Who would have thought that Hillary Clinton would have worse prospects for success in bringing peace to the Middle East than Condoleezza Rice?

Much of the talk about Hillary Clinton since she became secretary of state has centered on how ambitious she would be in brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace in the Middle East.

Now, given the post-election gridlock in Israel, Clinton, along with special envoy George Mitchell, would seem to have even fewer options than Rice, whose performance in the region was widely criticized as belated and ineffectual.

"The form follows function," said Aaron David Miller, who has advised several secretaries of state on Middle East issues and who is now a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "Baker did diplomacy for a reason, he had an opportunity and he knew how to do it. There's a real danger for Mitchell, that he gets treated as part of the political furniture because he goes repeatedly once a month and nothing happens and people start to take him for granted and they star to question our competency."

Miller said that two causes fundamentally motivate American involvement in the Middle East.

One is a profound crisis that requires American involvement to protect national interests, or an opportunity so attractive that an American president or secretary of state understands that there are potentially enormous benefits despite risks.

"That's Sadat going to Jerusalem, which allowed Carter to do his thing, there’s Baker and Bush 41 in the wake of the first Persian Gulf War, there was real opportunity,” he said. “You don't have a real opportunity right now. And you don't have a crisis sufficiently painful."

According to the relatively few people who got to see her in private settings during the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s enthusiasm for the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was an impressive thing to behold.

Yashar Hedayat, who organized a fund-raiser for her in 2007 at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, recalled that her response to a question about Israel and Palestine that was so long and detailed that his guests were “in awe.”

That sort of fluency should theoretically put Mrs. Clinton in a strong position as secretary of state, since her performance in helping to achieve stability in the Middle East will be the central challenge of her tenure in the Obama administration, and the foundation on which her legacy will be judged.

The problem is that she’s got nowhere to begin.

“Her options in terms of generating change and difference are going to be very limited,” said Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “It’s a really big mess.”

While her much-celebrated appointment to State has raised expectations that she’ll be able to achieve progress where, say, Condoleezza Rice hasn’t, it’s hard to see how she can do much that’s different anytime soon. (The Israeli election returns on Feb. 10 did little to clear up the picture, giving an early, narrow edge to the centrist Kadima Party of Tzipi Livni, well short of what it would take for her to form a stable governing majority.)

In fact, the more immediate question is whether, by sheer force of her domestic and international stature, Mrs. Clinton can begin to affect a new outcome simply by being conspicuously involved.

“She is going to have to connect with them ultimately if she wants to be a consequential secretary of state,” said Aaron David Miller, who has advised several U.S.  secretaries of state on Middle East policy. “What secretaries of states do is take crises and make them better.”

According to Uri Savir, Israel’s chief negotiator for the Oslo Accords and the president of the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv, Mrs. Clinton needs to get involved “immediately, after the Israeli election.”

Certainly, Mrs. Clinton won’t be held back from engaging in the Middle East from any lack of enthusiasm about the subject.

She spoke about it frequently, sometimes controversially, as first lady, as the junior senator from New York and, of course, as a candidate for president.

But it will likely be a while before Mrs. Clinton gets going on the topic in public.

“The question is always when is it time to bring in the heavy guns in a negotiation. We are not yet in a place where we have a negotiation ongoing,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Middle East Democracy and Development Project at the Brookings Institution. “It would be very premature that the secretary needs to weigh in.”

There is, in other words, a lot of diplomatic spadework to undertake before talks are ramped up to the level of direct engagement by Mrs. Clinton. For now, that will be left to George Mitchell, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the Middle East.

On Feb. 3, Mr. Mitchell reported back to Mrs. Clinton after his trip. At a joint press conference, he said that many of the key players wanted her to visit.

“I warned her this morning that she’s going to have to start pretty soon,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Because all of the leaders with whom I’ve met had already spoken with the secretary and are anxious for her to come to the region, which, at an appropriate time and consistent with the worldwide demands on her schedule, I hope she will be able to make.”

The question is, then what?

“It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker blowing up that big planet,” said Mr. Clemons. “You’ve got to get that little hit, because the constraints and distractions are so huge, and so I think the chances are low of success, but there is a chance.”

Even then, experts believe that the approach toward peacemaking is going to have to more modest and incremental—the opposite, essentially, of what we saw from the Clinton administration.

