Hillary Clinton Decides to Accept Post at State Dept

[daredevil]

Clinton Decides to Accept Post at State Dept., Confidants Say

By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat and accept the position of secretary of state, making her the public face around the world for the administration of the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential nomination, two confidants said Friday.

The apparent accord between perhaps the two leading figures in the Democratic Party climaxed a week-long drama that riveted the nation’s capital.

Mrs. Clinton came to her decision after additional discussion with President-elect Barack Obama about the nature of her role and his plans for foreign policy, said one of the confidants, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the situation.

Mr. Obama’s office told reporters on Thursday that the nomination is “on track” but this is the first word from the Clinton camp that she has decided.

“She’s ready,” the confidant said, adding that Mrs. Clinton was reassured after talking again with Mr. Obama because their first meeting in Chicago last week “was so general.” The purpose of the follow-up talk, he noted, was not to extract particular concessions but “just getting comfortable” with the idea of working together.

A second Clinton associate confirmed that her camp believes they have a done deal. Senior Obama advisers said Friday morning that the offer had not been formally accepted and no announcement would be made until after Thanksgiving. But they said they were convinced that the nascent alliance was ready to be sealed.

Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Philippe Reines, issued a statement Friday afternoon cautioning that the nomination was not final. “We’re still in discussions, which are very much on track,” Mr. Reines said. “Any reports beyond that are premature.”

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton fought the most competitive Democratic nomination battle in modern times, one that polarized their party for months and left bitterness in both camps. But in asking Mrs. Clinton to join his Cabinet, Mr. Obama signaled that he wants to turn a rival into a partner, and she concluded that she could have the most influence by accepting the offer.

The decision followed days of intense vetting and negotiations intended to clear any potential obstacles to her taking the job due to her husband’s global business and philanthropic activities. Lawyers for Mr. Obama and former President Bill Clinton combed through his finances and drew up a set of guidelines for his future activities intended to avoid any appearances of conflict of interest should she take the job.

People close to the vetting said Mr. Clinton turned over the names of 208,000 donors to his foundation and library and agreed to all of the conditions requested by Mr. Obama’s transition team, including restrictions on his future paid speeches and role at his international foundation.

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton will have had a powerful platform to travel the world and help repair relations with other countries strained after eight years of President Bush’s policies. But at the same time, she will now have to subordinate her own agenda and ambitions to Mr. Obama’s and sacrifice the independence that comes with a Senate seat and the 18 million votes she collected during their arduous primary battle.

Driving Mrs. Clinton’s deliberations in part, friends said, was a sense of disenchantment with the Senate, where despite her stature she remained low in the ranks of seniority that governs the body. She was particularly upset, they said, at the reception she felt she received when she returned from the campaign trail and sought a more significant leadership role in the expanding Democratic majority.

“Her experience in the Senate with some of her colleagues has not been the easiest time for her," said one longtime friend. “She’s still a very junior senator. She doesn’t have a committee. And she’s had some disappointing times with her colleagues."

In particular, the friend said, Mrs. Clinton was upset when the Senate Democratic leadership rejected the possibility of her heading a special task force with a staff and a mandate to develop legislation expanding health care coverage. The idea of giving her an existing leadership post was also dismissed because the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, did not want to force out any senators currently holding those jobs.

But Mr. Reid wants to come up with some sort of leadership position to recognize Mrs. Clinton’s standing and aides said he was confident he could arrive at something with sufficient muscle to appeal to her. He told a closed-door meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus on Tuesday that he was looking for a way to create a new leadership role for her, two people in the room said.

Mrs. Clinton would bring a distinctive background to the State Department. As first lady, she traveled the world for eight years, visiting more than 80 countries, not only meeting with foreign leaders but also villages, clinics and other remote areas that rarely get on a president’s itinerary. Mr. Obama during the primaries belittled that experience as little more than having tea and pointed to schedules showing many ceremonial events on those trips.

But more than any first lady before her, Mrs. Clinton delved deep into particular policy issues in the international arena, from women’s rights to microlending to alleviate poverty. As a senator for the last eight years, she served on the Armed Services Committee and continued her interest in foreign affairs.

She and Mr. Obama agree on the broad outlines of a new foreign policy for the post-Bush era, but they disagreed sharply in several crucial areas, particularly over how to deal with Iran and Pakistan. She characterized Mr. Obama as naïve in his view of those two countries, while he criticized her judgment for going along with Mr. Bush on the war in Iraq at first.


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[pkpatriotic]

Will Clinton Fill State Dept. With Loyalists?
Foreign Policy World Fears Clinton Will Take Old Guard to Foggy Bottom
By Spencer Ackerman 11/21/08

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) almost certain to become President-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state, some foreign-policy experts in the Obama orbit are expressing frustration.

Clinton herself isn’t so much the problem, they say. It’s the loyalists and traditional thinkers Clinton is likely to bring into the State Dept. if she becomes secretary.

