Senator Hillary Clinton Chosen as Next U.S. Secretary of State

According to several sources, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) will be President-elect Barack Obama's choice as secretary of state. And I believe she will be a very good secretary of state. She would not have been my first choice, but hey, I wasn't elected president either.

Of course there are political reasons why President-elect Obama would choose Senator Clinton. This keeps her from running against him for the nomination in 2012, and it brings lots of new or renewed supporters on board with the Obama Administration. On the political downside, he now has to share his spotlight with an international celebrity who brings a former presidential spouse onto the stage as well.

But I don't think he choose her for purely political reasons. Clinton knows the world and knows what needs to be done to restore America's respect and admiration around the world. I believe she knows how to capitalize on the automatic goodwill we have received for merely electing Obama.

It is interesting that foreign policy was one of the divisive issues between Obama and Clinton in the primary race, yet here they are pledging to cooperate on that very issue. Clinton said we couldn't trust Obama to handle the 3 a.m. phone call about a global crisis. And the two diverged on how far to go in engaging enemy states. But as at the end of most campaigns, these things will be papered over. I never thought Obama and Clinton were really that far apart on the engagement issue anyway.

In the end, choosing Clinton will leave many people conflicted. Even in a column where Maureen Dowd seemed to be mostly OK with the choice, she wrote "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary — who voted to authorize the Iraq War without even reading the intelligence assessment — in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"

So what do you think? Will President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton be a formidable foreign policy team? Or are we in for some big time White House drama?