Take Off The Tinfoil Hat

AH-HAH!!!

Here's a seemingly little-noticed update on Hillary Clinton:

TAVIS SMILEY: Finally, there's already speculation about whether or not Secretary Clinton is going to do this for the full first time, and whether or not she has any interest if asked to stay on to do it for eight years? You see how tough the job is, can you imagine yourself doing all four years and, if asked, doing it for another four years?

HILLARY CLINTON: No, I really can't. I mean, it is just…

TAVIS SMILEY: No to what? All four or eight?

HILLARY CLINTON: The whole, the whole eight, I mean, that that would be very challenging. But I, you know, I don't wanna make any predictions sitting here, I'm honored to serve, I serve at the pleasure of the President, but it's a, it's a 24/7 job, and I think at some point, I will be very happy to LAUGHS pass it on to someone else.

TAVIS SMILEY: That opens the door for the obvious question, what would Hillary Clinton want to do when she is no longer Secretary of State?

HILLARY CLINTON: Oh, I, there's so many things I'm interested in, I mean, really going back to private life and spending time reading, and writing, and maybe teaching, doing some personal travel, not the kind of travel where you bring along a couple of hundred people with you. Just focusing on, on issues of women, girls, families, the kind of intersection between what's considered 'real politique' and real life politics, which has always fascinated me.

Mm-hmmm.  Spend time reading...?  Riiiiiight.

Let's review.  It was Hillary's turn to be President, right up until she got out-foxed (some would say cheated) by this young upstart Obama in the Iowa Caucus.  Things went downhill from there, and she ends up backing out of the Dem primary to accept a high-profile position in his Cabinet.  However, she doesn't disband her campaign office.  A recent Gallup poll has her more well-liked than Obama.  Now she's talking about how she won't be SecState for more than four years -- coinciding nicely with the end of Obama's first term in office -- and is being cagey about what she's planning to do next.  How many dots do we need to see before we start connecting them?  This is nothing new - we discussed the idea of Hillary 2012 way back before the 2008 election. 

And now, Barack Obama has made such a mess of the Democrat party's electoral chances that we are starting to see Dems clamoring for Hillary to unseat him.

Methinks the tinfoil hat must come off!

But wouldn't such a challenge be disastrous for the Democrat party as a whole?  Perhaps; under normal circumstances, an intra-party challenge certainly would be.  But, can things really get a whole lot worse for the Dems in 2010 and 2012 than they're already shaping up to be?  So what's going to happen to Barack Obama if Hillary does challenge him?  Is there a way to avoid the intra-party conflict?

Well...Moe Lane at RedState traces Obama's professional career (it's a short trace) and links a very interesting story from Byron York:

This is about the time Barack Obama becomes bored with his job.

He's in his second year as president, and he's discovered that even with all the powers of office, he can't do everything he wants to do, like remake America. Doing stuff is hard. In the past, prosaic work has held little appeal for Obama, and it's prompted him to think about moving on.

Begin with his first serious job, as a community organizer in Chicago. Obama got a little done, but quickly became frustrated with small achievements. "He didn't see organizing making any significant changes in things," Jerry Kellman, the organizer who hired him, told me in 2008.

What Obama wanted was political power, and that is what sent him to Harvard Law School. "He was constantly thinking about his path to significance and power," another organizer, Mike Kruglik, told me. "He said, 'I need to go there [Harvard] to find out more about power. How do powerful people think? What kind of networks do they have? How do they connect to each other?'"

Constantly seeking greater and greater power, and getting bored after just a short time in every position he's ever held?  Hmmm...

Coincidentally, I was just doing a little light reading about the U.N. Secretary General the other day, and I noticed that the SecGen serves a 5 year term.  The current SecGen Ban Ki-Moon was elected in 2006 and took office in 2007.  Hmmm...  I consulted my nifty mental calculator and discovered that the next SecGen would be elected in ***GASP*** 2011, to take office in 2012!  Given that Obama is doing so much to erase America's global leadership -- economically, militarily, freedom-wise, and in all other possible ways -- the rest of the world generally appears to think pretty fondly of him.  Double hmmm...

Okay, maybe the tinfoil hat should go back on with that last part.  But, when I see a story about someone proposing an exception to the rule that nations on the permanent Security Council can't field a SecGen, it's coming right back off again...

There's my two cents.