by Mike Dorning

Another Bill Clinton cabinet member has endorsed Barack Obama.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, whose long friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton goes back to the days when Reich and Bill Clinton were Rhodes Scholars together at Oxford, endorsed Obama with a posting on his personal blog

Reich's endorsement comes after former Clinton Energy Secretary and Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson endorsed Obama last month. Hillary Clinton supporter James Carville of suggested Richardson's endorsement of Clinton oppondent was an act of betrayal, comparing him to Judas.

Reich, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said in his blog that the former first lady "has offered solid and sensible policy proposals" but addeed that "Obama's strike me as even more so."

"His plans for reforming Social Security and health care have a better chance of succeeding," Reich wrote. "His approaches to the housing crisis and the failures of our financial markets are sounder than hers. His ideas for improving our public schools and confronting the problems of poverty and inequality are more coherent and compelling. He has put forward the more enlightened foreign policy and the more thoughtful plan for controlling global warming."

Reich is quoted in New York magazine writer John Heilemann's blog saying he had planned to stay out of the Democratic primary fight but changed his mind after Hillary Clinton aired TV commercials in Pennsylvania earlier this week attacking Obama for his comment that people in small-town America are "bitter" over economic misfortunes.

"She's an old friend," Reich said. "I've known her 40 years. I was absolutely dead set against getting into the whole endorsement thing. I've struggled with it. I've not wanted to do it. Out of loyalty to her, I just felt it would be inappropriate."

"I saw the ads" -- the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama's bitter/cling comments a week ago -- "and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics.