CHICAGO: President-elect Barack Obama extended a bipartisan olive branch by meeting his vanquished Republican rival John McCain yesterday, but a Cabinet job was not expected to be on offer.
The meeting in Chicago between the victor of the Nov. 4 election and the Arizona senator put substance to Obama’s promise of reaching out to old opponents. Before reporters were ushered out of the meeting at Obama’s transition headquarters, the president-elect anticipated a “good conversation about how we can work together to fix up the country.” Obama said he would also “give thanks to Sen. McCain for his outstanding service.”
According to reports, Obama’s transition team is conducting an in-depth vetting of the finances of his former primary rival Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill Clinton with a view to naming her his secretary of state. In an interview on CBS program “60 Minutes” that aired late Sunday, Obama confirmed that he had met with the former first lady in Chicago last week but refused to say if he made her a job offer.
The Democrat also said he would name at least one Republican to his Cabinet. A transition source said the Democratic president-elect would not go as far as offering McCain a post in his Cabinet. Obama and McCain were joined at the meeting by McCain’s close Senate friend, Republican Lindsey Graham, and Congressman Rahm Emanuel, whom the president-elect has chosen as his White House chief of staff. “President-elect Obama and Sen. McCain have been champions of immigration reform in the past, and they would make a formidable team going forward,” Lynn Tramonte, policy director at the pro-immigration group America’s Voice, said.
In his CBS interview, Obama vowed to pull troops out of Iraq, crush Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and shut down the Guantanamo Bay internment camp as part of a dramatic foreign policy break with Bush.
