“Team Of Rivals” And The Clinton Chase

November 17, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, History, Obama administration, Presidents 

From Andrew Sullivan to TNN’s own Robert Nedelkoff, pundits and bloggers have been team-of-rivaling ever since the spring’s struggle between Sens. Clinton and Obama. The idea (“meme” is the word for it these days) comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s epic Team Of Rivals, which showed how Abraham Lincoln co-opted most of his opponents for the 1860 Republican nomination by bringing them into his administration, especially William Seward, the New Yorker who’d thought the nomination was his and yet ended up as Lincoln’s Secretary of State and most reliable, creative, and indeed loving colleague.

That might be the way it would go with powerful, thwarted New Yorker Clinton as Secretary of State, but it might not. The fly in the mustard sauce was the ruthlessly ambitious Salmon Chase. Lincoln made him Treasury secretary, from which post he did everything he could to undermine Lincoln’s Civil War leadership as he prepared to challenge him for the nomination in 1864. For instance, as Goodwin writes,

Lincoln told [his] worried [personal secretary John] Hay that he had “all along clearly seen [Chase's] plan of strengthening himself. Whenever he [sees] that an important matter is troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man of some influence he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades the victim that he has been hardly dealt by and that he (C.) would have arranged it very differently.

It was one thing for Chase to make trouble for Lincoln with generals and politicians. It would be another thing for Clinton to do it with world leaders. I’m not saying she would, though Dr. Gannon’s post is highly instructive about her unquenched thirsts. Team Of Rivals is a great book, not a foolproof Tony Robbins plan for unlimited political success. Obama may well have the temperament to make it work. But to paraphrase St. Paul, a team takes two or more.

Comments