With President-elect Obama deftly parceling out the personalities and details of his approaching administration, polls indicate he is steadily reinforcing great public expectations for a fresh start after the eight calamitous Bush years finally ending.

His appointment of Bill Richardson, a man of many portfolios, to be his secretary of commerce continues to reflect Obama's own self-confidence in surrounding himself with folks with greater resumes in public service and experience than his own.

Those great expectations seem to extend to Richardson himself, who after failing to win the Democratic presidential nomination was said to have hopes he might become Obama's secretary of state, considering his strong background in diplomacy. His willingness to give up the governorship of New Mexico to accept the commerce post suggests a desire to be part of the new adventure in Washington wherever he might fit in.

In many ways, Richardson had superior credentials for the top diplomatic post than did Hillary Clinton. She landed the State Department under circumstances that hinted at party political considerations as well as Obama's assessment of her skills as a global negotiator.

Richardson as a former ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration had an impressive background to take on one of the central challenges of the incoming president — restoration among the family of nations of America's reputation, shattered by George W. Bush's end run around the U.N. with his invasion of Iraq.

But Obama chose Susan Rice, his key campaign foreign-policy adviser and a strong advocate of a return to multilateralism in dealings with the U.N. and world crises, to be his U.N. ambassador. Richardson, who already had been energy secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, was left with Commerce.

Obama, in introducing his remaining major Cabinet appointee, came off in the manner of the prince squeezing a too-small slipper onto Cinderella's foot. Brushing aside a reporter's implication that Richardson deserved a more prestigious post, the president-elect accentuated the positive.

As the next commerce secretary, he said, Richardson "knows that America's reputation in the world is critical not just to our security, but to our prosperity — that when the citizens of the world respect America's leadership, they are more likely to buy America's products." He cited Richardson's hands-on style as a congressman and as U.N. ambassador, noting "he was a regular in the U.N. cafeteria, mixing it up with U.N. employees over lunch. And during his 2002 campaign for governor, he actually broke a world record by shaking nearly 14,000 hands in just eight hours."

Obama insisted that "all of this reflects a determination to reach out and understand where people are coming from, what they hope for, and what he can do to help. This approach, I believe, has been the key to Bill's success as a negotiator and will be key to his work on the critical functions of the Commerce Department — from administering our census and monitoring our climate to protecting our intellectual property and restoring our economic diplomacy."

If Richardson was disappointed in not becoming Obama's secretary of state, he didn't show it in being trotted out for the Commerce job. Although he had been a loyal team player in the Clinton administration, when Richardson quit the presidential race this year, he endorsed Obama at a critical time during the Obama-Clinton primary fight. That move might have been expected to earn him a more prestigious appointment.

The timing of the announcement of Richardson's Commerce nomination curiously came separately and after Obama had already trotted out his economic team to deal with the financial crisis inherited from the departing Bush administration.

When a reporter implied at Obama's news conference presenting Richardson that the new addition to that team deserved a more prestigious and important post, the president-elect called him "uniquely suited for this role as a leading economic diplomat for America."

As for Richardson himself, it may be that with an exciting new national leadership coming aboard, the view of it from the governor's chair in Albuquerque might have seemed too distant for a seasoned and ambitious political jack-of-all-trades to remain on the outside looking in.


Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press. Reach him at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.