John Kerry

As for Rice as Hillary Clinton's successor, on the merits I would prefer John Kerry in the job. If you have seen him discuss these issues in Senate-floor debate or elsewhere, it is obvious that he really knows them, and knows his counterparts around the world. Also, as with the choice of HIllary Clinton as Obama's first secretary of state, there would be a karmic plus to Kerry's selection. Like Hillary Clinton, he came close but not close enough in running for the presidency -- and, again like Hillary Clinton, he has worked loyally and skillfully on behalf of the Democrat who did make it all the way. (For now, let's set aside considerations of whether removing Kerry from the Senate might give Scott Brown a good chance of taking his seat for the Republicans, as he earlier did Edward Kennedy's.)

But when I see the cheap-shot, hypocritical, know-nothing tenor of the "arguments" against Susan Rice (by McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others), I shift from a so-so outlook on her nomination to enthusiastic support. If her opponents manage to knock her off with these tactics, they'll have every incentive to keep using them. Obama didn't need to send signals that Rice was his first choice. But now that the fight has shaped up this way, he really needs to take it on, and win. He's still in his first term, but this is the first important test case of what he'll put up with in the second.