Some progressive Obama supporters think the arrival of Clinton at the State Dept. will mean they’ll be frozen out. That would have implications for their advancement in subsequent Democratic administrations.
“Basically, you have all of these young, next-generation and mid-career people who took a chance on Obama” during the primaries, said one Democratic foreign-policy expert included in that cohort. “They were many times the ones who were courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many of them supported Obama in the first place. And many of them would likely get shut out of the mid-career and assistant-secretary type jobs that you need, so that they can one day be the top people running a future Democratic administration.”
In the foreign-policy bureaucracy, these middle-tier jobs — assistant secretary and principal-deputy-assistant and deputy-assistant — are stepping stones to bigger, more important jobs, because they’re where much of the actual policy-making is hashed out. Those positions flesh out strategic decisions made by the president and cabinet secretaries; implement those policies; and use their expertise to both inform decisions and propose targeted or specific solutions to particular crises.
NYT:
By this past Thursday, when Mr. Obama reassured Mrs. Clinton that as secretary of state she would have direct access to him and could select her own staff, the wooing was complete.
This is not change I can believe in. Having Clinton at State is a fine idea (it would be ironic, don't you think, for her to end up sitting down with the Iranian Foreign Minister without preconditions), but this bit is frustrating. The foreign policy folks who backed Barack Obama in the primaries were putting their careers on the line, for which it appears they will get very little in return. Half the premise of the Obama campaign was that Hillary Clinton's instincts on foreign policy were part of the preen-your-hawk-feathers attitude that helped pave the road to Baghdad, and that Obama wasn't just running to end the war, but "end the mindset that got us into war". But now there's a good chance that Dick Holbrooke will end up as a major player, while Susan Rice ends up, at best, Deputy National Security Adviser or Ambassador to the United Nations. Samantha Power probably won't have a job at all.
Throughout all of these announcements I have been steeling myself by saying that Obama is hiring a team to execute his policy. But that's becoming less effective with every announcement.
