What, you don’t remember the Berkeley punk band Rice? They were on Lookout and everything. I’ve been wanting to use that headline for a while, but couldn’t, really, because it’s badass and I wouldn’t want to imply that Condoleezza Rice is badass. But the elevation of Susan Rice to the top of Obama’s foreign policy team — and, probably, his administration — makes the headline total fair game.

Coincidentally, I just published a profile of Susan Rice, with an exploration of What Her Ascendance Means, in the Washington Independent this morning.

 According to interviews with longtime associates, the woman who was just named to head the foreign-policy transition team for an Obama administration — and herself a likely candidate for deputy national security adviser or other top position — is a rigorous thinker and thorough pragmatist, impatient with ideology and incompetence.

Over the past year and a half, Rice has become increasingly close to Obama, owing in large part to their mutual frustration with conventional foreign-policy thinking. Unlike many seasoned foreign-policy hands, Rice’s focuses less on traditional state-to-state relationships and more on transnational threats, challenges and opportunities — befitting the emphasis of a new generation of global strategists. With Rice at the helm, former colleagues said, an Obama foreign policy would likely be bold but not dogmatic.