As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stood at a Dec. 1 press conference in Chicago to announce her nomination as secretary of state, they promised the country, and the world, a much-needed push toward the restoration of world order.

It would be, Mr. Obama said, “a new beginning—a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century.”

Except, perhaps, in the one place where order is needed most.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 170 people have rendered instantly quaint the president-elect’s blueprint to use aggressive diplomacy to engineer a stable relationship between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan, and to formulate a regional approach to winning the war in Afghanistan.  read more »

Although this page supported Barack Obama during the Democratic presidential primaries, we never questioned Hillary Clinton’s intelligence, competence and determination. Only a fool would do so. She has been an effective voice for the state in the Senate and proved to be a genuine consensus-builder in an increasingly divided and dysfunctional capital.

The president-elect could not have made a better choice for secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton has been a public figure of global significance for nearly two decades. Now, she will be the public face of the United States as a new administration seeks to mend international fences. For New York, of course, Mrs.  read more »

When the journalistic pack bites into a tasty cliché they often refuse to let go, lazily chewing and regurgitating a phrase like “team of rivals” long after the flavor is gone. Derived from the Doris Kearns Goodwin book on Lincoln’s cabinet, that morsel had scant relevance to the cabinet being assembled by Barack Obama, as the president-elect bravely tried to explain when he introduced his national security team.

But as Mr. Obama learned many months ago, our leading media minds tend to be far less interested in real ideas and policies than in a fixed narrative about personalities. So his decision to nominate primary rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, with all the friction that would supposedly generate, became the focus of the news.  read more »

Just over six years ago, as legend has it, George H. W. Bush weighed in on the invasion of Iraq that his son seemed hell-bent on pursuing, deputizing his old confidante Brent Scowcroft to deliver a very public warning to the president.

Mr. Scowcroft’s resulting op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal and titled “Don’t Attack Saddam,” presciently decreed that any invasion “is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.” It fell on deaf ears in the White House, and the war commenced a few months later.

The elder Mr. Bush’s hand again seemed to be at work four years later, when, with public frustration with the war reaching its breaking point, James A.  read more »

Wake up, girls! This is the dawning of a new era. It’s time to get serious. The age of Obama has no place for superficial broads who spend all day ironing their hair, blowing their credit on status handbags and coveting bunion-mangling shoes.

In the super-earnest, cash-strapped America of today, you can no longer define yourself by a flashy purse or the number of Louboutin porno pumps in your closet. Ding-dong, the Sex and the City female archetype is melting! That post-feminist woman, the gal who thought drinking Cosmos and buying Blahniks made her an empowered and contributing member of society, is now lying in the fetal position in her closet, clutching fistfuls of credit card bills and cringing with embarrassment at her previous excesses.  read more »

It's been fashionable to compare Barack Obama's presidential transition favorably to Bill Clinton's 16 years ago, which was supposedly a model of chaos and disorganization. This is somewhat unfair to the former president, whose popularity didn't really take a hit until after he was sworn in. But Clinton did make at least one blunder that Obama has avoided: getting involved in a Georgia Senate run-off.

In late November '92, weeks after eking out a victory of his own in the state, President-elect Clinton made a last-minute campaign appearance (after first dispatching Vice President-elect Al Gore) with Senator Wyche Fowler, who was facing Republican Paul Coverdell in a run-off.  read more »

Never mind the campaign.

That's Barack Obama's once-and-for-all line on his former differences with Hillary Clinton, who he just announced as his secretary of state at a press conference this morning introducing the Obama foreign policy team.

Asked why he thought Clinton, who was standing just behind him, was qualified for secretary of state now after he once equated her trips to foreign countries as first lady with sipping tea with the powerful, he said, "This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated in the course of the campaign – no, I understand – and you’re having fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  read more »

With a run-off in Georgia set for Tuesday and a lengthy recount still ongoing in Minnesota, not all of this year's Senate races have been resolved. And yet it is a contest that won't even take place for two years that has arguably stirred the most interest this past week.

For months, it's been obvious that Chris Matthews would like to return to his native Pennsylvania and run for Arlen Specter's Senate seat in 2010. He's done nothing to silence media speculation that he'll be a candidate, declared on national television, "I want to be a senator," and even  read more »

The Gates debate is over, but Barack Obama's decision to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates upset many of the president-elect's progressive supporters -- including Chris Bowers of Open Left, usually a very astute analyst, and my friend Greg Sargent at TPM. But their objections seem to be based on a misunderstanding of both Gates himself and of the Defense Secretary's likely role in an Obama administration. As I noted earlier, Gates represents anything but a reprise of the awful neoconservative policies of the Bush years and his reappointment doesn't signify Bush's third term. On questions of military action and defense spending, he will carry out the wishes of the commander in chief -- on issues that they have presumably discussed already as well as others yet to arise -- or else he will resign.  read more »

While Barack Obama introduced the first members of his economic team, a wailing noise could be heard somewhere in the background. That was the sound of complaining liberals, who worry that the president-elect is already surrendering the progressive moment to centrists—the kind of post-election disappointment with which they are all too familiar.

Looking over the names of the new Obama appointees to important positions in the Treasury and the White House, critics on the left have dismissed them as “Clintonite retreads” or worse. According to this gloomy analysis, the incoming administration is poised to repeat the mistakes of the past rather than create new policy for the future, by staffing itself with economists wedded to old ideologies of deregulation and budget-balancing, rather than government intervention and public investment.  read more »