Wake-Up Call: Salazar needs to stay put

Timing is everything. Early on, as president-elect Barack Obama started filling his Cabinet, Ken Salazar's name kept surfacing -- but so did word that what the first-term senator and former Colorado Attorney General ultimately wanted was a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and in the meantime, he was perfectly content in the Senate. To balance out his picks, however, Obama tapped Salazar for the Department of the Interior, where he now has his hands full undoing eight years of Bush administration policy and grappling with decades of entrenched bureaucracy, as Alan Prendergast detailed in this story.

Now Obama has to fill Justice David Souter's seat on the Supreme Court, and he's being urged to appoint a Latino. Even though Salazar has denied that he's interested, his name keeps surfacing -- most recently in the Washington Post .

But Salazar has work to do at Interior, important work, and he needs to stay put... for now. Timing is everything.