Vetting Hillary Clinton

There's a major obstacle to Hillary Clinton's appointment as Barack Obama's secretary of state, said Peter Baker and Helene Cooper in The New York Times: Bill Clinton. Looking into the donors to the former president's charitable foundation, at home and abroad, and coming up with ways to head off any possible conflicts of interest could prove the most difficult part of vetting Sen. Clinton for a spot in the president-elect's cabinet.

The unprecedented "public-private partnership" that the Clintons would represent, said Michael Shear and Philip Rucker in The Washington Post, could benefit the new president, but at a price. "He would be investing his fortunes not only with his former rival for the presidency but also in an outsize figure on the global scene who has been conducting a kind of privately financed foreign policy all his own since leaving office."

"Barack is playing with fire," said Marty Peretz in The New Republic online. Giving Hillary the top foreign policy position in his administration would help her pile up credentials for her next presidential run, and it would give Bill what he wants, which is to be "where the action is." But it would reverse what most Americans wanted from Obama in the first place, "and this was to end the Clinton dominion in American politics."

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