Vice President Joe Biden’s name is being floated as a potential secretary of state if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins the White House.
Biden’s name has popped up in several news stories over the last day, including Politico, which cited a source saying he “is at the top of the internal short list Hillary Clinton’s transition team is preparing for her pick to be secretary of state.”
CNN also reported “sources connected to the campaign and the transition team” say Biden would be under consideration for the job should Clinton win.
Appearing on Fox and Friends on Friday, conservative veteran Pete Hegseth dismissed the trial balloon as a “terrible idea.”
“Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates — who knows these issues back to front — has famously said that Joe Biden has been wrong on major foreign policy issue in the last 40 years, which is true,” Hegseth said. “I mean, the guy was against the Gulf War, which was famously successful. He voted for the Iraq war. Then he was against the surge. Then he was for the pull-out. He was against all the actions that have been positive in Afghanistan. He’s famously very skeptical of the military. Overly so.”
The Washington Post’s James Hohmann wrote Friday “it is hard for us to envision Hillary ultimately going with the 73-year-old.”
“They often do not see eye to eye on foreign policy,” Hohmann wrote. “When she was secretary of state, she was far more hawkish and he was more dovish. They made different recommendations to President Obama during the first term on how to handle Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. And then there was the Osama bin Laden raid. When it looked like Biden might run, Clinton noted in a not-so-subtle dig that he had been against the OBL raid.”
Hohmann also argues the “Clintons value loyalty above all else. Biden has been campaigning hard for her the past few months, but he came very close to running against her just one year ago. And he has mused publicly after he passed on 2016 that he occasionally has regrets that decision. Clinton knows Foggy Bottom as well as anyone because she spent four years there. Why wouldn’t she put a loyalist there? Someone who she and Bill know won’t freelance or get them into trouble with gaffes?”
The counterpoint: It wasn’t long ago the newly-elected President Obama tapped Hillary Clinton — a well-known political rival — to take the job.