President-elect Barack Obama may be exasperated by the drama involved in vetting Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, but he has no idea the cascading effects such a selection will mean here. If Obama does indeed pluck Clinton from her Senate seat for the Secretary of State post, he will be touching off a chain reaction of political jockeying that will tumble down from the federal level all the way to the New York City Council.

So, we have decided to play along and map out the possible scenarios in this downloadable flow chart. We start with Hillary Clinton, out line each of her possible replacements, and then connect them to each of their possible replacements… and so on, down the line. Admittedly, some scenarios are more far-fetched than others, but each has a justification: Malcolm Smith may seem an unlikely choice to replace Clinton, but if it turns out that he is the one obstacle to the Democrats forming a majority in the State Senate, Paterson may want to whisk him away to a place where he can no longer cause trouble. And in the race to replace Andrew Cuomo, we have included Jeff Klein and Mike Gianaris, because they have expressed interest in the position in the past.

A few important notes: All of this assumes, of course, that Gov. David Paterson will not appoint himself, which he has ruled out. We restricted ourselves to playing musical chairs with current elected officials, rather than speculating on who might come up from the community or municipal level to run for city or statewide office. And we decided to stop our speculation at the City Council or State Assembly level, for fear of inducing nausea.

Feel free to send this map to others and, of course, add your own speculation.