A Triumph for Hillary, Many Women Agree

Hillary Clinton, a first lady turned senator turned almost-president, is now transforming herself again, this time into the nation's top diplomat. But she is also back to a role she cannot seem to shake: a canvas for women's highest hopes and deepest fears about the workplace.    As she pondered this week whether to trade her hard-won independence and elected office for a job working for a more powerful man, mothers and schoolteachers and law partners mulled in tandem with her. After eight years of building her own constituency, how could Mrs. Clinton surrender it? they asked. Is secretary of state a promotion or an acknowledgment that her political prospects are now limited? And ultimately, how well will her male boss treat her? As news spread on Friday evening that Mrs. Clinton had decided to accept the job, so did a basic consensus: the assignment was probably a triumph for Mrs. Clinton, if a costly one.   Click http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/us/politics/22clinton.html?_r=1 for more details.   My comment: The foregoing is of course from women's point of view. From a detached point of view, Hillay is a virtual caterpillar on ever ongoing metamorphosis and never really becoming a butterfly. Women would like to think that Hillary has triumphed, albeit pyrrhic, oblivious to clever and subtle shuffle of the president-elect to put her out of the way and in her place..  As Secretary of State she will be implementing foreign policy that is unpalatable to her taste, based on her previous campaign. She will be implementing policy that she mocked and detested, using that as battlecry to rally women who form the cracks in her ceiling.  Barack Obama could have selected Diane Feinstein as a matter of course, but no ... it must be Hillary Clinton to rub it in... in the same manner that John McCain paid homage to the president-elct in Chicago to show the world that their claim of experience on Day One is nothing but hot air.