Wanted: Secretary of State (please no baggage)

Imagine, for a moment that you are an employee of the State Department.

For starters, you probably have an insufferable opinion about yourself. (Well the New Testament notes that "blessed are the peacemakers" after all.)

However, right about now, you're probably a bit hacked off about how your new boss will be hired.

Given his inexperience in foreign affairs -- actually inexperience marks everything about Obama except for getting elected -- one would think that he would select an Éminence grise (akin to a Warren Christopher or a George Shultz) to guide the State Department. Somebody who gives you the feeling that he knows how to find his office on the 7th floor at Foggy Bottom and can discern between our friends and our enemies and those who are neither.

In fact, the next Secretary need not worry about having his (or her) worldview comport with the next President's. After all, if political expediency is the foreign policy then indecision will be the key to flexibility. The new boss need not have a stand on departing or staying in Iraq, meeting or not meeting with world tyrants sans preconditions, or if Iran should be seen as a big or a small problem.

This scenario makes the parlor game -- Name your Secretary of State -- so dispiriting. Hillary Clinton, who tagged along with her husband on his world jaunts and dodged "sniper" fire in the fields of Bosnia is the leading candidate. If selected, one will have a hard time thinking that this is anything less than a paid political IOU. Hillary, one would hope, has come to the realization that she will never occupy the Oval Office; and being party leader in the Senate seems to be such a poor second place. Alas, two women have already served as Secretary of State, so she wouldn't even have the honor of being the first. But would she take the gig as a thank you for making Obama's road to the presidency a little less difficult?

Bill Richardson would be a horrible pick. He got on the Obama bandwagon a little late in the game (was he threatened to hold back his endorsement?) but he delivered New Mexico. Unfortunately for Richardson, his singular achievement while the Ambassador to the United Nations was to find Monica Lewinsky a job. You want to revisit that era? Sadly, he has a beard and he wears suits that wore better on him twenty pounds ago -- you want him to be the face of the United States?

John Kerry's desire for the job borders on desperate and that just doesn't go with the "cool" Obama Administration. Richard Holbrooke would need a separate office to hold his ego (or so I have it from those who met him.) More tellingly, these guys may have their own foreign policy agenda. Obama is looking for stenographers, not statesmen.

On foreign affairs, the only masterstroke by Obama & Co. has been to remove Joe Biden from the machinery. He'll do a fine job attending funerals, provided that he doesn't get to offer a eulogy.