Obama's foreign policy and national security team, formally announced on Monday, was impressive in its genuine diversity. This wasn't faux diversity or tokenism, but a group of people who represent a refreshingly wide spectrum on ideology, gender, race, age and life experience. Three women, three African-Americans, three white men, two Republicans, or perhaps independents. It shows the world that Obama is pulling together a strong team that looks like America, but that his primary value is excellence and competence. He also made clear this now-cliché "team of rivals" will be expected to debate and even clash, but he will make final decisions and set policy.

I think this was a very smart set of moves on Obama's part. You have continuity in Robert Gates (though not continuity in the Iraq mission); you have change in Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder and Obama sounded important notes about protecting security while also protecting Americans' freedoms. "The Department of Justice plays a unique role on this team," Holder noted. "It is incumbent on those of us who lead the department to ensure not only that the nation is safe but also that our laws and traditions are respected ... We can and we must ensure that the American people remain secure and that the great constitutional guarantees that define us as a nation are truly valued." I was excited about Holder's statement, and didn't want it to get lost in the hoopla over Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

This is a team that will protect the nation's military might but bring back diplomacy, global partnership and concern for human rights. They're focused on terror, but also the global inequality that leads to terror. You look at that group onstage Monday, and while you may quibble about one choice or another, it's hard not to think Obama looks like a supremely strong leader to have assembled them.

I've already written about why I think Hillary Clinton is a strong choice for secretary of state. On Monday Obama himself made the point I made on "Hardball" two weeks ago: The foreign policy differences between them are very small, and were exaggerated for political effect during the primary. To the extent that there were differences, she liked to play the experienced hawk, while he was generally more of a voice for diplomacy, of sitting down with dictators, talking to our enemies. She didn't want him sitting down with foreign dictators with no preconditions, so she'll be in charge of setting up those meetings for him. It's a funny symbolism. I assume they'll both be getting some 3 a.m. calls.

I also think we should pay attention to what Obama praised  about Clinton: her discipline and her work ethic. He clearly sees someone who's going to work hard to advance his agenda, which he knows is also her agenda. She cannot succeed if in any way if she undermines him, and they both know that.

And while the Clintons are controversial at home, partly because of their own missteps but also thanks to an industry of professional Clinton haters, they both have a tremendous global reputation and global relationships. They stand for a time when the U.S. was more respected in the world. I think Obama is smart to annex the name and the relationships on his behalf.

I had to debate Christopher Hitchens, Clinton-hater-in-chief, on "Hardball" today. I thought I held my own, but when I watched it I caught many outright falsehoods that I missed, like his calling Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist leadership the "main clientele" of former President Clinton. Hitchens has allowed himself to be deranged by his Clinton hatred, and it's unfortunate to see a smart guy disabled by his own bias.

My bottom line is, if Hitchens is right, and Hillary Clinton is an utterly unqualified political hack who only cares about her political future and her husband's, what does her selection say about Barack Obama? Either he's naive and wimpy, and hasn't availed himself of the superior knowledge of the Clintons that Hitchens claims (or he knows and doesn't care about it); or he knows everything Hitchens does and picked her anyway for craven domestic political reasons: to get the Clintons inside his tent, not outside of it, and to co-opt a potential 2012 rival. That would be more politically venal than almost anything Hitchens accuses Clinton of doing: sacrificing our nation's global diplomatic interests to his domestic political ambitions.

So now Hitchens is extending his baseless charges of corruption against the Clintons to smear Obama. This, of course, makes me admire Obama all the more: He's taken both Clintons inside his tent because he needs them and recognizes their formidable domestic and foreign political and policy skills. He's spending political capital on them, because he thinks they're worth it, and saying a big, polite "up yours" to the Clinton haters who've made a career out of spreading this garbage. Those are my words, not Obama's, of course; he's much more diplomatic.

You can watch my debate with Hitchens here:

I was getting ready to expand on the sappy Thanksgiving post I wrote on Open Salon last night when news began to unfold Wednesday about the Mumbai attacks. We don't know enough as I write for me to say anything intelligent about this, but I found myself counting my blessings again, in a more somber way, and including Barack Obama and Joe Biden among them.

It now seems particularly ridiculous that Republicans tried to make an issue out of Biden's factual statement, during the campaign, that Obama would be "tested" by our adversaries early in his term. Of course he will, and maybe this set of attacks will be part of it, maybe it will be something brand-new after Jan. 20.

