After Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, can a white man be named Secretary of State?
Perhaps more notably, he is one of the few unsuccessful White House aspirants to emerge from defeat with his reputation actually enhanced. The senior Senator from Massachusetts has been a steady voice of conscience in the Senate, urging attention to atrocities in Sudan, engaging in personal diplomacy with Pakistan and being an early advocate of a no-fly zone in Libya.
But Susan Rice is considered President Obama's favourite for the office, much to conservatives' consternation. She is eminently qualified for the post, having first served in the Clinton administration's State Department.
A Rhodes Scholar, Rice was a protg of Madeline Albright and has emerged as a trusted voice for the Obama administration at the UN. When first appointed ambassador in 2009, she was the second youngest person to hold the post at age 44 and the first African-American woman.
It is interesting and historically significant that President Obama's foreign policy team is driven by women. The Libyan air strikes marked "the first time in US history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action," as I argued in The Daily Beast at the time.
Rice, Clinton and the influential Human Rights Director Samantha Power overturned more cautious administration counsellors who were arguing for multilateral humanitarian intervention and no more.
Likewise, Rice has been unflinching in her criticism of Russian and Chinese opposition at the UN to intervention in Syria. "We the United States are standing with the people of Syria. Russia and China are obviously with Assad," Rice said on CNN. "Their veto dramatically increased the risk of greater violence."
Given that this emerging market-Leninist alliance is likely to be a force in geopoli! tics over the next four years, Rice's willingness to confront it could be a strategic asset.
But no analysis of Rice's chances are complete without considering the conservative freak-out that is likely to erupt if she is nominated.
She is implicated in the conspiracy theories that have spread on the right in the wake of the Benghazi attack. It fell to Rice to articulate the administration's initial explanation on the Sunday shows, arguing that the attacks were the result of spontaneous protests over an obscure film defaming Mohammed, which had led to violent protests outside the Egyptian embassy earlier in the day. It has subsequently been divulged that the attack was premeditated and fuelled by Ansar al-Sharia or other affiliated Islamist groups.
As a result, Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham swore they would filibuster her nomination and 97 House Republicans fired off a pre-emptive message of opposition. President Obama fired back in his first post-election press conference, saying "If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me."
And for all the fog of war questions remaining about the Benghazi attack, Rice was sticking to CIA talking points when she initially spoke.
While having a former presidential candidate as Secretary of State communicates the position's importance, the downside for Obama of appointing John Kerry is that he would have to be replaced in a special election to the Senate.
Nominating Susan Rice, on the other hand, would provoke an early second term fight with conservatives, spending some of the president's precious political capital.
What's clear is that Obama takes his own counsel and disdains DC politics. Foreign Policy has been a cornerstone of his administration's accomplishments and he'll try to set an even more indelible record in a second term.
John Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast