Clinton remaining loyal to Obama administration

"Whatever happened to Hillary Clinton?"

The question came from a senior diplomat of yesteryear in a conversation I had a few days ago. The issue was raised in light of all the questioning after the presidential election about a role in the Obama Cabinet for Clinton. A superstar in her own right, Clinton was herself a near presidential victor. The pundits pondered whether, if the younger president picked her, he could contain her; whether he would run the risk of her outshining him.

The pondering has proved irrelevant. In domestic and foreign media, President Barack Obama has become a superstar to trump all other superstars. (If he has anything to fear in Washington on the publicity front it is not Clinton but Michelle Obama who is getting multi-print and TV coverage.)

By contrast, Secretary of State Clinton has become a dutiful bureaucrat, hewing close to the Obama party line, with never a ripple to agitate the White House. No more campaign-trail talk of obliterating Iran if it attacked Israel. No more questioning the president's competence to handle the 2 a.m. crisis call. Not even a Joe Biden-like gaffe to bring a frown to the president's brow.

When the president speaks, she is in a silent phalanx behind him with other members of his team. The word is that she has a private, one-on-one weekly meeting with the president — the kind of session that all secretaries of state yearn for but not all get. But in public, when presiding over her own meetings, or when she travels abroad, she sounds like a clone of the president, albeit cloaked sometimes in diplomatic non-speak.

Some cynics suggest that for Clinton this good-soldier routine is all a clever ploy with an eye to 2012 and another crack at the presidency. Insofar as a second term for Obama is concerned he will sink or swim on the economy. If it is up, he looks good for re-election. If it is still down, the Obama family, complete with dog, goes home to Chicago.

Clinton would be untainted by such a domestic calamity. She has stayed away from the American economy, leaving the unfortunate secretary of the treasury, Tim Geithner, to play point man on this issue for Obama.

On the foreign front, she is insulated from political damage in critical areas by the appointment of prestigious special envoys (George Mitchell to Israel and the Palestinians, Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dennis Ross to Iran). This has prompted at least one former U.S. diplomat to exclaim: "How many secretaries of state do we have now?" Should the envoys succeed in their difficult diplomatic assignments, Clinton would gain prestige as the managing architect. (Should they fail, they will all be writing books in retirement.)