Clinton, Gates and the water's edge

Watching the rollout of Presidentelect Barack Obama's foreign-policy team brought to mind a variation on the well-worn Tip O'Neill theme that "all politics is local": In this case, all foreign policy is domestic policy. And no two Cabinet picks exemplify this better than those of Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and Bob Gates to remain at his post as secretary of defense.

Interestingly, these are precisely the two personnel decisions that have drawn Mr. Obama the most fire from his liberal base, which just goes to show that the Democratic grassroots might be able to learn a thing or two about politics by watching their party's new standard bearer. If one considers some of the most prominent elements of foreign policy on which Mr. Obama campaigned — a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, making Israeli- Palestinian negotiations a priority, conducting diplomacy with Iran — his choices for the people he will get to implement these policies starts to seem downright canny.

Let's start with Secretary of Statedesignate Clinton. When she was running against Mr. Obama for the Democratic nomination, she called his plan to meet with leaders of nations such as Iran "irresponsible and frankly naive." In the Senate, she voted for the Iraq War and for designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. She has said that the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran if Iran used nuclear weapons against Israel — a nation in which she is probably the most popular American politician.

Both talks with Iran and the kind of evenhanded negotiations that will no doubt be necessary if Mr. Obama hopes to advance the Israeli-Palestinian issue could well draw criticism from Israel, its backers in the U.S. and those who are generally hawkish on Middle East policy. Mr. Obama won the election, but for credibility abroad and inoculation against criticism at home, one could see why some might call Ms. Clinton the better person to be out front in the handling of these issues.

This, apparently, is how Mr. Obama sees it, too — and so he's put a new spin on the "two for the price of one" adage. Though some may still call his policies "naive" or worse, he can now be sure that Hillary Clinton won't be the one saying these things -- and certainly not from her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Instead, she will play the designated "Nixon" to Iran's "China."

As for the present and future Secretary of Defense Gates, the president he now serves will leave behind a mammoth challenge in the form of Iraq. The American public has shown a marked preference for withdrawing our troops, but the road back home is fraught with not only humanitarian and strategic danger but political peril as well. Many observers have characterized Mr. Bush's second-term approach to Iraq as "running out the clock" so as to hand the problem of getting out — and the blame for any unhappy consequences — to his successor.

It seems as if one of the ways that Mr. Obama has decided to address the political aspects of the Iraq dilemma is by essentially putting — through his retention of President Bush's choice to head the Pentagon — the Bush brand on the withdrawal. Again, this will not render Mr. Obama immune from criticism, but it will make it harder for Republicans to paint Mr. Obama as pursuing a policy of "defeat" in Iraq, as his GOP rival Sen. John McCain did during the campaign.

There are sound, substantive policy reasons for Mr. Obama's picks for State and Defense. But it is in contrasting the policies Mr. Obama has said he wants to pursue with the people he has chosen to implement them that one gets a sense that the president-elect fully understands that politics doesn't stop at the water's edge.