Gateway Pundit passes on some key information of why Obama likes Susan Rice:

Black Is Right discovered this in a CNN article published in 2008.

President-Elect Barack Obama has picked Dr. Susan Rice to be the new United Nations Ambassador. Rice served as Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and later worked as foreign policy advisor to John Kerry and John Edwards during their 2004 presidential campaign. Terrorism experts blame Rice for having played a key role in blocking efforts to neutralize Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.

According to Mansoor Ijaz, a former trouble shooter for Clinton, the FBI had their efforts to capture bin Laden “overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan.” In a Washington Post Op-Ed published in 2002, Mansoor Ijaz and Tim Carney, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan blamed Susan Rice for being a major obstacle to accepting offers of help from Sudan and to share their intelligence on bin Laden’s terror network.

Rice was also influential in the Clinton Administration’s remaining uninvolved in the Rwandan genocide that took place in that nation in 1994. The Atlantic (September 2001) published an article by Samantha Power titled: “Bystanders to Genocide,” and outlined Rice’s role in the do-nothing policy of the Clinton Administration.

Of course, Democrats will say this is just a racist attempt to smear the ambassador.