Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are seen at a campaign rally in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 20. (John Raoux/Associated Press)Barack Obama is finally set to name his one-time bitter rival, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state Monday in a move that's been transfixing Washington for weeks due to the uneasy relationship between the president-elect and the Clintons.

Bill Clinton, once dubbed a "veteran of non-disclosure" by the Obama campaign, agreed this weekend to publicly divulge the names of 208,000 donors to his presidential library and foundation by the end of the year.

The donor list apparently includes everyone from Arab governments to eastern European tycoons.

The former president had long resisted making the names public, saying contributors gave money to his foundation assuming their identities would remain anonymous.

His refusal to name names was seized upon by Obama during his bare-knuckle battle against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But Bill Clinton has been singing a different tune since his wife was first approached for the high-profile job shortly after the Nov. 4 election.

In a sign that he's keen to see her take it, he's also agreed to allow the state department and the White House, if necessary, to pore over his personal business interests and speeches in order to avoid conflicts of interest.

That clears the way for Obama to give the New York senator the job. The president-elect and Clinton were scheduled to hold a news conference Monday morning in Chicago.

Obama was also expected to announce that Defence Secretary Robert Gates would remain in his job for a year or more and that retired marine Gen. James Jones would serve as national security adviser.

Clinton appointment would be unprecedented

It's the Clinton announcement, however, that still has Washington buzzing about everything from Obama's true motives to Bill Clinton's potential interference in his wife's professional dealings. Some suggested Sunday that the Clinton marriage unquestionably complicates her work.

"This is an unprecedented situation historically," Senator Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate's foreign relations committee, said on ABC's "This Week."

"I'm not alone in suggesting there will be questions raised and (they) will probably be legitimate. Given all of the ties, all of the influence that he has, all of the relationships ... he is a major player in foreign policy. Now Mrs. Clinton is going to be the secretary of state. They are married."

Those more concerned with the politics of Obama's job offer have been dissecting it for weeks: is it a grand gesture of goodwill aimed at healing the wounds inflicted during the hard-fought primaries?

Or is it a cunning scheme to effectively neutralize his two biggest political threats — Bill and Hillary Clinton?

If the strong-willed and independent Clinton, as some critics fear, "goes rogue" and proves a problem for Obama, he can remove her after a single term, something not unusual for secretaries of state. Bill Clinton, for example, replaced Warren Christopher with Madeleine Albright after four years.

And if she'd remained a senator, Clinton could have raised money to pay off her 2008 campaign debt of $7.5 million — but as a member of Obama's cabinet, she's banned from doing so.

And so if Clinton only serves a single term as secretary of state, she could find herself in 2013 with no Senate seat, no job, no power base and a big pile of debt — and no longer a threat in any way to Obama.

Those close to Obama scoff at that conspiracy theory. Despite the primary battle, they say, Obama has long been impressed by Clinton's foreign policy smarts, her energy and her work ethic and had envisioned her as his top diplomat for months.

Nonetheless, other pundits wondered if their friendly but distant relationship will not serve either politician well.

James Baker and President George H.W. Bush had a close relationship and are often cited by historians as the ideal foreign policy team.

"When foreign leaders spoke with Baker, they knew that they were speaking to President Bush, and they knew that President Bush would defend Baker from domestic rivals and the machinations of foreign governments," wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Clinton may have ultimately backed Obama and campaigned enthusiastically for him, but she has never been close to the president-elect — something that could leave questions among some foreign leaders about whether she truly speaks for him, Friedman wrote.