I find myself particularly grateful for Obama's calm and his clear judgment as I think about future awful days like this one. I'm glad he got a jump on his economic team this week, and I'm relatively happy with the news about his foreign policy and defense team as it emerges, particularly Hillary Clinton at State and Susan Rice as U.N. ambassador. Frankly, I'm torn about reports that Obama will keep Robert Gates as secretary of Defense. Like all Iraq war opponents and Bush critics, I'd like a clean break with the past. On the other hand, Gates was an improvement on Donald Rumsfeld, and wasn't responsible for Abu Ghraib or Rumsfeld's retaliation against war skeptics and critics in Defense.

Watching these scenes from Mumbai, I am a little more sympathetic to arguments that Obama needs experience and stability at Defense as he takes charge. But just a little. It would be wrong to let an ugly terror attack, wherever it occurs, shake our values and our commitment to a sane foreign and defense policy. We tried that seven years ago and look where it got us.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm grateful for your readership and support.

I don't know whether Barack Obama can get the economy out of the ditch, but so far his moves have been reassuring. Most important, he's inched carefully into the breach created by the lame-duck, clueless Bush administration.

But it may be too carefully. I find myself wondering whether there's more he or his team could do to change the awful terms of the Citigroup bailout, for instance. And did he have anything to say about the Fed's $600 billion plan to buy more troubled mortgage-backed securities, which even Paul Krugman can't understand?

I watched Obama's Tuesday press conference thinking he may be trying a little too hard to reassure Republicans he's concerned about "fiscal responsibility," as though Republicans have a claim to any kind of responsibility after the last eight years.  Singling out a relatively tiny program that rewards millionaire farmers, as Obama did, isn't going to reassure anybody that he's got a secret weapon for cutting pork. Nor is his promise to go over the budget line by line. Maybe these are a needed sop to people afraid of Great Society overreaching, but I'm not sure he should be worried about that. I'm most afraid of underreaching.

I have been a great advocate of trusting Obama in this transition, and for the most part, I do. It's early to second-guess his appointments, and I'm not inclined to, because they all seem sound. (I think Glenn Greenwald and other bloggers deserve a round of applause for making it politically impossible for him to appoint John Brennan to a top intelligence post. Obama's reported decision to retain Defense Secretary Robert Gates isn't surprising and probably merits its own column.) On the economy, Andrew Leonard has already laid out the reasons Timothy Geithner was a strong pick for Treasury secretary -- mainly, his relatively early (if still belated) recognition of the problems with the greed-inspired toxic phantasms of the lending industry.

And while Greenwald today sounded some valid warning notes about the kvelling over Geithner and National Economic Council chairman Larry Summers -- making the important point that both of them are implicated in the deregulation that led to the current collapse, and the overreliance on monetary policy that slowed a strong response to the crisis -- it's going to be hard to find anyone experienced in government who wasn't misguided about those things. The question is, how early did Obama's new team members realize they were wrong, and what did they do? (Two must-reads on this issue: John Cassidy's New Yorker profile of Ben Bernanke, which shows how everyone at the Fed, including Geithner, was behind the curve, and how they have tried to play catch-up; and John Judis' disturbing piece about Obama's Council of Economic Advisors chair Christina Romer, who likewise seems to have realized too late that monetary policy alone couldn't stop the slide.)

The bigger question about Obama's economic plan is going to be whether and when he'll be able to tell the truth about how much blame the Bush administration bears for the current mess, and what it's going to take to get us out of it. Speaking today, the president-elect again talked about the need for bipartisanship in this time of crisis. Meanwhile, Grover Norquist was on CNBC blaming the crisis on Democrats retaking control of Congress in 2006 and raising the specter of repealing Bush's tax cuts for the rich. Whatever the problem, the solution for most Republicans is tax cuts for the rich, even after the Bush economic agenda brought us to the brink of ruin. Bravo to David Sirota for stating the factually true and obvious: Bill Clinton's tax increases on the wealthy after the last Bush recession helped usher in an era of prosperity.

The issue isn't as simple as tax cuts or tax hikes, and this economic downturn is much more complex and troubling than that of the early '90s. But Democrats need to say, every chance they get, that they are inheriting a crisis caused by an overdose of Republican, free-market economic policy, which tried to establish a tax-cutting, regulation-slashing, winner-take-all, loser-gets-nothing (unless he runs a big dumb corporation that took unconscionable risks driven by greed, and then he gets a bailout) paradise. I wanted Obama to say that in Chicago this afternoon.