“This attitude of ‘we have to get everyone to the table and get the parties to agree’ just isn’t going to happen that way,” said Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “You can’t use Fatah; Fatah’s corrupt. And you can’t use Hamas; they want to destroy you. So you have to find another way.”

Kirsten Gillibrand kind of knows everyone in politics. Just ask her.
“What makes me so successful is that I’ve developed so many relationships,” she said in a phone interview on Jan. 27, hours after being sworn in as a U.S. senator, as she walked to the Senate floor to cast her first vote. “Because I did fund-raising and organizing in New York for 10 years before I ever ran for office, I developed so many great relationships with all the people that care about elective politics. From the public servants to the donors to the community organizers.
“These were all the relationships I called upon when I decided to run,” she continued. “When I did my first poll I asked Hillary Clinton to review it. I asked Andrew Cuomo to review it. I asked Eliot Spitzer to review it. These are all people that I had worked with helping them to get elected, working on their causes, so they all had become friends through my 10 years of organizing in New York.”  
Ms. Gillibrand, who replaces Hillary Clinton as New York’s junior senator, has been portrayed, alternately, as an apple-fed upstate yokel and a grasping Tracy Flick.
Both ideas underestimate her.
She is a leviathan—a Schumer-esque fund-raising monster with a political pedigree; a careerist overachiever who has studiously cultivated ties to a surprising number of the most powerful Democrats in the state and the country; a fearsome campaigner who, despite her wholesome appearance, is comfortable in the mud.
Ms. Gillibrand is the pure, unadulterated political creature that a state like New York demands. And now that she is a senator, it seems impossible—naïve, even—to picture her as anything else.
“Like Schumer, her eye has been on that prize for a long, long time,” said Jonathan Schiller, a founding partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where Ms. Gillibrand worked as a partner early in the decade. “She is no hayseed, she is no newcomer, she’s no shy, reclusive country girl. She is someone who grew up in a political family.”
Her wont to travel in elite circles isn’t news to the political cognoscenti.
Last year, Anthony Weiner thought he had scored as the only member of Congress to make it into an exclusive Hillary Clinton event with New York’s top fund-raisers and power brokers at the Museum of Modern Art.
That is, until he looked around the room and noticed that a junior colleague, Representative Kirsten Gillibrand from the yonder Hudson Valley, was already there, going from one bigwig to the next collecting business cards, shaking hands and extracting campaign contributions.
“She’s working the tables,” he recalled. “She’s shmoozing. It was chutzpah, but you’ve got to admire it. She represents Hudson. It’s not like she happened to be at the bar at the Modern. And even more interesting, from my perspective, is that she seemed to know a lot of those people already.”
Ms. Gillibrand is clearly resented by some of her former House colleagues (though not, Mr. Weiner made clear, by Mr. Weiner). She probably doesn’t much care.
Born into an elite Albany political clan—she is the daughter of an influential lobbyist with Republican ties and the granddaughter of a close aide to Erastus Corning, the longtime mayor of Albany—the 42-year-old has nurtured deep Clinton ties and Cuomo connections. She is the pick of the Patersons and a favorite of Rahm Emanuel.
Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director and now a key aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, acted as media guru for her 2006 campaign. Her longtime pollster is Jefrey Pollock, of Global Strategy Group, which represents the governor and Mr. Cuomo. She counts as friends the city’s top lawyers and fund-raisers.
“From very early on, she would say that the family was from upstate and that she would one day go home and run for Congress,” said Ann Lewis, a close aide to Mrs. Clinton who first met Mrs. Gillibrand in 1999. “I think her family was better connected than I knew.”
She went to college at Dartmouth, studied in China, interned in Austria and then came home and worked at a prestigious law firm. Later, she worked as a special counsel to Andrew Cuomo when he served in the Clinton administration as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  
Even after she went back into the private sector to work as a lawyer at a white-shoe firm, the public sector was never far from her mind.
Mr. Schiller said that “throughout the time she worked here, and closely with me on complex federal litigation, she was in touch with Hillary Clinton, she was in touch with the Democratic Party. She never stopped thinking about and planning her career.”
“This was when email was emerging as a political tool, and she was very organized, always hosting meetings, and storing information about events that were going on around the country,” said Ryan Karben, a former assemblyman who worked across Lexington Avenue at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett when Ms. Gillibrand worked at Davis Polk Wardwell in 2001 and 2002. “She clearly had great political organizational skills.”
“She was one of the early volunteers for Hillary and was one of the original volunteers of women for Hillary,” Ms. Lewis said.  (Karen Persichilli Keogh, Clinton’s former state director, is already advising the new senator, and Ms. Lewis said she would gladly help, too, if asked.)
And Ms. Gillibrand, running in a race in 2006 that nearly no one expected her to win, was a much more vicious campaigner than anyone knew. She savaged Republican incumbent John Sweeney--once again, in a style eerily reminiscent of Chuck Schumer, who dismantled incumbent (and onetime Gillibrand mentor) Al D’Amato in 1998.

