In just a few hours, Hillary Clinton will be announced as Barack Obama's pick to be the next Secretary of State.  There's been a tremendous amount of speculation as to the wisdom of Obama's choice, and there's really no predicting whether this will turn out to be a pitch-perfect partnership or a match made in hell.  Whether one takes the former or latter view appears to depend on what one thinks of Hillary Clinton's motivations, and her ability to keep her ego and her husband's penchant for drama in check.

Substantively, it's clear that Clinton's foreign policy instincts are slightly to the right of her new boss, as is the case with most of the national security team he will be announcing today.  Yet, as David Sanger writes this morning, all appear to be on board with the President-elect's vision to enact "a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena" that will include an increase in foreign aid, a beefing up of the US diplomatic and aid corps, as well as a shifting of military priorities toward Afghanistan and away from Iraq.

Clinton will find her plate at State is already full and growing more so by the day with the terror attacks in Mumbai (where current Secretary of State Condi Rice is now headed), the growing piracy epidemic off the eastern coast of Africa, the ongoing standoff with Iran and its pursuit of nuclear weapons, dealing with an aggressively resurgent Russia, and, of course, the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict which will take a yet another new turn with the upcoming election in Israel.

As James Lindsay, director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin, told Susan Page of USA Today in her piece this morning: "What matters most are two things. One, the secretary of State has to have the president's ear. Two, the president has to have the secretary of State's back."

As Clinton sets out to work on such a thick portfolio of challenges, let's hope both of those things turn out to be true.