I thought that Sally Quinn had been banished to Twitter and the Daily Beast, but I guess not:
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden should switch jobs.
Really.
It makes sense for the Democrats, actually. Clinton has done an incredible job as secretary of state. First of all, she has worked harder than anyone should ever be expected to. She has managed to do the impossible: She is the ambassador of the United States to the world, maintaining her credibility while playing the bad guy to President Obama’s good guy, such as with North Korea, Iran and Israel, and still looking good. She has been a true team player. If Clinton is dissatisfied with her role, you would never know it. She has been loyal and supportive to the president and has maintained a good relationship with him and with others in the White House. If she is being left out of the policymaking, or being sent on trips to keep her out of town, she has not shown it. She is cheerful, thoughtful, serious and diligent. There are no horror stories about her coming out of the State Department. Most notable, though, is that Bill Clinton has not been the problem that so many anticipated. He has been supportive of her and of Obama, and he has stayed out of the limelight and been discreet about his own life.
I’ve got a better idea: how about a Thomas-Clinton Unity 2012 ticket? He’d pull in the black vote, she’d pull in the women. Even though neither of those two groups’ votes really count, technically that would give them a majority. Then Thomas could appoint Hillary to fill the SCOTUS vacancy he himself created when he ran for president. That’s the job Hillary has always really wanted. Then Thomas could make Joe Lieberman his vice-president, saving Lieberman from a certain loss in the Connecticut Senate race.
It all makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
mistermix
The only unanswered question in your highly plausible scenario: What about John McCain?
DougJ
@mistermix:
I’m glad you asked: he gets the Secretary of State position vacated by Hillary.
Zifnab
John McCain becomes Secretary of Media BBQs. Then we make Dick Cheney Director of War Porn. We’ll turn over the Treasury to Goldman Sachs again, because they’ve done such a good job of remaining profitable while the government has run deficits. And we’ll save a seat at the table for a handful of conservative Dems on the honorable Hippie Punching Committee.
And then our country will be fixed and nothing bad will ever happen again, yippie!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Gordon Schumway
DougJ,
Will you marry me?
GS
jwb
“It all makes a lot of sense when you think about it.”
You forgot to add: “Take it seriously.”
Michael Bersin
Uh, didn’t Hillary not go to one of Sally’s parties once or something?
Keith
She needs to up her dosage and spend some more time in her meditational labrynth until someone other than the gardner tells her its time to come out.
neill
sally quinn’s brain is sorta like sarah palin’s brain, except without all the riff-raff…
zmulls
The number of bothersome assumptions in that snippet amazes me.
Who would have thought that Hilary wouldn’t be a problem or that she’d work hard? We all know she’s being left out of policy-making and that she is dissatisfied, but she acts as if she isn’t! And Bill isn’t being a problem!!! She’s being sent on trips to *keep her out of town* And can you imagine *no horror stories* — what a shock!!!
It does not enter her mind at all that maybe Hilary is a thoughtful, intelligent and serious person who cares about and respects the US, and cares about getting her job done.
Only a shrieking harpy would assume she was a shrieking harpy.
Steve
Gee, Hillary is doing a great job, so let’s get her out of that job and give her a different one! Uh, what?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Sally has the pulse of the nation. Gawker America.
mistermix
BTW, this is Sally’s new gig:
I didn’t know that “no white after Labor Day” was a religious belief.
Rock
@Steve:
Well, that’s a typical corporate strategy (moving people out of jobs they do well and into jobs they do poorly or that have less positive impact). And we know the the Insiders love them some CEOs ( “the MBA president!”), so it does make sense.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What do you call contrarianism when it isn’t contradicting anything? or thinking outside of a box that doesn’t exist?
swellsman
Actually, wasn’t this one of the speculations running around after Biden was named VP? That if Obama got a second term Biden would step down so that Hillary could get his place and run as an “incumbent” for President?
As I recall, there was never any actual evidence of facts presented to support this theory, but I do seem to remember a sort of “conspiracy theory” to this effect, i.e., Obama and Clinton had worked out a plan to eventually land her in the White House after he was done.
Anybody else remember this?
Allan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You call it Sally Quinn.
MattF
You’re suggesting that scraps of idle cocktail-party-conversation aren’t “news.” Shame on you.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@swellsman: I do remember Clinton saying a while back that her aspirations of being president are over. She will be about 69 after a second Obama term. That’s getting up there for presidents. But is also relative to the individual. So who knows.
Sentient Puddle
@Steve: The Peter Principle. It’s common practice in corporations.
Zifnab
@mistermix: Did Nietzsche just get proven right?