“Early on you could see that she was a tough cookie,” said Jen Psaki, who worked on the Gillibrand race in 2006 for the DCCC.  
Ms. Psaki, now a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, recalled that Ms. Gillibrand essentially forced the race onto the DCCC’s radar, and that she became a favorite of the psychotically aggressive DCCC chair Mr. Emanuel, who is now Barack Obama’s chief of staff.
According to another Democratic aide who worked on the campaign, when Mr. Sweeney demanded that Ms. Gillibrand release her tax returns to demonstrate whether she paid New York City residency fees—a tactic intended to frame her as a rich, Brit-marrying cosmopolitan elitist—she demanded that Mr. Sweeney release his police records. According to the aide, the campaign knew Mr. Sweeney had several arrests to his name dating back to the ’70s, including an episode in which wine, Mr. Sweeney’s car and an electric pole combined to leave several people stranded on a ski lift. She never released her tax returns, and with the help of Mr. Sweeney’s subsequent run-ins with the law, won the race by a healthy margin.
Once in the House, her votes on gun, immigration and gay issues frustrated many of her Democratic colleagues. But even more infuriating to some members, including Nancy Pelosi, was her attempt to jump ahead of more senior members to fill a vacant seat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
But even colleagues who disagree with her policies can’t help but marvel at her political acumen.
“As a freshman, to come in and be put on the Steering and Policy Committee, that’s huge,” said Yvette Clarke, who came into the House with Ms. Gillibrand in the 110th Congress.
When asked how that happened, Ms. Clarke said, “If I had the answer to that, I’d be on Steering and Policy.”
There is every reason to expect that Ms. Gillibrand will be equally hard to ignore in the Senate. Asked how she expected the dynamic to work between her and Mr. Unignorable himself, Chuck Schumer, she said, “I really feel like our areas of expertise are complementary. Yes, he will always be senior and I will be junior, but I don’t see that as a relationship of one lesser than the other. I just think he has much more experience, which obviously is going to make him very effective and powerful.”
(Her initial Senate committee assignments, for the record, are Public Works and Environment, Foreign Affairs and Agriculture.)

