Hairy Kerry rises to chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee
You'll never guess who was just named the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The same fellow who sternly testified there nearly four decades ago with a posse of other anti-Vietnam war protesters.
Massachusetts' o
wn junior senator John Kerry, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 2004, who testified before the same committee in 1971 as a veteran.
Kerry, who's been on the committee awaiting his turn for 23 years, replaces Delaware's own Joe Biden, who reportedly is becoming the new vice president on Jan. 20 on the Democratic presidential ticket with former senator Barack Obama.
Biden has been in the Senate since the new president was 11 years old; Biden hates when people point that out. But it shows what a longtime Washington veteran he is.
In a shocking statement released by Kerry's office (he's traveling in Pakistan), the new chairman said he was "honored" to become the new head of such an important committee, which is decided by seniority. "We have a big agenda ahead of us," he added.
-- Andrew Malcolm
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Photo: Associated Press
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Let's hope that he runs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee better than he ran the team that didn't put him into the White House.
Posted by: George Edward | December 15, 2008 at 04:51 PM