A very interesting excerpt from Renegade by Richard Wolffe, which will be available tomorrow:
"His decision to offer her the job of secretary of state came surprisingly early. Well before the end of the primaries, when his staff and friends still felt hostile to her, Obama decided that Clinton possessed the qualities to carry his diplomacy to the rest of the world. 'We actually thought during the primary, when we were pretty sure we were going to win, that she could end up being a very effective secretary of state,' he told me later. 'I felt that she was disciplined, that she was precise, that she was smart as a whip, and that she would present a really strong image to the world... I had that mapped out.'
"Recruiting and managing a team of rivals would not be easy, and
Clinton came with her own set of issues. Chief among them was her
campaign debt, which she wanted eliminated before she took the job of
secretary of state. Would the president-elect go out and help her to do
so? 'I'm not begging her to take this job,' Obama told his senior
aides. 'If she wants it, I could help. But I'm not willing to go out in
these difficult economic times to do a flashy fundraiser in
California.' As it happened, plenty of people in the Senate were
begging Obama to offer Clinton the job. Obama's aides believed that
many Senate Democrats thought Clinton had extended her presidential
campaign far beyond the point where she had lost the election. Her
negative advertising wasted Democratic money, threatened to undermine
the party's nominee, and suggested that she was disloyal to the party.
They were unwilling to offer the junior New York senator a position
ahead of her lowly rank, and she stood little chance of becoming
majority leader. 'There was a lot of encouragement from inside the
Senate to get her into this job,' said one senior Obama aide. 'They
wanted her out of there.'"