If she remains a work-in-progress on the issues, Ms. Gillibrand has the routine of actually being a winning politician down.
“She was an accomplished attorney, so there’s that whole world she could tap into in,” said Ms. Clarke. “Bill and Hillary both went to support her in her run; that in itself opens the door to a whole other cadre of donors. She knows how to establish those relationships and cultivate them. And from those relationships you get to move on to other relationships.”
She added, “She just parlayed whoever she knew into influence.” To be sure, the Park Avenue penthouses and townhouses of New York’s rarified fund-raising community is familiar terrain to Ms. Gillibrand.
Hassan Nemazee, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser who served as a co-finance chair on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said he had first met Ms. Gillibrand before her 2006 race and was impressed by the case she made as to why she could win in a reliably Republican district. The down-home upstate routine, he suggested, was only part of the picture.
“Look how successful she has been at raising money in Manhattan,” Mr. Nemazee said. “If you are just a parochial candidate you are not as successful as she has been.”
“She’s fabulous,” said Ellen Chesler, a prominent donor and early fund-raiser for Ms. Gillibrand, who was introduced to her by mutual friends in the Clinton universe. “She raised close to five million dollars for a seat where nobody who gave her money lives.”
Sometimes, the admiration is grudging. But, at least in process terms, it’s always there.
Teachers union head Randi Weingarten, the apparent runner-up to Ms. Gillibrand in Mr. Paterson’s post-Kennedy senate search (she was the last candidate to receive word that she would not be a senator), said Ms. Gillibrand was something of a “star” among female Democrats.
Asked about the various complaints having to do with Ms. Gillibrand’s win-at-all-costs reputation in the House, Ms. Weingarten did say, “One of the things that Hillary taught everyone was how much she was a team player. Ultimately collaboration becomes very important for getting things done.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 23, Ms. Gillibrand put on her team-player hat as she stood in Meeting Room 6 in the Capitol building. That didn’t stop all the state’s power brokers from jostling for a coveted place in the camera shot at her side.
Onstage, Mr. D’Amato alighted over his old intern’s right shoulder. Mr. Schumer signaled for her to shuffle closer to him. The Albany legislative triumvirate of State Senator Neil Breslin, Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari, and Assemblyman Jack McEneny entered the room just before Ms. Gillibrand’s family.
When Ms. Gillibrand spoke, she turned on the folksy charm. Wearing a black pantsuit and pearls, she expressed bewilderment at the mass of reporters assembled before her and deferred to Mr. Paterson in the running of the question-and-answer session. When her young son hopped onto the stage, she put her hand on his head. She affected an oh-my-gosh air and talked about licking envelopes in her grandmother’s office. The audience, aware that her grandmother was a power player in the capital’s Democratic machine, nodded knowingly.
“She comes from a very important political family in Albany,” said State Senator Neil Breslin after the event.
On Jan 26, Ms. Gillibrand kept doing the modest thing. Without any apparent security detail, she walked into the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. Two reporters behind her didn’t immediately realize who she was. She again deferred to Mr. Paterson during the press conference, but in her answers, she made it clear she was a player to be reckoned with. She talked about dining with Harry Reid and said she’d sit on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee. When asked about her stance on immigration, which has been criticized by Latino and other immigrant groups as cynically nativist, Ms. Gillibrand indicated that she’d maintain a less-than-lenient line.
“My view has always been that we need to right-size immigration,” she said, adding that she believed in a need to “have a database in the Department of Labor of immigrants who have been cleared, who are legal, that are part of our system, and the number has to be the right number.”
“I’m going to be a voice to solve this problem,” she said.
Ms. Gillibrand knows the cold realities of politics. But she also knows there is time for softballs and smiles.
At the end of the Hyde Park event, as reporters swarmed Ms. Gillibrand with questions, she thanked them for the work they did and promised to speak with them in the near future. As she left the room, a diminutive elderly woman came up to greet her.
“I’ve met you once before,” said the woman. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, it’s good to see you. Thanks for your support,” Ms. Gillibrand said. “God bless you!”
“She’s being portrayed as a lightweight,” Tom Poelker, a party chairman in a neighboring county, who has watched Ms. Gillibrand closely, said after attending the event in Hyde Park. “My opinion is that there’s not much that gets by Senator-designee Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s very sharp—very perceptive. Extremely perceptive. Very perceptive politically.”
And how does Ms. Gillibrand herself respond to those people who say that she is, in fact, an overblown lightweight? Or an overambitious climber?
“It doesn’t bother me at all, because at the end of the day, this is just the short term,” she said in the phone interview. “I think all of this will smooth out as I demonstrate my effectiveness and my work ethic and as I partner with all the constituency groups in our state and make a difference for them.”

At her first Sunday press conference as senator in New York City, Kirsten Gillibrand reiterated her support for “hunters' rights,” calling it a “core value for our region and for our state,” but said her “advocacy will become broader.”

She also promised eager reporters, "You will see me wherever you want to see me.”

Gillibrand – in a black pantsuit outfit reminiscent of her predecessor, Hillary Clinton - was answering questions from reporters who had waited for her in a small nook outside the main lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. For nearly an hour, Gillibrand dined downstairs with Governor David Paterson, Senator Chuck Schumer and Clinton.

They chatted quietly at a table in the back of Oscar and Bull while photographers snapped the four of them together. After the meal, Clinton and Schumer left without coming upstairs to speak to reporters.

Gillibrand was escorted to the podium upstairs by Paterson, who fielded two questions and then left (he said he was on his way to a swearing-in ceremony, but did not elaborate). That left Gillibrand to manage her first Sunday press conference by herself.