Even as I write that, I know that's not the president we elected. As much as we on the left like to think we're his base, and like to talk about how much he owes us, Obama made a conscious decision to pitch himself as a post-partisan guy who'd appeal to centrists and even Republicans. I wrote about that during the primary season; Digby writes about it here. Now, he did hone a more populist message in the last months of the campaign, and I believe he won largely because people believed he'd deliver real solutions to the economic crisis. Obama himself noted that today, saying, "We had a decisive win, because of the extraordinary desire for change on the part of the American people."

But he then went on say that "it's important we enter into the administration with a sense of humility, and recognize that wisdom isn't the monopoly of any one party." I'm sure he's right; it just doesn't feel that way right now. As Obama speaks to the other party with respect and diplomacy, I desperately want him to remember that he'll never have a window like this one to make big economic and political change. There's actually a bipartisan consensus behind a big domestic stimulus package; next week we'll be asking experts what it should do. It's fine for Obama to talk nicely to conservatives; I just frankly hope he's listening mostly to liberals as he shapes his economic plan.

Tuesday's short press conference also gave us a window onto what reporters are concerned about: whether Obama is confusing people about who's president (if only) and whether he's going to "overreach."  Oy. That's why I'm largely inclined to give Obama a pass until he's actually president, and can do things -- rather than just talk about them, and have the media worry about problems that don't exist. Jan. 20 can't come soon enough for me.

Given the state of the economy, it's hard to cheer when any organization shuts down, but I enjoyed a Nevada newspaper's report that funder Sheldon Adelson is set to pull the plug on Ari Fleischer's silly Freedom's Watch.

Fleischer launched the conservative advocacy group, set up to support pro-war GOP candidates, with self-aggrandizing bravado, announcing, "For people who believe in peace through strength, the cavalry is coming." Describing pampered Beltway lobbyists and fat cats as "cavalry" in a time of war was bad, but it was worse when Fleischer used real disabled soldiers in his Freedom's Watch ads, but couldn't remember their names.

On Monday the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that after spending $30 million in the last election cycle, Freedom's Watch was winding down. The group's spokesman refused to give the Review Journal a list of the races where it was active, although in Las Vegas itself it ran goofy, ineffectual ads against Democrat Dina Titus, who won.

In the anti-meritocracy that is the GOP, Fleischer is sure to be rewarded with another cushy post, but let's celebrate small victories.

I find myself in a very strange position this week. When the world was overtaken by Obamamania last year, I was a late swooner. Some may recall that I even occasionally criticized the Democratic nominee. So why am I mainly happy with the way Obama's handled the presidential transition, when so many early swooners, especially in the blogosphere and mainstream media, are so critical?

Since his most controversial move is (reportedly) considering Hillary Clinton for secretary of state, it's clear my respect for Clinton has a lot to do with it. I thought she'd be an excellent president, so it's not surprising I think she'd be a good choice for secretary of state. She's smart and tough, has a lot of respect worldwide, she had an international portfolio as first lady, and she's strengthened that experience as a senator and on the Armed Services Committee. She'd also be a strong voice for women's rights globally.

But there's one qualification to my belief that she'd be a good choice: I only think so if Barack Obama thinks so. If he believes she can contribute to his foreign policy, but most important, carry it out; that she can represent him well and inform his worldview; that she can improve our standing abroad, well, then, I believe she can, too. This choice is neither a popularity contest nor a meritocracy; it's all about the person the president believes can best represent his foreign policy and America's interests in the world. He has to deeply trust the man or woman in that role.

One reason I believe Clinton could loyally represent Obama's foreign policy is that I think the differences between them were exaggerated for political reasons during the primary season. He had a political stake in portraying her as a hawk; she had one in portraying him as naive and unready. He was right about Iraq from the get-go and she was wrong, but their positions on how to get out were virtually identical. Despite their debates about how and when to sit down with dictators, I think they'd take much the same approach to dealing with both our enemies and our friends. So it makes sense to me that Obama would seriously consider her for the post.

Now, if they continue to talk and he has doubts about her capacity to loyally represent him abroad; if concerns emerge about President Clinton's global dealings; if any number of genuine troubles arise that convince Obama that despite his initial enthusiasm, it's not the right choice, I'll accept that. The only bad reason not to pick Hillary Clinton as secretary of state is the predictable media mob of Clinton haters telling him not to.