Chad N Freude
OK, how hard should someone be expected to work? How hard should a Secretary of State be expected to work? How hard should any high-ranking member of the Government be expected to work? How hard should the President be expected to work? Is she working harder than that? How hard should I be expected to work and is she working harder than that?
What is the metric for hard work? The number of Inside-The-Beltway cocktail parties missed?
That statement is stupider than any statement should ever be expected to be.
El Cid
I think the Secretary of State does much more of consequence than the Vice President, so, except for inane prestige of the sort that a shitty hag like Sally Quinn would care about, this makes no sense.
Steve
@Rock: Let’s make her Secretary of HHS so she can help get the health-care bill passed.
Woodrowfan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
A pundit.
Woodrowfan
This is good news for John McCain!
twiffer
i’m not even going to try to understand the thinking behind this.
Culture of Truth
“a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification”
God forbid!
As opposed to a county you can be vilified for a decade for not saying you invented the internet.
catclub
@Chad N Freude:
Although the concept of how hard does someone like Cllinton work is nebulous, it is NOT impossible to make some judgements.
I would guess you would agree that Bush did NOT work very hard as president. If it is possible to tell when someone is NOT working hard, then you should be able to tell its opposite.
If you are going to argue that we can’t really tell in either case, then we will have to agree to disagree.
daveNYC
Not sure there was much thinking behind this.
Culture of Truth
shorter Quinn: Hillary is doing fantastic job so she should not do it anymore
And we wonder there is so much failure in the beltway.
kindness
Man the comments over at the WaPo under their articles are kinda tough to stomach so early. Too many Tea Partiers who seem to have been up all night swilling coffee before me.
Same thing with Politico’s commentors. Now I know there is an equally looney left and sometimes that description includes me, but it sure seems as if my side doesn’t seem to want to shout from their soapboxes just what fools we are nearly so much as my esteemed opponents.
Thank god for teabaggers. For it is they that will keep the next Congress in Democratic hands. Now if only we can get that Democratic Congress to start acting like Democrats where legislation is concerned.
master c
She has worked hard, He’s been discreet. Bravo!
Where is our media?
Culture of Truth
typical DC logic – if someone actually does a good job, get them out that job on onto something else immediately!
This is the kind of thinking that led to Colin Powell being dragged out of retirement to tell us how to fix an oil spill.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Culture of Truth:
Well, to be fair, the first time he came out of retirement, it was to be the Designated Grown Up of the GWBush administration. And that went so well, well, who ya gonna call?
Hal
I allow myself one conspiracy theory a decade, so let me say that I wouldn’t be surprised if Hillary ends up the VP candidate with Obama in 2012.
The funny thing is, as a strategy for keeping voters interested, going with Clinton for VP in 2012 wouldn’t be a horrible idea for Obama. If Palin is the candidate, not that I actually think she’ll be that much of a challenge, it would also get out the vote for women who would see Hilary as the obvious choice over Palin.
Zach
I get that Clinton is doing a good job, but this is missing the other half of the argument about how Biden’s doing a poor job. There’s only a vague and doubtless wrong suggestion that he’d rather be SecState than VP.
And, if we’re talking about gaffes, Biden’s yet to do anything as stupid as either the reset button stunt or the “oh no you didn’t” response to a poor translation. In fact, Biden’s most notable gaffe (this is a BFD!) was actually a plus for the administration.
SiubhanDuinne
@Michael Bersin:
That was very interesting, reading that decade-old Salon piece about SQ. Makes a nice bookened to the recent Vanity Fair piece that someone here linked to recently.
Some
thingspeople never change, I guess.ETA: Here’s the VF link: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/07/sally-quinn-201007
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Schrödinger’s Cat Fight
Zach
@Hal: “it would also get out the vote for women who would see Hilary as the obvious choice over Palin.”
Palin lost votes for McCain amongst women. The whole hilariously inept strategy behind nominating Palin was that there was some army of disgruntled women Clinton supporters who would rise up behind Palin… rather than the reality of a few thousand rather vocal folks who were often racists.
Sheila
So let me get this straight. Quinn believes Hillary Clinton is doing a spectacular job as Secretary of State so President Obama should move her elsewhere? Someplace where she gets more attention because she handled the limelight so well during the primaries? Maybe Obama should move Malia to the talk shows and invite Liz Cheney to live in the White House.
CalD
Oh, Sally.
Chad N Freude
No-no-no-no-no. Of course one can determine whether someone is working hard. But how do we determine whether they are working “harder than anyone should ever be expected to“? I expect the Secretary of State, the President, the Secretary of Defense, etc. to work as hard as they can without ending up in a hospital or a cemetery. One can infer that Ms. Quinn sets the bar a bit lower than that, and that they should never be expected to work as hard as they apparently do now.