Her first question was about her position on guns, which has been criticized by Michael Bloomberg and her fellow New York representative, Carolyn McCarthy of Long Island.

“I will always believe in protecting hunters’ rights,” said Gillibrand, before expressing a shared concern with those in “our city communities” about the dangers of illegal guns and gun violence. Later, she said “there is such a different debate about how to keep our streets free from gun violence.”

Gillibrand noted her vote in support of legislation to make it easier to perform background checks “to make sure people with mental instability do not have access to guns,” which she called a “cornerstone” of the McCarthy position.

“I voted for that legislation and that is where that common ground exists,” Gillibrand said. “I didn’t have any big towns in upstate New York. We didn’t suffer from the tragedy of gun violence on the same level that lots of downstate places have.”

Now that she represents the entire state, “my advocacy will become broader,” she said.

When asked about her meeting with the state leaders, Gillibrand said, “We talked a lot about the economy” and that “one area we all agreed on was that we really want high-speed rail.”

She said it was unclear whether they could secure funding for it in the latest economic stimulus package coming out of Washington, but said it was pivotal. “Because if you want to get economic development in this state, and around this state, if you can have a high-speed rail straight up the 87 corridor all the way to Montreal and then straight across to Buffalo and ultimately back down in a triangle, what you’re going to do is create an economic development engine for decades.”

Not only would that create jobs, but “it means for the financial service industry, you can put back offices, upstate, or in western New York, not necessarily in our lovely neighbors, Connecticut or New Jersey. We can put them in other places in New York State.”

She ended the press conference by saying that she'll be sworn into office sometime Tuesday, and, as reporters shouted questions, she said, "You will see me wherever you want to see me."

Gillibrand walked through the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, stopping occasionally to talk to a few onlookers. Reporters and photographers swarmed around her. Cameramen walked backwards to capture her every step. Her spokeswoman Rachel McEneny told reporters following them that she didn't have new business cards with her contact information printed yet and repeated her cell phone number as the entourage moved through the lobby.

Asked about all the media attention she was getting, Gillibrand said, “It’s different, that’s for sure. I never had that before. But we have a great press corps in upstate and we really admire them and work with them, and so, we like the press. You just have a lot more of it here. We don’t have this many cameras, this many stations, this many reporters.”

When I asked if she was prepared for all the scrutiny, Gillibrand said, “I have a Sunlight report,” referring to her practice, following a pledge to the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation, to make her daily schedule available online to the public. “I like it, it’s good for government.”

Gillibrand left the building, turned the corner and – before hopping in a van waiting for her, stopped to talk to reporters again.

Even before David Paterson officially names Kirsten Gillibrand as his pick to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate, the backlash from within the ranks of the more-senior House delegation has begun.

"She has a reputation for being very difficult to work as a member and at the staff level," one congressional staffer said, voicing a sentiment that was widely expressed by other candidates in the New York delegation leading up to Paterson's decision.

Earlier, Representative Carolyn McCarthy said she would run a primary against Gillibrand in 2010, motivated by Gillibrand's pro-gun philosophy.

More to come, we can be sure.

ALBANY—Here's our new senator, expected to be named at noon.

Kirsten Gillibrand, 42, had never run for public office until 2006. She was first endorsed by the Saratoga County Democratic Committee in 2005 to run against Representative John Sweeney, a four-term incumbent.

Gillibrand at that time was a partner in the Albany law firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner and the mother of a young son. But she comes from a politically connected family: her father is Doug Rutnik, a lawyer and lobbyist in Albany who married the daughter of Polly Noonan, a longtime pillar of the Albany Democratic machine and founder of the Albany County Women's Club.

Gillibrand got a quick and early boost from Hillary Clinton, and has always been close to the senator. Clinton appeared at an early fund-raiser for Gillibrand in late 2005. It is expected that Gillibrand will absorb some of her staff.

Gillibrand defeated Sweeney in 2006, defying expectations, by six points. He was hurt by the last-minute release of records indicating police were called to a domestic dispute at his house.

Wayne Barrett pointed out yesterday Gillibrand's ties to Republicans. In 2006, it was reported that Gillibrand and Rutnik dined at an Albany restaurant with a top official in the Pataki administration, leading many to theorize that she ran and Sweeney was defeated with the ex-governor's acquiescence.

