Obama's Security Team: Hillary Is the Biggest Question Mark

With President-elect Barack Obama set to announce his foreign policy team today, the names expected to fill out the squad were widely praised on the Sunday political talk show circuit. But the "team of rivals" didn't escape scrutiny.

Republicans Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Lugar both said that Obama's potential appointments for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Jim Jones as National Security Adviser showed a pragmatic, non-ideological approach to addressing international concerns. They gushed even more over the president-elect's apparent decision to keep Defense Secretary Bob Gates at his current post.

"Secretary Gates is a great choice," said Graham, who was reminded that he had once said he feared the day that Barack Obama became commander-in-chief. "Jim Jones, known him for a long time, former NATO commander. He opposed the surge early on, but he's a four-star general with a lot of national security knowledge. Senator Clinton is a friend, is known throughout the world, very smart, a little harder line than Senator Obama took during the campaign."

Other Senators, including Democrats Claire McCaskill and Jack Reed, followed suit, saying that Obama had siphoned off the cream of the crop when it came to staffing his foreign policy team. Many TV pundits concurred, arguing that the president-elect had done the best he could to hit the ground running come January 20th.