Sam Nunn

Steve Clemons isn't buying former Senator Sam Nunn's efforts to tiptoe away from the anti-gay record of his time in the U.S. Senate. To me, the interesting thing is that he's bothering at all. I'd heard Nunn's name tossed around for a potential appointment in an Obama administration, but I'd seen that as mostly idle talk -- Nunn seems to me to have reached that semi-retired eminence grise phase in his career where he co-chairs panels of various sorts and gets mentioned sometimes as an example of The Kind of Statesman We Don't Have Any More.

Efforts to reposition his profile on gay rights, though, seems to indicate that he really would like to get a job. But I'm not even sure what kind of job that would be. He seems like one of several people (Chuck Hagel also comes to mind) who would be a good choice for a position as some kind of high-level nuclear proliferation stopping guy. Something like that, with a narrow-but-important portfolio would be a good post for a conservative Democrat or a moderate Republican who was smart on the relevant issues, the kind of thing that would be all about putting disagreements on various other issues aside to focus in on this one grave problem.