Let’s give Obama the benefit of the doubt, which is to do no more than everyone else is doing during the transition. As a Republican I know says, he is smarter than you and doesn’t need your advice. In that light, the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State can be seen as a bold move, even though she does not have the credentials that usually make for a great Secretary of State. Remember that William Jennings Bryan, who had very little in common with Woodrow Wilson, and was appointed as a political legacy, a charge also made about the Clinton appointment, never could answer the call of internationalism and so resigned rather than face the horrors of World War I, that an act not so much of foresight into the horrors of the twentieth century as a retreat into nineteenth century isolationism.

What Secretaries of State usually do is formulate foreign policy and negotiate it. All the great ones have done that: John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Kissinger and George Ball all did that. George Marshall, who was no great intellectual, had learned to distrust Communists reluctantly and on his own, as the result of having conducted foreign negotiations in China and having tried to figure out how to accommodate the Russians, though the articulation of the underlying policy was done by George Kennan, the foreign policy intellectual who remains a model of how to do that job in that he was taken seriously while George Ball, the house intellectual in the Rusk State Department, was expected to say his piece and then be quiet, which was a procedure that allowed the national security advisors to President Johnson to assure themselves that they had heard all sides of the issue.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, is no foreign policy intellectual, even to the extent of the successful Madeline Albright and the notoriously unsuccessful Condoleezza Rice. Nor has her political life, very carefully observed by political reporters for a long time now, told us much about how she was as a negotiator when she was in the White House. David Gergen says she was a virtual chief of staff, and he was in a position to know, but what we do know, in public and in general and independent of testimonials, is that she was not very effective at negotiating a health care bill. Well, maybe dealing with Congress is tougher than dealing with the Russians once was.

So why did Obama select her? The journalists who are describing her virtues may be on to something. They do not say much about her as a negotiator or as an intellectual/professional diplomat. What they say is that she is very popular around the world and therefore can serve as a good representative of an American foreign policy which has turned to corner back into internationalism and coalition building and not shooting from the hip. She will be the voice of public diplomacy.

Now this is a role that has been relegated to the back seat. Secretaries of State are, as a rule, not particularly eloquent people. They play their cards too close to the vest for that. They are by nature reticent and the way they choose their words with such care is taken to mean that they are being slippery when all it means is that they are not going to step beyond the brief they have fashioned for themselves or have had fashioned for them. Hillary has been a politician and a policy wonk long enough to have learned how to say what she wants to say with great precision and appeal and yet not to give away very much. She learned that when in the White House, where she made a lot of missteps that the administration had to pay for, such as Travelgate, and learned it even more surely on the campaign trail for the nomination which, it will be remembered, she started off by being extensively heard for the first time and then, long before New Hampshire, finding her voice in the sense that she could express herself forcefully and winningly, even if not with the same mastery as her husband. She can be the voice rather than the creator or negotiator of American foreign policy.

Bush tried to compensate for the fact that diplomats are not very good at making their cases to the public by appointing Karen Hughes, his close confident, and, before her, Margaret Tutwiler, as public spokespersons to mobilize a program to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. Whether because of the people involved, who didn’t know much about foreign policy, or their ill-defined roles, or because the Bush administration never developed anything to offer the Arab world that was not a platitude, nothing much came of those efforts. Those who officially enunciated foreign policy, the ambassadors, did not do much to make the case for American policy, not an easy case anyway for such a set of defective policies. To the extent that being Secretary of State can make public diplomacy front and center, and Hillary’s talents suit this role, and Obama wants to use her that way, there is a chance that Hillary can craft a way to say something to the Arab world and other hostile constituencies that has some meat in it in that they are tied to proposals that are too good to refuse, whatever those might be.

So who formulates and negotiates foreign policy? I have not heard William Holbrooke’s name recently, though the early bets were on him for Secretary of State in a Clinton Presidency. He has the talents to do the job of both formulation and negotiation. The younger people Hillary might bring into the State Department are also people to look at. Yet it might also be the case that the President is intending to do that job himself with the consultation of what we might want to come to refer to as the inner national security cabinet: Biden, Jones, Clinton and Gates. Come to think of it, Obama has more academic training in international affairs than any of them, though, of course, much, much less experience in actual policy formulation and negotiation. He could send any one of the four out to do negotiations in some particular area based on the blueprint worked out in D. C. Just as ambassadors became somewhat useless when jets allowed Secretaries or Presidential envoys to travel everywhere, so too a Secretary of State becomes part of a team each of whose members are given specific and temporary portfolios for the execution of a policy drawn up collectively. Or at least that is one way of imagining it, and Obama is certainly imagining grand.

He needs to. No one has come up with a good idea about what we should do about Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Palestinians, and so on, only that we should do something creative. How different that is from economic policy where, no matter how bad the economy gets, and it gets worse every day, every expert does have a plan for what to do, even if the plans happen to contradict one another. The Washington foreign policy team is going to have to be very clever and whoever is assigned to carry the ball in a specific play is going to have to be very good at execution.