There’s likely to be another Rice in the house once Barack Obama takes office – Dr. Susan Rice, that is.

ABC News reports that Rice – who often served as the face of Obama’s foreign policy during the presidential campaign, is now the leading candidate to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. So it looks like Caroline Kennedy won’t get that job, after all. We don’t think she wanted it anyway.

There were whispers throughout the blogosphere about Rice’s possible post earlier this month, but today those whispers are yells. But we might have to wait until after Thanksgiving to get the official word from the Obama camp – that’s when he plans to announce his national security team.

Rice, a member of Pres Bill Clinton’s National Security Council and a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, is known in foreign-policy circles as a forward-thinking pragmatist. The former Rhodes Scholar has been recognized for her contributions to the formation of peaceful, cooperative relationships between nations, and U.S. security policy for global peace.

The UN Dispatch notes that former Sen. Tim Wirth, the Clinton administration’s undersecretary of state for global affairs from 1993 to 1997 and current president of the UN Foundation, said Rice takes a different view when it came to the world’s problems: She sees connectivity in them, and doesn’t just view them through a prism of individual state power.

"She was one of the few people to live in the foreign-policy world who understood global issues, transnational issues like human rights, climate change and terrorism," said Wirth, who worked with Rice when she was at the National Security Council. "The foreign-policy community is largely about political relationships. That’s what drives the [typical] foreign-policy world. But the new one is transnational problems, problems that don’t have passports."

The New Republic cites a person “who really knows the foreign-policy bureaucracy” as saying: “For UN ambassador, everyone is going to be focused on who is picked, but an important issue to pay attention to is what relationship the administration establishes for that post. Does that person report to and through the secretary of state, or will that person have Cabinet rank and status (as [Richard] Holbrooke did). Will it be a Hillary person, so that foreign policy is unified under her control, or for some issues might it be a competing power center?”

Rice, if sent to the United Nations, will have to tackle all sorts of global issues, not least of which is the genocide in Darfur.

She has spoken out in favor of authorizing U.S. military action against Sudan if the killing continued. Here’s what she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 11, 2007 (hat tip to The New York Times):

Some argue that it is unthinkable in the current context. True, the international climate is less forgiving than it was in 1999 when we acted in Kosovo. Iraq and torture scandals have left many abroad doubting our motives and legitimacy. Some will reject any future U.S. military action, especially against an Islamic regime, even if purely to halt genocide against Muslim civilians. Sudan has also threatened that al-Qaeda will attack non-African forces in Darfur — a possibility since Sudan long hosted bin Laden and his businesses.

Yet, to allow another state to deter the U.S. by threatening terrorism would set a terrible precedent. It would also be cowardly and, in the face of genocide, immoral.

Others argue the U.S. military cannot take on another mission. Indeed, our ground forces are stretched thin. But a bombing campaign or a naval blockade would tax the Air Force and Navy, which have relatively more capacity, and could utilize the 1,500 U.S. military personnel already in nearby Djibouti.

Still others insist that, without the consent of the UN or a relevant regional body, we would be breaking international law. But the Security Council last year codified a new international norm prescribing "the responsibility to protect." It commits UN members to decisive action, including enforcement, when peaceful measures fail to halt genocide or crimes against humanity.

And no, Rice is no relation to the current Rice in power — Condoleezza, Pres. Bush’s secretary of state.