That night, Sen. Kerry went to the presidential palace, where the two men, sometimes accompanied by Mr. Eikenberry and sometimes alone, hashed out Mr. Karzai’s concerns. “We had lot of hours together and talked about a lot of things, including the American experience in elections, and going back to 1864, Al Gore in 2000,” Sen. Kerry said. “I think it helped to put it into a certain framework.”

Within days, Karzai agreed to the runoff, and Kerry was next to him in front of a bank of cameras, calling Karzai a statesman. This is a very big deal: with Kerry’s intervention, Karzai avoided a situation that might have meant a drastic revision of Obama’s Afghanistan plans, and not in any positive direction.

After reading all of this stuff last night, I tweeted a prediction that Kerry may have just clinched a gig as Secretary of State when Hillary Rodham Clinton decides to move on. Kerry lobbied hard for the job last year after vigorously supporting Obama on the campaign trail, and was just barely passed over for Obama’s former presidential rival. On the eve of the election — in fact, on the day-of – it was my understanding he’d get the position.

But he remains a close confidante of the president, particularly on foreign affairs. Kerry will meet with Obama privately today at the White House to discuss Afghanistan. Chances are they won’t talk about any future emissary role, but it might be hovering in the background.

[A]fter Taitz brought her campaign to the office of Kentucky’s deputy Secretary of State Leslie Fugate, Fugate issued a letter to the state’s attorney general calling for “President Barack Obama’s eligibility to be on the ballot in Kentucky.”

9/11 conspiracy theorists tried some similar strategies, but for whatever reason (often because Fox News jumped on the stories) legislators were less bold about putting their names next to the “truthers” and pushing for their causes.

Based on her testimony, her answers to questions, and her public statements, I believe she will take our foreign policy in a direction that erodes our national independence and surrenders sovereignty to international powers.

I am deeply concerned that she will take aim at decades-old policies intended to protect the sanctity of human life. These policies ensure that our foreign assistance money do not fund abortion, and are not used to lobby foreign nations to repeal laws that protect unborn children.

The United States is certainly an economic, political, and military superpower.  But, we have also strived to be more — to be a moral superpower.  Our unwavering adherence to principles of freedom and human dignity set us apart, and these pro-life regulations contribute to that moral leadership.

DeMint was also bothered by the Clinton Foundation issues, but he’s honest enough to point out that these were not the things that should have bothered conservatives about Clinton. Note to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.): this is how you convince this wing of your party that you’re good to go.

The hosts of “Fox and Friends” asked Cornyn about his confrontation with Clinton yesterday, when she reportedly put her hand on his arm. “It was done in affection,” said Cornyn. The cameras cut away from him before he nervously handed over his lunch money to a gang of menacing Senate pages.

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (WDCpix)

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) almost certain to become President-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state, some foreign-policy experts in the Obama orbit are expressing frustration.

Clinton herself isn’t so much the problem, they say. It’s the loyalists and traditional thinkers Clinton is likely to bring into the State Dept. if she becomes secretary.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The dispute is only partly ideological in nature. While the coterie of foreign-policy thinkers around Obama have been more liberal, in an aggregate sense — on issues like Iraq and negotiations with America’s adversaries — the Obama loyalists question the boldness of the Clintonites. They fear that Obama’s apparent embrace of Clinton represents an acquiescence to the conventional Democratic foreign-policy approaches that they once derided as courting disaster. Some wonder whether a Clinton-run State Dept. will hire progressive Obama partisans after an acrimonious primary.

In addition, some Obama loyalists wonder whether the same people who attacked Obama on foreign policy during the primaries can implement Obama’s agenda from State Dept. perches. “Look, Clinton and Obama are both smart people,” said one Democratic official who would not speak for the record, “and I’m sure their one-on-one relationship would be OK. But when you hire a Clinton, you hire more than just that one person, you get the entire package.” If Clinton becomes secretary of state, it’s possible that the fissures between her loyalists and Obama’s would be a significant undercurrent of the administration’s foreign-policy decision-making.

No one would comment for the record for this story from either the Clinton or the Obama camps. Several people were reluctant to speak even on background, whether out of an exhaustion with a dispute that has lasted for more than 18 months within the party or out of reluctance to jeopardize their own prospects for jobs with the Obama administration.

Some in the Democratic foreign-policy community worry about the implications for a cohesive diplomatic message, given the differences in substance and tone between the supporters of the two Democratic giants.