The dispute is only partly ideological in nature. While the coterie of foreign-policy thinkers around Obama have been more liberal, in an aggregate sense — on issues like Iraq and negotiations with America’s adversaries — the Obama loyalists question the boldness of the Clintonites. They fear that Obama’s apparent embrace of Clinton represents an acquiescence to the conventional Democratic foreign-policy approaches that they once derided as courting disaster. Some wonder whether a Clinton-run State Dept. will hire progressive Obama partisans after an acrimonious primary.

In addition, some Obama loyalists wonder whether the same people who attacked Obama on foreign policy during the primaries can implement Obama’s agenda from State Dept. perches. “Look, Clinton and Obama are both smart people,” said one Democratic official who would not speak for the record, “and I’m sure their one-on-one relationship would be OK. But when you hire a Clinton, you hire more than just that one person, you get the entire package.” If Clinton becomes secretary of state, it’s possible that the fissures between her loyalists and Obama’s would be a significant undercurrent of the administration’s foreign-policy decision-making.

No one would comment for the record for this story from either the Clinton or the Obama camps. Several people were reluctant to speak even on background, whether out of an exhaustion with a dispute that has lasted for more than 18 months within the party or out of reluctance to jeopardize their own prospects for jobs with the Obama administration.

Some in the Democratic foreign-policy community worry about the implications for a cohesive diplomatic message, given the differences in substance and tone between the supporters of the two Democratic giants.

“Foreign policy is probably where Clinton and Obama differ the most,” said the Democratic official. “They just have fundamentally different instincts. On the big decisions, Obama can and will certainly call the shots, but the consistency of follow-through could really be a problem. And the instincts on the smaller decisions will be very different. Cohesion of our foreign policy could suffer.”

Most directly at issue is the nest of appointments within the State Dept. — which in a Democratic administration is where most of the foreign-policy resumes go, as liberals traditionally gravitate toward issues involving diplomacy instead of defense. Since the terms of a prospective Clinton appointment are not yet worked out — ABC’s Jake Tapper cited an Obama aide on Thursday saying an announcement would likely come after Thanksgiving — it is unclear how much control Clinton would have over staffing the department, though veterans of previous administrations say it would be unheard of for her not to be able to bring in her own team.

“Sometimes, if you offer me a cabinet job, I take it but [only if] I get to pick all Senate-confirmable appointments, down to assistant secretary,” said one such veteran of prior administrations. “Or I get the top three and then we work out the rest.” In George W. Bush’s administration, for example, Dick Cheney placed his ally John Bolton as undersecretary of state as a check on a Foggy Bottom team that conservatives distrusted, Secretary Colin Powell and Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage.

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.

The responsibility conferred on those offices, and the expertise developed and deepened by their occupants, shape the future luminaries of U.S. foreign policy. Susan Rice, for example, served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton’s second term and is now a leading contender for a top job in the Obama administration.

“These are your foreign-policy change agents,” said the Democratic foreign-policy expert.

Additionally, there are only so many jobs to go around. Many State Dept. positions go to Foreign Service officers and career bureaucrats. Important ambassadorships tend to go to large campaign contributors. And while the State Dept. was known as a repository of resistance to Bush during the past eight years, it has its share of Republicans, Obama-skeptics and even Bush supporters.

“State is already, like most agencies, riddled with Bush loyalists,” said a Democratic official with ties to the foreign-policy community. “If you add in a camp of Clinton loyalists, plus career staffers, none of whom are directly tied to Obama, I think it should be a serious concern to Obama. Clinton folks are known for their loyalty to the Clintons.”

There is an ideological component as well — though it is more complicated than either side typically admits. During the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign attracted more familiar Democratic faces from the foreign-policy community — the people derided by the liberal blogosphere as self-styled Very Serious People — who tended to be less progressive than their counterparts in the Obama campaign. The foreign-policy wing of the Obama campaign, during the primaries, considered itself as a force for redressing the timidity of the traditional Democratic foreign-policy community that acquiesced to disasters like the Iraq war.

“You’ve already begun to see it even before Sen. Clinton gets to the State Dept.,” said the foreign-policy official who has served in previous administrations. “Look at the people on the transition team. These are not people who necessarily supported Obama in campaign, and had different views on Iraq.”

Some Obama loyalists pointed to a 2007 memo written by Harvard’s Samantha Power — a former leading Obama adviser who resigned from the campaign after making an untoward remark about Clinton — that summarized the Obama campaign’s ideological meta-critique of many of the people who might staff a Clinton-run State Dept. Titled “Conventional Wisdom vs. the Change We Need,” the campaign released Power’s memo to the press after the Clinton campaign labeled Obama naive for proposing negotiations with dictators without preconditions; for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and for proposing highly-conditioned military strikes in Pakistan against senior Al Qaeda operatives.

