Hasslington's Obama Administration Cabinet Endorsements, #1: Bill Richardson For U.S. Secretary Of State

THE HASSLINGTON ENDORSEMENT PROCESS BEGINS

Over the next week or so, I will be making endorsements for important cabinet posts in the emerging Obama Administration (which takes over the reigns of executive power on January 20, 2009).

My first endorsement will be for the very (and increasingly) important role of U.S. Secretary of State, and here it is:

HASSLINGTON'S ENDORSEMENT FOR U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: BILL RICHARDSON

Why? Well, there are five or so major contenders for the role (at least if one believes the recent media reports), and they represent a very impressive field. Any one of them would do a fine job in the role, so making an endorsement is a very difficult process.

Prior to examining Governor Richardson's qualifications, let's look at the other four compelling candidates for the role.

DEMOCRATS:

* U.S. Senator John Kerry may be in the "lead" in the horserace for this post, and his intellectual talents and well-traveled world-view suggest that he deserves a lot of consideration. That he is also a former Democratic presidential nominee who lost a close election to George W. Bush in 2004 also might help him, given that a Kerry appointment to the post would suggest an immediate break with the Bush mindset. (And, of couse, he made sure that Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention--which launched President-Elect Obama's national political profile in a dramatic manner--so the president-elect might feel as though he owes a debt to Senator Kerry.)

* Richard Holbrooke is a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., as well as a former Undersecretary of State, so he would bring a lot of real-world experience to the role. He has worked in international affairs since the 1970s, and he has been a foreign policy advisor to several high-profile Democrats.

REPUBLICANS:

* U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel is a social conservative, but he's also a sharp critic of the Bush Administration's deployment strategies regarding (and subsequent use of) U.S. troops worldwide. Like John Kerry, he is a Vietnam veteran, but unlike Kerry, he is leaving the U.S. senate this coming January. (Senator Kerry was re-elected to his post last week, whereas Senator Hagel is voluntarily stepping away from his senate seat.) He has developed an impressive foreign policy portfolio over the last dozen years and, despite the fact that he is a Republican, he has not hidden his admiration of Barack Obama since Senator Obama entered the presidential race nearly two years ago. He even traveled to the Middle East with Senator Obama and Senator Jack Reed several months ago.

* U.S. Senator Richard Lugar is well into his seventies, but he has been an expert on nuclear proliferation issues for decades now. Furthermore, his willingness to work with Democrats, combined with his elder-statesman-esque mindset and calm demeanor, have served him well as a negotiator working to resolve seemingly irreconcilable differences between ideologues in the senate chambers and beyond. He is also from Indiana, a state that voted for Barack Obama for president this year, which marks the first time since 1964 that Indiana voted for the Democratic candidate. Surely the Democrats want to stay on the "good side" of Indiana voters....

*** NOTE: There are surely others, such as former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn (of Georgia), who will receive well-deserved consideration for the role. (In fact, he'd be a strong selection.) For the purposes of this post, however, I am merely examining the five individuals most often discussed in the media over the past week. ***

SO WHY SHOULD BILL RICHARDSON BE SELECTED FOR THE ROLE?

Though they are all impressive candidates, none of the above four individuals has as diversified a political portfolio as Bill Richardson, which can only help in the process of adapting to a new governmental role. He spent fourteen years as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, which he followed with substantive stints as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the U.S. Energy Secretary, and the two-term Governor of New Mexico. (In 2006, he was re-elected by an overwhelming majority of New Mexico voters.) This will be his final term as the chief executive of New Mexico, as that state limits its governors to two terms.

Governor Richardson is well-known throughout worldwide diplomatic circles, and for a number of reasons. First of all, he has been an international hostage negotiator for at least fifteen or sixteen years now, and has had considerable success in that heavy-pressure role. He has also negotiated with and/or delivered U.S. requirements to the likes of Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Slobodan Milosevic of the former-Yugoslavia, and the North Korean leadership structure. (The North Koreans, who refused initially to speak directly with President Bush's leadership team in his first term, instead flew to New Mexico in order to negotiate through Governor Richardson. The Bush Administration quietly sanctioned this unique set-up, and negotiations were largely successful.) He has often met with success in these types of roles, prompting former-President Clinton to suggest that this success is due partly to the fact that "bad guys like Bill" and his straight-forward, honest approach to negotiations; such a mindset has prompted many unsavory types to respect Governor Richardson, which has often led to foreign policy progress. (It also helps that he is a big, burly figure who cannot be intimidated easily, physically or otherwise.)

The fact that Governor Richardson is Hispanic might also help in that it would allow President-Elect Obama to fill an important cabinet post with someone from an ethnic group that swung heavily to the Democrats in several critical swing-states during this election cycle. That might help to solidify support among an ethnic group that is still considered very much "in-play" for both major parties during each election cycle.

Then there's this: Vice President-Elect Biden seemed to develop a rivalry with Governor Richardson during this past election cycle. Both ran for the Demcratic party's presidential nomination, and both leveraged heavily their considerable foreign policy experience. Governor Richardson made it out of the Iowa caucuses with his campaign alive, whereas Mr. Biden did not. If the president-elect wants to create what Abraham Lincoln did, which is to say a cabinet of rivals who are forced to use their considerable talents in order to work together, he could do much worse than choosing Governor Richardson as his Secretary of State, given that soon-to-be Vice President Biden will surely be involved heavily in foreign policy decisions (as will the president, of course) and will need to work closely with whoever is slotted-into the role. I, for one, would like to see those two foreign policy experts working together in order to find a concensus (and occasionally butting-heads in order to hash-out emerging concerns) as opposed to occasionally working at cross-purposes.

Given his impressive resume' (and I didn't even mention his five Nobel Peace Prize nominations), his magnanimous but tough negotiating personality, his familiarity with leaders worldwide (several worldwide leaders, including the head of Spain's government, Jose' Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, called him in order to congratulate the Democratic party on their electoral success last week), and other assorted reasons (such as his fluency in English, French, and Spanish), I endorse New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson for the role of U.S. Secretary of State in the forthcoming Obama Administration.