From TheJewishPress.com:
While it's still early - the new president won't take office until January 20 - it appears that many of the concerns voiced on this page and in our community about an Obama administration may have been ill founded.
The appointment of Congressman Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff and the expected choice of Senator Hillary Clinton as secretary of state should put to rest fears that Mr. Obama harbors any deep-seated animosity toward the Jewish state.
As has been widely reported, Mr. Emanuel was an IDF civilian volunteer during the first Gulf War, has been an unabashed supporter of Israel while in Congress, and his father fought in the Irgun. The fact that the president-elect chose someone with Mr. Emanuel's background to oversee his White House speaks volumes.
As for Sen. Clinton, she has long erased any reasonable doubt as to where her sympathies are regarding the Middle East. Indeed, she has emerged as one of Israel's strongest Senate supporters of the Jewish state. While we have no doubt that Mr. Obama's apparent selection of Sen. Clinton had a lot to do with domestic politics, it still is instructive that he chose as secretary of state someone with such a strong record on Israel.
Of course, it is Mr. Obama who ultimately will set the course of his administration's foreign policy, and whether or not he will press for American "evenhandedness" or a role as "an honest broker" remains to be seen. But the two choices are encouraging.
In the area of foreign policy generally, candidate Obama seemed to credit the complaints of such rogue states as Iran that the U.S. was the reason for much of the turmoil roiling the international arena. His reference to President Bush as practicing "cowboy diplomacy" seemed to us to undermine any notion of American exceptionalism in the world arena. A secretary of state named Hillary Clinton will assuage many of our doubts. It is also reassuring to hear that Mr. Obama is seriously considering retaining Robert Gates as secretary of defense.
Also during the campaign, we had grave concerns about Mr. Obama's economic philosophy. He talked about spreading the wealth and taxing the rich, and it appeared to many that he was signaling a move toward some form of socialism. And yet his just-announced economic team headed by Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers signals that Mr. Obama is intent on seriously dealing with the rapidly deteriorating economic crisis rather than engaging in some frolic in economic experimentation.