“Foreign policy is probably where Clinton and Obama differ the most,” said the Democratic official. “They just have fundamentally different instincts. On the big decisions, Obama can and will certainly call the shots, but the consistency of follow-through could really be a problem. And the instincts on the smaller decisions will be very different. Cohesion of our foreign policy could suffer.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY)

Most directly at issue is the nest of appointments within the State Dept. — which in a Democratic administration is where most of the foreign-policy resumes go, as liberals traditionally gravitate toward issues involving diplomacy instead of defense. Since the terms of a prospective Clinton appointment are not yet worked out — ABC’s Jake Tapper cited an Obama aide on Thursday saying an announcement would likely come after Thanksgiving — it is unclear how much control Clinton would have over staffing the department, though veterans of previous administrations say it would be unheard of for her not to be able to bring in her own team.

“Sometimes, if you offer me a cabinet job, I take it but [only if] I get to pick all Senate-confirmable appointments, down to assistant secretary,” said one such veteran of prior administrations. “Or I get the top three and then we work out the rest.” In George W. Bush’s administration, for example, Dick Cheney placed his ally John Bolton as undersecretary of state as a check on a Foggy Bottom team that conservatives distrusted, Secretary Colin Powell and Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage.

Some progressive Obama supporters think the arrival of Clinton at the State Dept. will mean they’ll be frozen out. That would have implications for their advancement in subsequent Democratic administrations.

“Basically, you have all of these young, next-generation and mid-career people who took a chance on Obama” during the primaries, said one Democratic foreign-policy expert included in that cohort. “They were many times the ones who were courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many of them supported Obama in the first place. And many of them would likely get shut out of the mid-career and assistant-secretary type jobs that you need, so that they can one day be the top people running a future Democratic administration.”

In the foreign-policy bureaucracy, these middle-tier jobs — assistant secretary and principal-deputy-assistant and deputy-assistant — are stepping stones to bigger, more important jobs, because they’re where much of the actual policy-making is hashed out. Those positions flesh out strategic decisions made by the president and cabinet secretaries; implement those policies; and use their expertise to both inform decisions and propose targeted or specific solutions to particular crises.

The responsibility conferred on those offices, and the expertise developed and deepened by their occupants, shape the future luminaries of U.S. foreign policy. Susan Rice, for example, served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton’s second term and is now a leading contender for a top job in the Obama administration.

“These are your foreign-policy change agents,” said the Democratic foreign-policy expert.

Additionally, there are only so many jobs to go around. Many State Dept. positions go to Foreign Service officers and career bureaucrats. Important ambassadorships tend to go to large campaign contributors. And while the State Dept. was known as a repository of resistance to Bush during the past eight years, it has its share of Republicans, Obama-skeptics and even Bush supporters.

“State is already, like most agencies, riddled with Bush loyalists,” said a Democratic official with ties to the foreign-policy community. “If you add in a camp of Clinton loyalists, plus career staffers, none of whom are directly tied to Obama, I think it should be a serious concern to Obama. Clinton folks are known for their loyalty to the Clintons.”

There is an ideological component as well — though it is more complicated than either side typically admits. During the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign attracted more familiar Democratic faces from the foreign-policy community — the people derided by the liberal blogosphere as self-styled Very Serious People — who tended to be less progressive than their counterparts in the Obama campaign. The foreign-policy wing of the Obama campaign, during the primaries, considered itself as a force for redressing the timidity of the traditional Democratic foreign-policy community that acquiesced to disasters like the Iraq war.

Samantha Power (Wikimedia Commons)

“You’ve already begun to see it even before Sen. Clinton gets to the State Dept.,” said the foreign-policy official who has served in previous administrations. “Look at the people on the transition team. These are not people who necessarily supported Obama in campaign, and had different views on Iraq.”

Some Obama loyalists pointed to a 2007 memo written by Harvard’s Samantha Power — a former leading Obama adviser who resigned from the campaign after making an untoward remark about Clinton — that summarized the Obama campaign’s ideological meta-critique of many of the people who might staff a Clinton-run State Dept. Titled “Conventional Wisdom vs. the Change We Need,” the campaign released Power’s memo to the press after the Clinton campaign labeled Obama naive for proposing negotiations with dictators without preconditions; for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and for proposing highly-conditioned military strikes in Pakistan against senior Al Qaeda operatives.

“It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Power, who declined to speak for this story. “The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced and even naïve.”

