Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader?

Obama passed on her as vice president but can still put Hillary Clinton on the team by backing her for Senate Majority Leader.

In that role, Harry Reid has been ineffectual in rallying Democrats to curtail Bush's excesses or even effectively articulate an opposition view. Now, with a Senate reshuffling that includes the stepping-down of Robert Byrd and the throwing-out of Joe Lieberman, "change" could be served by bringing Clinton to the forefront.

With a clear electoral mandate and wide margin in Congress, before reaching out to Republicans as he has promised to do, the President-Elect can solidify his own ranks by recruiting the faction of his own party he narrowly defeated to win the nomination.

By naming Rahm Emanuel chief of staff, Obama has shown he was no qualms about relying on former Clinton loyalists. Choosing the former First Lady as a legislative partner would be a logical next step.

During the primaries, there were insistent rumors that Reid himself was offering his position to Sen. Clinton as an inducement to concede the nomination. He denied them, but the idea now won't come as a shock.

Clinton's ascension would be a powerful metaphor for cracking the glass-ceiling with women in the leadership positions of both houses of Congress, and her passion on domestic issues would nicely compliment Joe Biden's strength on foreign policy as surrogates for the new Administration's views.

The efforts of both Clintons during the campaign and the logic of a Hillary run in 2012 as a natural heir to a successful Obama Administration are strong arguments against any worries about possible subversion.

In his reaching out for bipartisan consensus, the President-Elect could start with unifying his own party.

Gender Goop

The booing of Sarah Palin yesterday for lauding Hillary Clinton's presidential primary achievement is a dandy metaphor for the sexual stew this election has created.

Here is a woman on the Republican ticket chosen mainly for gender appeal trying to profit from the unhappiness of Hillary supporters being rebuffed by Hillary-hating ideologues even as she tries to win an election for them.

If this foreshadows a Palin problem in her own party, it pales by comparison to the bind she creates for Democrats. If they harp on her lack of qualifications, they risk accusations of sexism. (Recall the success of Clarence Thomas, a less than brilliant choice for the Supreme Court, in clobbering Democrats, with charges of a "high-tech lynching.")

Looking ahead to the Vice-Presidential debate, Joe Biden will have to walk on eggshells to avoid appearing condescending. Even if he treats Palin with utmost courtesy, showing his superior grasp of foreign policy could be interpreted as sexist bullying.

Unlike the unspoken racism that dogs Barack Obama, the question of Palin's identity as a woman will be the subject of open argument ad nauseum, perhaps one of the goals the McCain campaign had in mind when choosing her.

It could serve the double purpose of defending veiled racial attacks on Obama with countercharges that Palin too is being victimized while she goes relatively unscathed in promoting the values of the Religious Right.

This is not quite what the leaders of the Women's Movement had in mind over half a century of trying to break through glass ceilings.

The Gender Agenda

"If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination," the New York Times asks today, "how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?"

The question underscores how crucial it is for Democrats to untangle the issue of what derailed America's first woman president from what seemed her clear path to the White House only a year ago. Was Hillary Clinton's campaign undone by the message or the messengers?

In the latter category, Sen. Clinton, although she bears ultimate responsibility, was clearly hampered not only by her husband but hot-shot strategist Mark Penn, who failed to see that voters would be turned off by a play-it-safe campaign fueled by what looked like a sense of entitlement. (They overlooked the lesson of what Harry Truman did to Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, a "sure" year for Republicans.)

"When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out. Her candidacy faltered as a result of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

No matter how true that may be, and even if they accept its validity, that will bring cold comfort to millions of women who have so much hope invested in what Hillary Clinton calls breaking "the highest and hardest glass ceiling" in American life.

All other calculations aside, and there are many, this frustration has to be taken into account in Barack Obama's choice of a running mate. With consideration and without condescension, the potential first African-American President has to think long and hard about the symbolic and practical value of breaking through American prejudice with two for the price of one.