WASHINGTON
Smart is the new cool.
So said Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools’ chief, at his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday to be Barack Obama’s education secretary.
Obama’s brainy ways and political posse of “hot nerds,” as one admiring reporter dubbed them, could inspire schoolchildren to aspire.
When Duncan spends a little more time in Washington, he will learn something strange: Politics is a place where really smart people often get caught doing really dumb things.
Take Tim Geithner, the hot nerd tapped by Obama to fix the colossal mess left by W. and Henry Paulson, a man who played with live snakes and dead-on-arrival ideas.
How does a guy on the fast track to be Treasury secretary fail to pay $34,000 worth of federal taxes ($43,200, including interest), or forget to check on the immigration status of a house cleaner — the same sort of upstairs-downstairs slip-up that has tripped up other top-drawer prospects on their way to top jobs here? Americans expect the man who’s in charge of the I.R.S. to pay his own taxes.
Geithner’s transgressions may seem petty given the kind of transgressions that have taken place in the Bush administration, and given the dire warnings of Obama’s choice for budget director, Peter Orszag, that the end may be nigh if the U.S. continues to spend beyond its means.
But Obama has proselytized about a shiny new kind of politics, and it’s déjà vu all over again with the smart being dumb, the rich being greedy, the powerful being sketchy.
This brings us to the Clintons.
Hillary aced her Senate hearing on Tuesday, performing as the A-student she is. As one of her former campaign aides said, whatever else you say about her, she is always prepared.
With Chelsea sitting protectively behind in a plum dress and glam ’40s hairdo — Bill was watching on TV with his mother-in-law — Hillary showed the reasons she could be a star at state and queen of Obama’s hot nerds.
She was on top of all the issues, no matter how obscure. She batted around our “stale” arctic policy — who knew? — with Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who doesn’t seem to realize we’re sick of Alaska.
She was up to date on the inevitable Law of the Sea Treaty.
She ladled up the broth of flattery expected in the Senate with a chef’s finesse. Even after Senator Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the panel that was questioning her, tut-tutted that her links to Bill Clinton’s foundation carry the “risk” of foreign governments “and entities” trying to curry favor with Madam Secretary by donating money to her husband, she deftly buttered up Lugar.
“Your leadership and inspiration with respect to arms control and especially nonproliferation and the efforts to contain and destroy loose nukes and other materiel, and now moving into the pathogen area, which is particularly dangerous, is a great example to me of what we should be doing,” she told a beaming Senator Lugar.
Not many women can talk about “the pathogen area” with such authority and yet femininity.
After enduring endless pompous lecturing from John Kerry on what she should read and think — a thinly veiled attempt to show the world that he would have made a better secretary of state, and indeed, thinks he was promised it by Obama — Hillary slathered on the oleo.
After his windy discourse on how scientists had “revised the levels of supportable greenhouse gas emissions from 550 parts per million to 450 to now 350,” Hillary replied: “You are eloquent in describing it, and you’ve been a leader in trying to sound the alarm on it for many years.”
That seemed to calm Kerry down a bit.
The only one who attempted to joust with her about Bill’s unappetizing gravy train was David Vitter, the Louisiana Republican who was caught messing about with the notorious D.C. Madam in 2007, and he wasn’t the right messenger.
Hillary swatted him away.
She will easily intimidate the world’s dictators, just as she often intimidated Obama in the primaries. But it remains to be seen whether she can put aside her tendency to see disagreement as disloyalty. Can she work at the State Department with those who deserted her to support the usurper Obama? Can she manage Foggy Bottom better than she managed her foggy campaign?
Obama and Hillary continue to be engaged in an intense tango.
The new president is confident enough to think he can do what has never been done. He thinks he can pull out — like a diamond from carbon — the sparkling side of the Clintons that can make them exceptional public servants, extracting it from the gray side of the Clintons that can make them tacky, greedy, opportunistic and ethically shady.
Cleaning out the Augean stables was nothing compared to this task, with Obama trying to bend Hillary and Bill to his will, while they try to bend him to theirs.http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
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