Her district stretches from Columbia to Essex counties and includes about 70,000 more Republicans than Democrats. Gillibrand has consistently been to the right of the New York Democratic mainstream, taking positions on gun rights that angered an anti-gun advocacy group and led downstate Representative Carolyn McCarthy to vow a primary challenge against Gillibrand. In 2007, Gillibrand was rated the most conservative Democratic house member from New York by the American Conservative Union.

Gillibrand stirred some national ire this fall by voting twice against the financial bailout. But, as one prominent Democrat told me, Gillibrand was selected after intense lobbying by Senator Chuck Schumer. Which, apparently, counts for more here than the resentments of her House colleagues.

In his Inaugural Address, President Barack Obama noted that his would be one of the rare presidencies to begin "amidst gathering clouds and raging storms."

Hillary Clinton can say the same about her tenure as secretary of state, which officially began when her former colleagues in the Senate confirmed her by a 94-2 vote on Wednesday. While she doesn't face the same pressure as her boss to produce tangible results during her first 100 days on the job, we will learn much in that time about how much power Clinton truly has within the administration—and how she plans to use that power.

Four areas in particular figure to monopolize much of Clinton's time and energy.

The first, Iraq, is the least controversial—even though, ironically enough, it's an issue that provided the crucial early grist for Obama's campaign against Clinton. Back then, it mattered very much that Clinton had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion (and only very slowly and haltingly moved away from that support) while Obama had spoken out against it.  

Now, of course, there is broad consensus, in the United States and in Iraq, that it's time to wind down the mission and withdraw, or at least severely scale back, the U.S. presence in the country. On Wednesday, Obama used part of his first full day in power to fulfill his campaign pledge to meet with military leaders and to begin planning for a 16-month phased troop reduction. The wheels seem to be in motion. There won't be much of a policy role for Clinton here, but there will be when it comes to where many of those troops will next be sent.

That would be Afghanistan, identified by Obama during the campaign as the "central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism." He is intent on sending an additional 30,000 troops to the country, hoping to replicate the stabilizing effect of the 2007 troop escalation in Iraq. But it's not nearly that simple.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 with the goal of routing the Taliban, a mission that was accomplished with relative ease. But after that quick campaign, U.S. (and NATO) troops remained, assigned only a vague peacekeeping mission. In the seven years since, the Taliban has used the occupation to slowly rebuild all around (and more recently within) Kabul, enfeebling President Hamid Karzai—who has taken to stoking anti-U.S. sentiment in order to prop up his own political standing.

Here, Clinton faces multiple challenges. A long-term vision for Afghanistan must be defined, a cooperative relationship with the country's leaders must be reestablished, and increased support from the NATO allies still supplying troops must be secured.

In her confirmation hearings, she indicated a willingness to get tough with Karzai, who was mostly coddled by the Bush administration. She branded Afghanistan a "narco-state" and said that Karzai's government was "plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption." We will soon learn to what extent she is willing to follow through on these words.

It also appears that Richard Holbrooke, her husband's old U.N. ambassador, will serve as Obama's envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like Clinton, he has had harsh words for the Karzai government. Reports have suggested that Holbrooke would report directly to Clinton, but given his weighty résumé and high profile, their working relationship will be worth watching for signs of friction.

Another top issue, not surprisingly, will be Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Here, both Clinton and Obama have sent very mixed signals over the past year. During their primary campaign, Clinton ridiculed Obama as "naïve" when he indicated a willingness to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president. She also threatened "to totally obliterate them" if Iran launched an attack on Israel, which has been agitating for U.S. action for years. (The outgoing Bush administration actually nixed an Israeli plan for air strikes.)

But now she has adopted Obama's tune. "[W]e are willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at the time and place of our choosing if, and only if, it can advance the interest of the United States," she said in her confirmation hearing. What we don't know is whether Clinton or Obama or someone else will participate in talks with Iran, and which Iranians they'd be willing to talk with.