Some in the Obama camp are left wondering whether picking Clinton as secretary of state represents an acquiescence to such conventional wisdom. “That memo was emblematic in many ways of the difference between the two groups,” said a Democratic foreign-policy expert and Obama loyalist. Asked about the ideological implications of the difference, the expert said, “The early Obama supporters were generally much more opposed to Iraq and you can draw out assumptions from there.”

Yet those assumptions are not entirely clear cut. Susan Rice opposed the Iraq war, but she was still a member in good standing of the traditional Washington foreign-policy community, ensconced at the ultra-establishment Brookings Institution. Her Brookings colleague, Lee Feinstein, signed on with the Clinton team and often criticized Obama, but he also wrote in favor of “unconditional negotiations with Iran” even before Obama entered the race.

Richard Holbrooke, a longtime progressive bete noir — and assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton — was an Iraq war supporter, but also been a leading voice with the Campaign to Ban Torture, a bipartisan pressure group devoted to rolling back Bush’s interrogation policies. And Clinton’s campaign gained the ardent support of liberal heroes like Gen. Wesley Clark and retired Amb. Joe Wilson, both of whom opposed the Iraq war.

The Democratic official noted Obama’s stated intrigue with presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals,” which documented the ultimately-constructive fissures in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, but rejected the comparison.

“The situation is fundamentally different today than in Lincoln’s time,” the official said. “The agencies are much more vast, so the people under the secretary, who aren’t directly controllable by the president, are a much bigger part of the equation these days. And when they are part of a group like the Clinton folks, it’s a real issue. Besides, even the Lincoln cabinet was much more dysfunctional than Goodwin’s book portrayed.”

John Kerry was one of the first party leaders to endorse Barack Obama. (wdcpix)

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, has emerged as a leading candidate for secretary of state — should Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency Nov. 4.

Obama campaign advisers declined to comment on the record for this story. Nor would many Democratic foreign-policy experts who might join an Obama administration. But off the record, Obama aides made clear that Kerry’s name is on a very short list of contenders to become the country’s top diplomat. Another person talked up by the great mentioner is Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a Vietnam War veteran whose foreign-policy views align surprisingly well with Obama’s.

Kerry would bring strong credentials to an Obama administration. His Vietnam experience instilled in him a sense of the tragic and a gravity about committing U.S. forces to peripheral conflicts. He has a well-established place in the Senate as a foreign-policy expert, stemming from his seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. His first book, “The New War,” published in 1998, was a prescient look at threats to national security from non-state actors like terrorists and narco-traffickers.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Furthermore, longtime observers say, Kerry’s political instincts could be an asset. Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a grant-making foundation for non-proliferation studies, said Kerry’s experience in the Senate — and as a presidential nominee — taught him the importance of building domestic support for an administration’s foreign policy. “He combines foreign-policy expertise with political instincts,” Cirincione said. “He understands it’s not enough to have the right policy, but to deliver the policy and build support for that policy.”

Over this year, Kerry has developed a close relationship with Obama. In January, he lent high-profile support to the Illinois senator in the Democratic primary, endorsing him immediately after Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses. At a time when many leading party figures were still withholding endorsements, Kerry intended his support to help Obama win the New Hampshire primary and end Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) front-runner bid for the nomination.

While that didn’t happen, Kerry still remained active as an Obama surrogate on the campaign trail. Aides who do not wish to be quoted said that Kerry often implored Obama to draw sharp distinctions with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on foreign policy — a lesson perhaps born of Kerry’s own reluctance in 2004 to renounce the invasion of Iraq.

“John Kerry has consistently pursued liberal internationalist positions in the Senate, which are in accord with expectations about an Obama administration foreign policy,” said Robert Farley, a national-security professor at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, in an email. “Notably, Sen. Kerry spearheaded initiatives to engage with two nations viewed as hostile to the United States. In 1985, Kerry visited Nicaragua and met with President [Daniel] Ortega, then under heavy pressure from the United States and its Contra proxies. In the early 1990s, Kerry (along with Sen. John McCain) worked to lay the ground for normalization of relations with Vietnam, including hearings that put to rest the idea that Vietnam continued to hold U.S. POWs. To the extent that a President Obama would seek engagement with Iran, North Korea or other nations hostile to the United States, Kerry would seem an ideal choice for secretary of state.”

