John Kerry is Psyched

Exhilarating to walk into @statedept today and get to work with remarkable team. Dad on mind! –JKflic.kr/p/dScAtT

— StateDept (@StateDept) February 4, 2013

John Kerry spent his first day as Secretary of State reveling in the role he'd spent his life working toward. He's “finally where he belongs,” writes the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who attended the former Senator's first briefing with State Department employees. “[L]ike a gleeful kid in a candy shop,” is how Time's Jay Newton-Small described him.

And indeed, if candy shops were filled with diplomatic paperwork instead of delicious chocolate, it seems Kerry wouldn't object at all, seeing as how he was busy flashing the tattered green passport he first acquired as an 11-year-old boy and telling the group he once was grounded for using it to sneak into East Berlin. Kerry was jocular and at ease, and he joked with the staff that following in the footsteps of Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton means he now has “big heels to fill.” He spoke for (only) 14 minutes, telling the room “I’m going to utter five words that certainly no sitting senator, and probably a former senator, have ever uttered, and that is:  These remarks will be brief.” Then he set about to find his new office, and wrote his first post on the unfortunately named “Dipnote” blog.

Yesterday also helped shed light on what would become of Kerry's rather epic Twitter account. The Hill reports that he will take over the State Department Twitter feed and add a “JK” at the end of all tweets he sends out directly. (This, of course, has some worried that it will seem like the new Secretary is perpetually “just kidding.“) There's no word yet on whether Kerry will retire his other account or whether his actual tweets as Secretary of State will come close to those imagined in the Texts from Hillary tumblr. But I hope that he keeps the old one active, if only just so that he can keep throwing verbal grenades at John McCain. Ba-bam.