May 21, 2007--A Uniter?

According to Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals, a feature of the Lincoln administration was his decision to appoint many of his leading political opponents to the cabinet. From her book and the other traditional accounts of his presidency this was a political and practical master stroke at a time when, to say the least, the country was fundamentally divided.

Sound unfamiliar? You say that was then as this is now and that in the U.S. and, say, Europe, where politics has become a blood sport, with everything seen through a ferociously partisan lens, doing something of this kind now would be unthinkable.

Well, think again. All we need to do to find an equivalent political model is to look east toward, sorry, France.

Lat week, their version of a divider, Nicolas Sarkozy, was sworn in as the new president of France; and the first thing he did, contrary to any sane expectations, was to construct a Lincoln-like cabinet of fierce opponents. And not just to insignificant positions like Minister of Culture. (See linked report from the NY Times.)

Most startling was his appointment of Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister. To begin, Sarkozy is a creature of the extreme right while Kouchner was a leading figure in the Socialist Party. “Was” because when he accepted Sarkozy’s offer, the party immediately expelled him. Kouchner is the founder of Doctors Without Borders and has not been shy in his criticism of his new president, calling him a “man who feels no shame” for pandering to the extreme right. But here they are working together. Of course we’ll have to see how things work out, but in the meantime they view themselves as partners in the effort to restore France’s rightful place in the world.

So I have this fantasy—

Hillary gets elected President and rather than turn foreign policy over to her husband she appoints James Baker to be her Secretary of State. And Rudy Giuliani, why not, to head the Defense Department. While she’s at it she selects Arnold Schwarzenegger as her Secretary of Commerce.

Most radically, and potentially transformative, she figures out a way to lure Chief Justice John Roberts off the Supreme Court to become Attorney General—to return America to the Rule of Law, or whatever. I know I’m stretching the fantasy further with this one, but you may recall that Lyndon Johnson got Arthur Goldberg to step off the Court to become his Secretary of Labor.

Vive La France!