The guessing game, the anticipation, the rumors over “will she or won’t she,” are all over today.

President-elect Barack Obama held a press conference in Chicago Monday to announce members of his national security team. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, was officially named national security adviser. Subject to Senate confirmation, she will be the third woman to hold that post, after Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, the latter of which served under President Clinton.  

Obama also announced that President Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, will stay in his post for at least a year. Washington lawyer and Clinton-era Justice Department official Eric Holder has been nominated attorney general, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano was named homeland security secretary, campaign foreign-policy adviser Susan Rice was tapped as U.N. ambassador and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones was named national security adviser.

“If confirmed, I will give this assignment, administration and our country my all,” Clinton said at the podium after Obama gave his nominees a chance to address the press - and the country.

“Leaving the Senate is very difficult for me,” Clinton added, but she said she’s been thinking about American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as well as the foreign service workers serving in many countries abroad. Last week’s attacks in Mumbai, India, also helped hit home the fact that America needs a strong diplomatic hand in the world – one that utilizes more diplomatic tools, and relies less on the use of force. We need “more partners and fewer adversaries,” Clinton said.

“I am proud to join you [Obama] on what will be a difficult and exciting new adventure in this century.”  

Added Napolitano: "Like Hillary, it is difficult to leave one job for another but one must go where one can best serve."

She vowed that as homeland security secretary, she will work to ensure that the domestic response to all hazards and threats will be “fast, sound, level-headed and effective.”

“Americans deserve no less.”

So when, exactly, did Obama decide that his former primary foe would be a good secretary of state? Soon after her primary concession, Obama said. And any political battles between the two waged over policy in the past will be left behind, he vowed.

“We share a view that America needs to be safe and secure” by combining military power with diplomacy, and sharing the burden of tackling the world’s evils with foreign partners, Obama said. “I believe there’s no more effective advocate than Hillary Clinton for that well rounded view for how we advance American interests.”

“It was not a light-bulb moment” where all of a sudden he knew Clinton would be a good secretary of state, he added. “I have always believed she is tough and smart and disciplned and she shares my core values and the values of the American people."

Democratic party officials said Bill Clinton has made several concessions as to how he runs his own affairs to help get his wife chosen as secretary of state, including disclosing the names of his foundation contributors and halting meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative overseas. We’re sure that the former president’s post-White House career will provide fodder for any Republicans hoping to derail Hillary’s nomination during the Senate confirmation process.

"I suspect, however, that I’m not alone in suggesting that there will be questions raised, and probably legitimate questions," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-IN, the top Republican of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told ABC’s "This Week" on Sunday.

Hillary Clinton herself has reportedly passed up a plum Senate post to take the diplomatic job offered by Obama - chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which essentially controls the government’s spending. The New York Daily News says that seat was supposed to be a reward for her hard-fought presidential primary race, and to make up for the fact that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, refused to let her join his health-care task force. The lion of the Senate also was irritated during the campaign by Bill Clinton for his anti-Obama remarks.

On Obama’s incoming national security team, The New York Times says Gates, Clinton and Jones have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem,” said Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign-policy adviser.

Who is Jim Jones?

Jones, who will serve as national security adviser, is the man to referee such relationships, as to not let the president be bogged down by any nonsense between the State and Defense department policies.

What do we know about Jones and his world view?

He turned down an offer by Bush to head Central Command, the job David Petraeus recently took. In 2006, Rice reportedly asked Jones to serve as her deputy at the State Department, but he declined.

He co-chaired the Afghanistan Study Group. Earlier this year, he issued a scathing report that called the Bush administration’s strategy in Afghanistan failed; Obama wants to withdraw some troops from Iraq and boost troop levels in Afghanistan.

"The ‘light footprint’ in Afghanistan needs to be replaced with the ‘right footprint’ by the U.S. and its allies," Jones and the group co-chair wrote in the report." It is time to revitalize and redouble our efforts toward stabilizing Afghanistan and rethink our economic and military strategies to ensure that our level of commitment is commensurate with the threat posed by possible failure in Afghanistan."

He has said of Afghanistan: "Symbolically, it’s more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq.”

“He is a person whose world view was presumably shaped, by a great extent, to the fact that he was an extremely successful NATO commander in Europe,” former national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said on MSNBC Monday morning.  "He speaks remarkably good French, which is impressive. I’m sure that will make the French swoon.”