I think Bush worked considerably less than anyone should ever be expected to, including the kids who sell lemonade in front of their houses during the summer.
Mumphrey
Wasn’t she the one who thought the Clintons were the worst thing ever to hit their happy little town when Bill Clinton was president and befouled the place with his cheap, sleazy affairs? Weren’t they the white trash no ‘counts who didn’t belong? I don’t understand this woman. Maybe that bespeaks well of me…
acallidryas
Besides the Sally Quinns, who anticipated that Bill Clinton would be a problem? Honestly, what did they expect him to do? Go around giving inappropriate massages to world leaders or something?
Chad N Freude
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: My FSM, that was good! I’m going to steal it.
Chad N Freude
@acallidryas: Giving inappropriate massages to world leaders’ interns.
sherifffruitfly
They’ll never stop trying to foist Clinton on us.
wrb
If Hillary had been vice president Hillary would have won the argument with Hillary over surging in Afghanistan.
Citizen Alan
@acallidryas:
Well to be honest, I did — the single biggest reason I finally chose Obama over Hillary was that I thought Bill was incapable of going eight years without doing something monumentally embarrassing to her administration.
On the bright side, this article demonstrates that Sally Quinn has finally forgiven Hillary Clinton for not coming to that party back in 1993, so all’s well that ends well. I find it strangely comforting that not even Sally Quinn can hold a petty grudge forever (though seventeen years is a pretty long half-life for a slight that would only matter at all to someone with the maturity of a seventh-grader)
Culture of Truth
I find it strangely comforting that not even Sally Quinn can hold a petty grudge forever
I submit it says more about Quinn’s acknowledgement that Hillary Clinton has eclipsed Quinn in every way.
Wag
Leiberman needs to run for the CN Senate this year. If he were to run again as an Independent, he might pull off another win. He could then caucus with BOTH the Democrats and the GOP, and be crowned with BIPARTISAN LAURELS by the media.
Allan
Sally’s just the world’s slowest PUMA.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Dasm!! Cole with egg on his face again! ;-)
MaryRC
@Mumphrey: See zmulls above. It’s what she’s saying when she’s not saying “Bless her heart”. The little digs in every sentence:
If Clinton is dissatisfied with her role …
If she is being left out of the policymaking, or being sent on trips to keep her out of town …
Bill Clinton has not been the problem that so many anticipated … he has… been discreet about his own life.
She’s being left out and ignored and we all know what a problem Bill can be and he’s still cheating on her but she’s smiling through!
It’s a Southern-belle thing apparently. You stick the knife in and as you twist it you say “Bless her heart. She’s doing the best she can.”
Rick Massimo
She’s good at her job and she likes it. Switch her out! It makes sense for the Democrats! Because Sally Quinn has been such a longtime Democratic supporter!
Ash Can
Oh, honestly. Who cares what that fussy old trollop says, anyway?
Lysana
And switch her into a job where we’ll never hear from her again to boot, bless her heart.
Quinn is so jealous the text of that article is green.
acallidryas
@Citizen Alan
I was embarrassed for our country over the impeachment crisis, but I wasn’t really embarrassed by Bill Clinton’s action. Not nearly as much I was embarrassed by Dubya whenever he went over seas.
I think that him doing something that was dragged out as an embarrassment by the Republicans was a very valid fear if Bill had been the first husband. But other than their hatred of him, I don’t see why they’d be particularly interested in disgracing the husband of the Secretary of State
Redshift
@Steve: Even worse, it’s “Hillary’s doing a great job so let’s move her to a different one that’s almost entirely ceremonial.” It’s just completely brainless.
Nellcote
@mistermix:
Does that explaing the “Saint Sarah” Newsweak cover?
TooManyJens
That’s the problem with your inane plan? That we’d have a lame duck Vice President?
Sweet mother of fuck.
IndieTarheel
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Where would you like your internet shipped?
Joseph Nobles
The press cannot be stopped from meditating on how much money they would make if there was crazy drama in the White House. It’s like speculating on how you’d spend the money if you won the lottery.
Norman Rogers
My exact words yesterday were (and I’m paraphrasing):
Only Sally Quinn has the power to destroy worlds. And Presidencies.
She is the light, and the way, and the ruler of all. Look for a ring on her finger. The One Ring.
Persia
@zmulls: It’s so weird. Hillary Clinton is doing great at her job! Let’s take her job away and give her a different job! How ’bout no.
chaseyourtail
Hillary is doing an OK job at best. I’m not impressed by some of her missteps. And the constant need by some to pump her up every now and then is getting annoying.