I just finished a "Hardball" debate on this with Michelle Bernard, who said it was "bordering on sheer lunacy" that Obama was considering Clinton. My friend Chris Matthews, no Clinton fan, led off the segment blaming the Clintons for the flurry of leaks about her possible appointment, although I reminded him that when NBC's Andrea Mitchell broke the news last week, she cited only Obama sources. It's clear there's more leaking from the Obama transition team -- about Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder and Tom Daschle, not just Clinton -- than there was from the campaign team. Rather amazingly, Matthews said I won him over with my argument that people who trust and believe in Obama should trust him on the choice of Clinton as secretary of state as well. We'll see.

Meanwhile, the selection of former Sen. Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services should mollify those who were beginning to wonder whether Obama was leaning too heavily on Clinton loyalists in his staff and Cabinet picks. My God, it just seems early to worry. He has a ton of appointments left. The only reason Clinton is getting so much attention is that Clinton haters are making her the top story. Who's going to be secretary of the Treasury, and how should he or she modify the bailout Henry Paulson is managing so poorly? Who's Obama's education pick, and what can that person do to improve American education, especially for low-income kids? Why aren't we debating those questions all day and night on cable news? Trust me: It's not because Bill Clinton is holding a gun to someone's head, demanding that we talk about him and his wife 24/7, no matter what Christopher Hitchens might claim.

On MSNBC's "Hardball" tonight, Pat Buchanan was not only insisting Barack Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, he also gave Obama advice about handling his left-wing base – and it's not what you'd expect. Buchanan suggested that with his next Cabinet pick, "he ought to give someone to the Daily Kos ... the people who supported and elected him."

This on a day when one anonymous Democratic aide bragged to Chris Cilizza that letting Joe Lieberman keep his chairmanship would mean: "The left has been foiled again. They can rant and rage but they still do not put the fear into folks to actually change their votes. Their influence would be in question." It's odd that Buchanan shows more respect for the left than leading Democrats do. The Lieberman decision is an abomination, and Obama and the Democrats may well regret it. Buchanan is no friend of the left, obviously, but he's an old-time pol who understands the importance of keeping the base happy. Too many Democrats seem to think the first thing they should do when they get power is display contempt for their base.

But I think it's important to keep the Democrats' and Obama's moves on Lieberman separate from the way we assess his Cabinet choices right now. I’m obviously not someone who sees Hillary Clinton as a bad, anti-change appointment; I think she'd make a terrific secretary of state. I have no problem with Eric Holder as attorney general, either; I think he'd fix the Justice Department that Bush destroyed, and I'm happy to see that Obama isn't afraid to make an African-American his first official Cabinet pick. I wish Holder had tried to block the awful Marc Rich pardon when he was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, but I'm not sure a lot of deputies would have stood up on that issue.

Still, I understand the disappointment of some Obama supporters, watching so many Clinton staffers line up for jobs in the change administration. I don't share their disappointment, because I honestly didn't believe there was much difference between Clinton and Obama, and how they would govern, in the first place. Some of the angst seems a little goofy: It's always been true that a lot of people closest to Obama during the campaign -- Holder, new White House counsel Greg Craig, foreign policy advisors Susan Rice and Anthony Lake; after the primary, Rahm Emanuel – once worked for the Clintons. So should they be seen as Clinton loyalists, or the new Obama team? It's funny how they were all seen as part of the new politics of change represented by Obama -- until he started building his administration, and then the mainstream media (and a few on the left) started deriding them as old school.

So while I think anger about the Lieberman maneuver is justified, I think it's way too early to panic about Obama's Democratic status-quo Cabinet. He's got plenty of time for unconventional picks.

Meanwhile, I don't know what to think on the Hillary Clinton front. It seems very strange that the Obama team revealed this possible appointment, and yet five days later, it's still little more than a well-sourced rumor. Are they really letting the media vet Clinton -- and Bill Clinton -- to see if they're worth the trouble? That doesn't seem like the Obama we've come to know, who appears to be a person of courage and integrity. All of Clinton's pluses -- intelligence, experience, stature on the world stage -- and minuses -- certain policy differences with Obama, her husband's baggage -- were well known before anybody ever mentioned a possible Clinton Cabinet post to a reporter. It's an odd mini-drama that's dragging out longer than it should, but this time it doesn't seem as though Clinton is to blame.