Timing is an important issue: Elections in Iran are months away, and Ahmadinejad, thanks largely to domestic mismanagement, could well lose his job—perhaps to Mohammad Khatami, who pursued a liberalization agenda when he served as president form 1997 to 2005 and who wanted to negotiate the nuclear issue and establish diplomatic relations with the United States in 2003 (the Bush administration, drunk off its initial success in Iraq, summarily refused him). Talking to an Ahmadinejad's government may be worthless; but the election of Khatami could open a host of new possibilities.

Complicating all of this is another Obama appointment that, depending on the source, may or may not be imminent: Dennis Ross as the envoy to Iran. Ross could complicate Clinton's job in two ways. He has taken a very hard line on Iran, stoking fears among Israel's supporters not just about Ahmadinejad, but about Khatami as well. Given his hawkishness, Ross could potentially undermine efforts at good-faith discussion with Iran. And if he and Clinton don't see eye-to-eye, a power struggle could quickly emerge.

And then, of course, there is the issue of Israel and Palestine. Unlike his predecessor, Obama has already thrust himself into it, making calls to the Egyptian, Palestinian Authority, and Israeli leaders on Wednesday. He and Clinton have repeatedly affirmed their support for a two-state solution, but that concept has never seemed more endangered than in the wake of Israel's massive military operation in Gaza.

One key question is whether the U.S. will pursue some kind of engagement with Hamas, which controls Gaza. Clinton, in her hearings, played it safe and said any talks would only take place after Hamas satisfied a hefty list of preconditions. But there have been reports that Obama is willing to pursue informal engagement through intelligence services. If this is true, domestic politics are at work: It's not politically realistic for Clinton or any high-profile appointee to offer anything but condemnation of Hamas, but there are signs that the group may be more flexible—more political—than is commonly portrayed. Any progress on this front likely won't involve Clinton.

And, as with Afghanistan and Iran, Clinton also seems likely to deal with a superstar envoy, with reports that Obama will tap George Mitchell for a leading role in Israel/Palestine talks. Whether it's Clinton or Mitchell taking the lead remains to be seen. And as with Iran, timing is important, too: if Israelis elect the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, who took pride in blowing up previous peace efforts, in their upcoming elections, Clinton's work will be that much more difficult.

Since her surprise pick, there's been plenty of debate about whether Obama chose Clinton because of domestic politics or because of foreign policy. A hundred days from now, we should have a good sense what the answer is.

In a one-sentence letter sent to David Paterson and Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton resigned her Senate seat, according to a release from her office.

“This letter is to inform you that I resign my seat in the United States Senate effective immediately in order to assume my duties as Secretary of State of the United States,” she wrote.

Clinton was sworn-in to her new post at 5:29 p.m. by her childhood friend, Associate Judge Kathleen Oberly of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

For the event, they used a bible that once belonged to Clinton’s late father.

The event took place in Clinton’s Russell Senate Office, and was attended by Bill Clinton, Hillary's Washington staff, and, according to another source, Representative Anthony Weiner.

WASHINGTON--Even at a black tie ball where President Barack Obama and his wife danced to celebrate his historic inauguration, New York's most frustrating political parlor game continued to take center stage.

"I think I've got an idea," said Governor David Paterson.

He was responding to questions from reporters about whether he had decided on a replacement for Hillary Clinton in the Senate as he swept through the Mid-Atlantic Ball on Tuesday night.

"I think we'll probably make it in about three days," he said of his announcement, adding that the person was someone who "enjoyed the inauguration today immensely." Paterson also confirmed reports that he had interviewed Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo and a candidate for the job, earlier that day. 

Dressed in a tuxedo with his wife, Michelle, clad in a gold dress, on his arm, the governor attempted to answer questions over the remaining members of the Grateful Dead, who played on stage. When asked about whether Senator Ted Kennedy taking ill during a reception with President Obama that afternoon would influence his decision making process. He said that there was absolutely no connection between "the prognosis of a human life and a political decision."

Asked why he said none of the candidates made an "apt" choice to replace Clinton the prior night at an event for New York Democrats at the Smithsonian, Paterson said, "Starting on their first day they are not. Starting on Senator Clinton's first day, people thought that she wasn't from New York, didn't have any previous political experience, had one policy endeavor, healthcare, a policy initiative that flopped. They were real down on her and now she seems as if no one can replace her."

Senator Chuck Schumer, who entered the ballroom at roughly the same time as the governor, also said that the decision would come on either Friday or Saturday.

