With Republican commentators and pols crowing about his selections (and liberals holding their breath, but still mostly hoping for the best...) Barack Obama announces his national security team, including Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton, this morning at 10:40. The team:
Secretary of State - Hillary Clinton
Attorney General - Eric Holder
Secretary of Defense - Robert Gates (staying on for at least a year)
U.N. Ambassador - Dr. Susan Rice
National Security Advisor - Gen. Jim Jones
Homeland Security Secretary - Janet Napolitano
Says the WaPo:
Obama and Clinton had each claimed to be the best candidate to restore the nation's reputation abroad, end the Iraq war and engage the new global economy as president. Now, they will try to do that together, though under Obama's direction.
Aiding in the effort will be Bush cabinet member Robert Gates, who will continue as Defense Secretary despite having overseen a war policy that was the subject of withering criticism from both Obama and Clinton during the campaign.
To be successful, Gates and Clinton will have to forge a working relationship that often eludes the secretaries of State and Defense even when they are members of the same party. Gates and Clinton will each have their own power base and have each sought assurances of access to Obama.
But Obama clearly believes the pair can work together, especially on the difficult task of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. To help in coordinating the competing views, Obama will turn to former Marine Gen. James Jones, who will serve as national security adviser.
Jones, who will operate inside the White House, will be charged with melding military and diplomatic policy and with helping Obama navigate the two bureaucracies.
The trio that Obama will introduce today represents a centrist team that has already angered some of the president-elect's most ardent liberal supporters, who had expected a foreign policy team with clear, left-leaning credentials. BTW, Jones happens to be a very close friend of John McCain's, and as Chuck Todd is saying on MSNBC, much closer to McCain personally, than to Obama. Meanwhile, says Steve Clemons:
I think that the Clinton we saw during the campaign will give herself, her views and approach to complex national security challenges a "makeover." She's going to push womens' rights, democracy, human rights, poverty reduction, and the like -- but I think she is going to be party of a realist-tilting, crafty Obama-led, Bob Gates-designed, Clinton-out front process to get a strategic shift in US foreign policy. We applaud that.
James Glassman, her Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has some ideas on how to move her agenda forward -- and she should consider using a lot of the tools that Glassman and his team are developing. And Politico suggests Clinton and Gates may be more like-minded than people think, at least on what the relationship between a president and his commanding generals should be. Truth be told, if you parse the Iraq posisitons of Clinton and Obama during the campaign, they're really not that different, if at all.
I'll reiterate that I think the choice of Hillary is smart on Obama's part, even if it produced an initial WTF??? reaction. Clinton's star power will give Obama a leg up overseas. She is a known quantity that world leaders can and will instantly respect, because they already know her, and frankly, because they know her husband. Men of the "old world" may not have the highest respect for women, but they do respect the politically powerful wives of powerful men. And of course, picking Hillary was a master stroke for Obama, who solves Hillary's biggest problem (not wanting to go back to being one of 100 Senators with no committee chairmanship) while simultaneously containing both her presidential ambitions, for now, and her potential to freelance from the dais on the arms services committee.
Brilliant move. Great team.
Meanwhile, Powerline grumbles about "honeymoon time" among the military brass.
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Labels: Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, national security, Obama administration, President Barack Obama, secretary of state, U.S. foreign policy |
