Meanwhile, both Clintons are effectively muzzled and cannot criticize Obama even as he reverses President Clinton's free-market proclivities and budget-balancing discipline. Hillary, the supposed friend of Israel, must sit by quietly and watch Iran get the bomb while trying all the while to stop Israel from preventing it.

Bill can't even make money. Denied the ability to accept speeches from foreign governments or their organs and fenced out of continuing his profitable relationship with the emir of Dubai, he and his wife must accept the loss of the $13 million they spent on her campaign and sit by passively, unable to earn the money to replace it.

Just as Abraham Lincoln buried his rivals William Seward, Salmon P. Chase and Edwin Stanton in the Cabinet and then on the Supreme Court, and Woodrow Wilson buried William Jennings Bryan at the State Department, so Obama has hidden his predecessor and his rival in plain sight at the upper reaches of the government.

How long will Hillary subject herself to this discipline? Likely as long as Obama is popular. Should his ratings fade, she might move away from the president and could even consider a primary contest against him in 2012. But while he is on top of his game, she'll stay loyal.

But she is shrinking by the day. Once Obama's equal -- and before that his superior -- she now looks tiny compared to the president. She doesn't look like a president in waiting -- she's more like a senior staff member hoping to rise in the bureaucracy. No longer at the head of a movement or the symbol of rising women all over the world, she has faded into the State Department woodwork.

She is much less visible than her predecessors Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, James Baker, Madeleine Albright or Condi Rice. She is even less in the public eye than was Al Haig during his one-year tenure. One has to go back to the likes of Warren Christopher or William Rogers to find a secretary of state as far down the totem poll.

This diminished status has got to grate on her and on him. But they are trapped in Obama's web and cannot easily escape.