State. Here’s what I knew: the Secretary is the chief diplomat, whatever that actually means. From what I could recall, none of the recent Secretaries had experience in the foreign service. So it’s natural to wonder how a political appointee figures out how to do the job. Is there a training program? Is background as a Senator advantageous or useless? How much autonomy do you have? Is it necessary to fly all over hell and gone to get things done?

The answers: No training program; being a Senator helps and being a former First Lady helps even more; autonomy is negotiable and constantly fluctuates; and yes, you have to fly all over the place. There isn’t much substitute for staring someone in the eye or soothing them with a gentle tone. Unsurprisingly, Hillary mastered it all, and she did it fast. This is her strength: she takes on enormous challenges within complex organizations and just gets it done. It is one of the things I admire about her.

But she is a mediocre writer (I’m being kind). She drones on with details that can numb your brain. She batters you into submission with the sheer volume of it. I have zero tolerance for this kind of thing. I don’t care the specific time an event occurred. The floor and room number of the room everyone met in. The names of all the minor attendees. But sandwiched in between the dull recitation of events, you learn what drives international relationships: the role of energy policy in cementing alliances, the expendability of human rights when the stake is access to air space for mission-critical helicopters, and the maneuvering over trade policy with insufficient regard for the environment (see energy policy). It is all so interwoven that it is excruciating to imagine how to pull a thread for change without unwinding the whole damn cloth, to the detriment of all.

I am not a proponent of small-scale change. In my youth, I verged on being an anarchist. I’m sick to death of all this bullshit in which corporations run everything and the rest of us muddle along, moving slowly downward into the abyss of irrelevance. But short of a large-scale, global uprising, how the hell DO you maneuver? Are tiny victories the best we can do? Are we doomed by our interconnectedness even as some of us believe that is our salvation?

The problem is that wisdom, the ability to reach for a vision, is unevenly distributed in humans and nearly non-existent among politicians. We, all of us, act out our lives and hopes on a global stage over which even the power players have little control. The ability to anticipate the other guy’s moves, let alone to affect the direction they go, is illusion. It reminds me of raising kids — you do your best to influence them but in the end, have very little control over the outcome. That’s frightening and real.

It also confirms how damn difficult it will be to make any of the things happen that have to happen if we are to save humanity from itself. As a group, we avoid hard choices. As individuals, we are no better at it, so why would we expect that to improve when we huddle together trying to position our country for winning the next global game? Even if we make progress with China, Putin has become the wild card that no one anticipated (though Hillary cautioned about him early in the book and she was right, it turns out).

So here’s the thing: I do not like Hillary’s connections to business, to money, to the “elite”. But if you are going to do battle, with any one of them on any scale whatsoever, do you send in a novice or someone who at least knows where they are vulnerable? Do you send a woman who can manipulate with the best of them or someone who is clueless and in constant learning mode?

A lesson: liberals and Democrats chose the novice last time. We got all fired up over a guy in whom I had little to no faith. He hated playing outside the house and getting dirty with the other kids. He thought that intellect mattered most. He was naive and we’ve lost what may have been our only opportunities to get some of the hardest choices made in our favor. His stand-in this time around is Elizabeth Warren. I swear, though I love her, I will beat the crap out of any serious Democrat who supports her in a Presidential run. If we haven’t learned anything in the last eight years, then we are not equipped to face reality as it is instead of as we wish it would be. We are already likely to lose the Senate this time around, making the person who sits in the Presidential chair our only hope of holding back the forces of darkness. And honestly, I don’t want a foreign policy virgin at the helm. Almost all recent Presidents have been sucked into the vortex by unexpected foreign policy crises. We’re oblivious to the possibility that will happen again and believe that if it does, then the military will save us. How’s that worked so far? Exactly. Oh, and if we have to mobilize a global effort to counter Climate Change, it’s critical that we build effective relationships with the other players, none of whom live here.

I do not agree with Hillary on everything. But she is a smart, savvy woman who knows her way around Congress, business and the world. She can play hardball. She consistently stands up for women and minorities. She stared Putin in the eye and didn’t see a benign soul looking back. It’s about time we step up and put her where she should have been in 2008. I’ve made my hard choice. Your turn.