During the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Kerry gave one of the most forceful speeches, directly attacking McCain on his perceived foreign-policy strengths. “When John McCain stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier just three months after 9/11 and proclaimed, ‘Next up, Baghdad!’” Kerry said, “Barack Obama saw, even then, an occupation of ‘undetermined length, undetermined cost, undetermined consequences’ that would ‘only fan the flames of the Middle East.’ Well, guess what? Mission accomplished.”

Kerry, of course, famously offered McCain a place on the 2004 Democratic ticket.

Since losing the presidency in 2004, Kerry’s foreign-policy positions have assumed a bolder cast. He repudiated the Iraq war in 2005; opposed President George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge with vigor and set to work overturning the media caricature of him as a politician without convictions.

In an off-the-cuff talk in Denver just before his convention speech, Kerry argued for vigorous U.S. re-engagement to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace; an end to the Iraq war that includes a negotiated reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites; and reframing the war on terrorism as a “global counterinsurgency” requiring a fundamental “rethink” of U.S. strategy. In a July Op-Ed for the Financial Times, the Massachusetts senator argued for making “a nuclear-free world” a central goal of U.S. foreign policy.

“Kerry would be a great secretary of state,” said Cirincione. “One of the best things that ever happened to him was to realize he’s not going to be president. It freed him up, and let Kerry be Kerry. His insights and statements over the last couple of years are some of the best work he’s ever done.”

Bob Mackey, a recently-retired Army officer, agreed. “Given his views on Iraq and the war on terror, [Kerry] would be of substantial benefit to the U.S. image overseas,” Mackey said. “Few, if any, senior leaders in the U.S. would do a better job. Many would do a lot worse.”

Rachel Kleinfeld, executive director of the Truman National Security Project, an organization advising progressive candidates on foreign policy, called Kerry’s foreign-policy instincts “excellent” but pointed out that a successful secretary of state had to be “someone close enough to Sen. Obama to make that department stronger.”

Advisers caution that Kerry isn’t a certainty to be Obama’s pick for Foggy Bottom. For one thing, his skill set as a senator with extensive foreign-policy experience and a perch on the Foreign Relations Committee matches that of Joe Biden, the vice-presidential nominee. For another, Kerry is running for his fifth term in the Senate, and if Biden wins the vice-presidency, the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be open.

In addition, other members on the short list for secretary of state offer their own strengths: Hagel, for one, would allow Obama a high-profile gesture to moderate Republicans.

Aides to Kerry did not return requests for comment. Similarly, many Democratic foreign-policy hands were reluctant to comment for publication. “People don’t want to do anything to hurt their chances of getting an appointment,” Cirincione observed. “This is Washington, man, everybody except for maybe four or five people wants to go into the administration. And I’m one of them — so I’m talking to you.”

Rice stressed that the Bush administration’s tough stand on Iran was backed by multilateral agreements and prior U.N. resolutions, while sounding a positive note on high-level meetings. Once Iran suspends its enrichment program, she said “we’re prepared to talk to Iran at anytime.”

Transcript from the State Dept.:

QUESTION: Let’s move to Iran. The Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, mentioned his willingness to talk to Iran if it’s going to produce any result. Why your position was the opposite? Was your policy toward Iran based on ideological stand or political strategy, and can you explain?

RICE: Well, let’s remember that the policy toward Iran is a policy not just of the United States but also of the European 3 – Germany, Britain and France – and Russia and China, which is to say that there are two tracks. If Iran is willing to negotiate and to suspend its enrichment and reprocessing, and accept the very generous offer that the six have put on the table, including, by the way, an offer for civil nuclear power, then there’s an open path to not just negotiation about the nuclear program but negotiation about anything that Iran wishes to talk about.

I hardly think that that’s saying that we won’t talk to Iran. We’re perfectly ready to talk to Iran. But what we don’t want to do is to give Iran cover to continue improving its nuclear programs that could lead to a nuclear weapon, which, by the way, no one in the international community wants to see Iran with a nuclear weapon. So my question has always been not why won’t the United States talk to Tehran, why won’t Tehran talk to the United States.

QUESTION: But you haven’t had a visit at a higher level, you know, in talking with Iran till now, only with strong conditions.

RICE: Well, those conditions are set by four Security Council resolutions, not just by the United States. But we’re prepared to talk to Iran at anytime. But suspend the program, even for a while, and demonstrate that there is not a desire to have a nuclear weapon.

It’s no Powell endorsement, but Rice is saying that greater engagement with Iran is a fine objective, suggesting that Obama might be on to something, while still disagreeing on the preconditions required for high-level meetings.