*Cross-posted at my website, The Danifesto*

OMG:

In an op-ed column last week in The Washington Post, journalists Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac urged Paterson to "send Bill Clinton to the Senate."

If that happened, Clinton would become the third former president to go from the White House to Capitol Hill.

President John Quincy Adams lost his re-election bid in 1828. Two years later he returned to Washington after winning election as a congressman from his home state of Massachusetts. He served in the House of Representatives until his death in 1848.

President Andrew Johnson also served as a Senator from Tennessee in 1875, 7 years after the Senate acquitted him of impeachment charges. He died a few months after taking office.

Adams actually became a very effective congressman after leaving the presidency, and he supposedly loved that job much more than his one term as chief executive.  Johnson - well, like it says, Johnson died like two seconds after returning to the Senate.

How would Bill Clinton do?

There's a part of me that actually really wants to see this happen, and it actually makes sense for the Obama administration on a few levels: the biggest impediment to Hillary Clinton's nomination, and theoretical confirmation, as secretary of state, has been the (shady) international work of her husband since leaving the White House.  Bill has been involved in a number of... entanglements... overseas, and had to undergo a ridiculously thorough, and probably invasive, vetting process in order for Hillary to be cleared for takeoff.

What better place to keep him out of trouble than to stick him - way down in seniority - in the United States Senate?

Think about it: the way it stands right now, Bill has a bunch of restrictions on him regarding his work with the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, so much so that he won't really be able to continue his work abroad as long as Hillary is heading the State Department.  I don't know about you, but the thought of Bill Clinton just sitting around looking for something to do kinda freaks me out.  He's liable to do something - dare I say - Clinton-like under those circumstances.

But if you put him in the Senate, give him a new challenge he's bound to excel at, put him on a committee or two working in concert with the Obama administration on a big issue of the day - say, health care or economic stimulus or something like that - and he could not only excel, but he'd be able to avoid the kind of entanglements that would get him into trouble with the White House.  He's much less jeopardizing to his wife's new job if he is one out of 58 (or 59, or 60...aahhhh!) Democratic senators who will, by and large, be working with President Obama & Co. on pulling the country out of its mess.

I don't expect it to happen, and I don't really know if it should, but it sounds so crazy that it just might work.