Hillary next Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton will be named the next US Secretary of State after the Thanksgiving Holiday this weekend. So the New York Times says today.

This is very good news for Ireland and should challenge Brian Feeney and other commentators who have been less then supportive of President Elect Obama’s commitment to this island.

For an insight into why Obama would appoint the woman who fought him so hard read Karen Tumulty in TIME this week.

As he wrapped up his second week as President-elect, it was clear that Obama was taking the long view in both diplomacy and politics. How else to explain the fact that he had all but offered the most prestigious job in his Cabinet to a woman whose foreign policy experience he once dismissed as consisting of having tea with ambassadors? Or that Clinton might accept an offer from a man whose national-security credentials, she once said, began and ended with “a speech he made in 2002″? Nowhere did Obama and Clinton attack each other more brutally last spring than on the question of who was best equipped to handle international relations in a dangerous world. That they could be on the brink of becoming partners in that endeavor is the most remarkable evidence yet that Obama is serious about his declared intention to follow another Illinois President’s model in assembling a “team of rivals” to run his government, in what could be a sharp contrast with the past 40 years of American Presidents. “I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln,” Obama told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. “There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was President, that I just find very helpful.”

Obama’s ambition is clearly to assemble a ‘team of rivals’ as Lincoln so famously did.

God speed Mr President elect.