Lengthy post-election interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Lots of interesting stuff, but here is one relevant section on Obama's impending choice to serve as her successor:

QUESTION: What qualities do you think Barack Obama should look for in filling this position?

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, I'm sure he will make a fine choice. There are a lot of terrific foreign policy professionals and foreign policy people on the political side out there.

The one thing we have on the foreign policy side is we have a kind of continuous conversation among those who are in the foreign policy community, whether they come from the Democratic side or from the Republican side. There are all kinds of fora and nongovernmental organizations, organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, where many of us see each other on a regular basis. And so there's a community of foreign policy professionals and foreign policy-interested people who will know these issues from day one.

I'm also certain that whoever's Secretary of State is going to know exactly what I know now. And what George Schultz, my great mentor and friend who was Secretary of State himself told me, he said, being Secretary of State is the greatest job in government. Now, he was someone who had to know that, because he'd been Secretary of Treasury, he'd been OMB, he'd been Secretary of Labor. And he said you're going to find that, because there's nothing like representing this country abroad and representing what America stands for. And I love this country, and I know that whoever becomes Secretary of State is going to love this country. And that's the first and most important qualification.

You have to love America. You have to understand its great strengths. You have to understand its long history and its weaknesses and its downsides as well. I used to love to go to places like Brazil, where you have another great multi-ethnic democracy, and talk about the long journey we've made, to talk about the fact in places that are just starting to look to a democratic future that we don't promote and talk about democracy because we think ourselves perfect, but because we know how imperfect we've been as a democracy. And we know it's hard. And we know that particularly making multi-ethnic democracy work is really hard. And so caring about those values and sustaining as a core value of our foreign policy that America cannot be neutral when it comes to democracy.

There aren't competing systems of, sort of, all of them are okay. There's only one for which – that is really in line with human dignity and with human aspiration, and that's democracy. And if you defend that, you're going to be okay.

If you missed it earlier in the week, here's a look at what is reportedly Obama's short list for the job.