Pejman Yousefzadeh

This may not sound like much to some people, but I happen to think that if you are competing for a job with someone, and you get selected, you don’t go out of your way to lord that fact over your erstwhile competitor—especially if you remain a colleague of that erstwhile competitor.

But try telling John Kerry that:

John Kerry says that President Obama offered him the secretary of state job a week before Susan Rice publicly pulled out of the running for the job.

“He called me, actually a week before Susan got out of the thing,” Kerry tells the Boston Globe. “He called me and said, ‘You’re my choice. I want you to do this.’ He asked me to keep it quiet. I did. I sat on it.”

At the time, Rice pulling out of the running for the top State Department job suggested that the position had simply fallen to Kerry, who had been in a neck-and-neck competition for the job. Now it seems that the White House allowed Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, to publicly save face by publicly withdrawing from a job that was never going to be offered to her in the first place.

I certainly don’t think that Susan Rice would have made a good secretary of state, but while it is one thing to criticize Rice for her shortcomings—and they are many—it is quite another for the guy who beat her out for the job to rub salt in her wounds. Maybe this story serves to remind people why John Kerry just couldn’t seem to connect with voters when he ran for the presidency in 2004.