"We're getting close to decision time. I think the Governor will make his decision Friday, Saturday night. Friday, Saturday, at night time," he said.

Asked why the schedule seemed to have been pushed back, Schumer said it hadn't.

"Hillary is not even going to be approved till Wednesday," he said. "And then a couple of days, that was always, as I understand it, when we found out the schedule, I called him and said Hillary is likely to be confirmed Tuesday or Wednesday and he said, well we'll probably do it Friday or Saturday, that's always been the plan."

Schumer also said that the governor's "apt" remarks the prior evening were harmless.

"A little hyperbole is appropriate," he said.

After spending a few minutes with the press, Paterson and his wife and coterie proceeded to a VIP section that overlooked the floor of the convention center where the ball took place. He stopped to chat with some bundlers dressed in tuxedos and yellow scarves. His wife sipped a drink from a lipstick-smudged straw. The couple and family made their way back through the floor, slicing through long lines for the bar. On the escalator up to the lobby, Paterson tickled his son's ribs in front of him and laughed. He appeared to be having a good time.

WASHINGTON--Bill Clinton paused from the ceaseless hand-shaking and picture-posing in his wife’s K Street political headquarters to make a prediction about how the interests of New York city and state would fare under the new administration.

“You know, they have such smart people and a lot of them are New Yorkers,” he told the Observer in a corner of the 10th floor office of Friends of Hillary. “You’ve got Geithner. You’ve got Donovan. Hillary.” Here, a squinting smile.

“So I’m upbeat, he said. “I expect New York to do quite well.”

It was the day before the inauguration, and the former president (and New York resident) echoed the outwardly optimistic view of many New York officials who descended on the nation’s capital for the days of exclusive cocktail parties, political dinners, sacred services and boozy media functions surrounding the historic swearing-in.

But along with the optimism about the country’s new leadership was some nervous uncertainty about New York’s own. With Hillary Clinton still waiting to be confirmed as secretary of state, David Paterson was still doing his best not to give any indication of who he intended to pick to fill her Senate seat.

 “I think there have been a half a dozen candidates mentioned, maybe more, who I think would do an excellent job,” said Mr. Clinton, who, unlike most of the lower-profile Democrats around him, might plausibly not have a horse in that particular race. “That’s the governor’s choice and he has enough pressure on him from other people. I’m not going to add to it. I used to be a governor. I’m not going to do that.

For their part, the actual candidates for the job did their best to appear deferential to the governor, and spent what was essentially crunch time for their stealth campaigns granting Mr. Paterson a conspicuously wide berth.

Caroline Kennedy, who arrived in Washington on Jan. 19, scheduled no public events other than visiting with her family and attending the inauguration. (Though Maria Shriver, told the Observer as she left an opening ceremony concert at the Lincoln Memorial that she thought her cousins chances were “good.”) Andrew Cuomo also kept his distance. (Though Lanny Davis, a close Clinton ally, called him “the best qualified.”)  The less-discussed candidates engaged in some delicate profile-raising while simultaneously trying not to seem overly eager.

Representative Steve Israel threw a party on the day before the inauguration at the Monocle, a restaurant a few blocks away from the Senate building. Surrounded by New York county chairs sipping on free beer and feasting on free salmon, Mr. Israel offered hugs and kisses and hearty pounds to everyone who came over to say hello.

 “This process has been wonderful,” said Mr. Israel, watched by his press secretary as he spoke slowly. “No matter what happens. I’ve loved traveling through the state and I will keep traveling no matter what happens.”

His press secretary nodded with approval.    

Mr. Israel and his entourage then headed over to the Smithsonian for Mr. Paterson’s party in honor of the New York Democratic Party. Some members of the delegation, like Representative Jerry Nadler, took the metro, where some straphangers also had animated conversations about Ms. Kennedy’s effort to fill the Senate vacancy.

“There’s not a caste system in our society,” a man in a down jacket said to Barbara Hetzel, a Democratic chair from Allegany County.

“I agree with you,” said Ms. Hetzel, who supports either Kirsten Gillibrand or Mr. Cuomo for the job. “You’re not born into it, you have to earn it. New York is not Massachusetts and we have problems in New York.” 

 Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Cuomo skipped the event at the Smithsonian, but several of the other candidates made sure to show their faces.