A Long Way From HillaryCare

by Chris Bodenner
Many great nuggets of reporting in Joe Klein's new column, but this one seems most apt in the wake of yesterday's confirmation:

In some ways, the most surprising of his appointments Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State has emerged as an exemplar of Obamism. ... Clinton, who can be spiky, has re-emerged as a natural diplomat. When she heard that Holbrooke and General David Petraeus had never met, she invited them over to her Washington home on a Friday night before the Inauguration. The two men spent two hours in front of a roaring fire with Clinton, getting to know each other, talking about the diplomatic and military division of labor in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clinton's was an Obamian gesture enticing the lion to lie down with the lion the sort of attention to detail that seems to have been replicated across the policymaking spectrum during the Obama transition.

Also, we're a long way from Gennifer Flowers:

Toward the end of the campaign, Michelle Obama asked me if I was going to write a novel about them like Primary Colors, my satiric account of the 1992 presidential race. I was at a loss for words, in part because the thought hadn't even vaguely crossed my mind. "He can't write a novel about us," Barack Obama reassured his wife. "We're too boring."