Lemme outsource an answer on this one, as
this struck me as something I was feeling myself but hadn't formed words for:
Quote:I continue to consider this a basically weird choice. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did not have many policy disagreements during the primary. Most of their disagreements, including the fight over health care mandates, were minor. They were technical fights or political disputes rather than collisions of principle. The exception was foreign policy. Iraq was a real disagreement on the level of principle. The heated argument over negotiations with autocrats was similarly fundamental. Samantha Power wrote, and the Obama campaign released, a
memo entitled "Conventional Wisdom vs. The Change We Need." It argued:
Quote: It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of US foreign policy. The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced, and even naïve. Barack Obama defied conventional wisdom and opposed invading Iraq. He did so at a time when some told him that doing so would doom his political future...Barack Obama was right; the conventional wisdom was wrong. And today, we see the consequences. Iraq is in chaos. According to the National Intelligence Estimate, the threat to our homeland from terrorist groups is “persistent and evolving.” Al-Qaeda has a safe-haven in Pakistan. Iran has only grown stronger and bolder. The American people are less safe because of a rash war...Barack Obama’s judgment is right. It is conventional wisdom that has to change.
Conventional wisdom, in this memo, was another way of saying "Hillary Clinton, her foreign policy advisers, and the people who agreed with her about things." And Obama just appointed her to the most important foreign policy position in the US government. She will have to carry out his overarching priorities, of course, but beneath that, she will have significant managerial autonomy, and considerable opportunity to use her judgment. The very judgment Obama oriented his campaign against. Which is not to say that this is a bad pick, or that Hillary Clinton will do a bad job. But it is a very sharp break with the Obama campaign's central message.
But it's not just foreign policy. You'll remember how Obama earned the ire of Bill Clinton early in the primary campaign when he repeatedly spoke of the need to put the country on a substantively different road of economic policy than it had been the last 30 years. He implied that the Clinton years were more of a pause in the conservative hold on economic policy than a break with it. And it's true: the Clinton years were years of welfare reform and deregulation. Obama spoke of a break with the whole era, and surrounded himself with advisors who had criticised the Clinton years from the left.
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