“It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Power, who declined to speak for this story. “The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced and even naïve.”

Some in the Obama camp are left wondering whether picking Clinton as secretary of state represents an acquiescence to such conventional wisdom. “That memo was emblematic in many ways of the difference between the two groups,” said a Democratic foreign-policy expert and Obama loyalist. Asked about the ideological implications of the difference, the expert said, “The early Obama supporters were generally much more opposed to Iraq and you can draw out assumptions from there.”

Yet those assumptions are not entirely clear cut. Susan Rice opposed the Iraq war, but she was still a member in good standing of the traditional Washington foreign-policy community, ensconced at the ultra-establishment Brookings Institution. Her Brookings colleague, Lee Feinstein, signed on with the Clinton team and often criticized Obama, but he also wrote in favor of “unconditional negotiations with Iran” even before Obama entered the race.

Richard Holbrooke, a longtime progressive bete noir — and assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton — was an Iraq war supporter, but also been a leading voice with the Campaign to Ban Torture, a bipartisan pressure group devoted to rolling back Bush’s interrogation policies. And Clinton’s campaign gained the ardent support of liberal heroes like Gen. Wesley Clark and retired Amb. Joe Wilson, both of whom opposed the Iraq war.

The Democratic official noted Obama’s stated intrigue with presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals,” which documented the ultimately-constructive fissures in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, but rejected the comparison.

“The situation is fundamentally different today than in Lincoln’s time,” the official said. “The agencies are much more vast, so the people under the secretary, who aren’t directly controllable by the president, are a much bigger part of the equation these days. And when they are part of a group like the Clinton folks, it’s a real issue. Besides, even the Lincoln cabinet was much more dysfunctional than Goodwin’s book portrayed.”

 

[Niazi9]

It's probably Diwali all over again in Delhi.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Obama Close to Choosing Clinton, Jones for Key Posts

By Michael Abramowitz, Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 22, 2008

Barack Obama appears intent on naming an experienced and centrist foreign policy team, with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser, sources said yesterday.

A friend of Clinton's said she is ready to accept an appointment that would make the former Obama rival his point person in tackling an array of international crises and restoring the United States' influence around the world, a frequently stated objective of the incoming administration.

Although the Obama transition team and Clinton's Senate spokesman said nothing has been finalized, her office for the first time officially confirmed that she is talking to Obama about the job. "We're still in discussions, which are very much on track. Any reports beyond that are premature," said Philippe Reines, Clinton's spokesman and senior adviser.

Meanwhile, several sources said that Jones has moved to the top of the list to be Obama's national security adviser and that the sides are in advanced talks. Sources familiar with the discussions said Obama is considering expanding the scope of the job to give the adviser the kind of authority once wielded by powerful figures such as Henry A. Kissinger.

The Jones appointment would put the onetime Marine Corps commandant and NATO commander in charge of managing an interagency process that many Democratic foreign policy experts say has been broken under the Bush administration.

With many Democrats expecting Robert M. Gates to remain as defense secretary, the emerging national security team appears to be centrist in orientation, with deep experience in many of the areas likely to be the focus of Obama's foreign policy -- including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and instability in Pakistan and the Middle East, where Obama advisers have been signaling a desire to make an early mark in the stalled peace process.

While there has been much discussion about the president-elect's purported interest in creating a "team of rivals" in his Cabinet, the emerging group could also be one that works well together. Gates is widely known for being a nonpartisan, congenial manager, while Jones is considered by many who know him to be a self-effacing general who "wears power very gracefully," as one put it. That probably is part of their appeal to Obama, some Democrats said.

One wild card would be Clinton, who clashed sharply with Obama over foreign policy during their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination but worked hard for the party's ticket in the fall. And the past few days have brought increasing signs that, after some hesitation, Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, want her to take the job. That position comes after the Obama and Clinton sides came to an agreement on how to handle potential conflicts with Bill Clinton's activities.

"It seems more likely today, versus a few days ago, that she will accept," one Clinton loyalist said yesterday.

Obama has also been meeting with possible candidates for other posts, including director of national intelligence. One name that has surfaced as a possibility in recent days is retired Adm. Dennis Blair, a former chief of the U.S. Pacific Command. Others said to be possibilities include John Brennan, a former CIA analyst who worked his way up the agency ladder, and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.). A member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a former Army officer and businessman, Hagel has strong Capitol Hill support and is respected within the national security community as a nonpartisan analyst of intelligence issues.

Sources said the announcement of the national security appointments will be made on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

In picking Jones, Obama would be sending a powerful sign that he wants to conduct a nonpartisan national security policy. Jones is also close to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his colleague as a military liaison to Capitol Hill in the 1970s, and stayed publicly neutral during the presidential campaign, though he quietly provided advice to Obama in telephone conversations, according to a source who knows both men. Jones is one of the few public figures who probably would have been courted for government service regardless of the election's outcome.

"He would bring a lot of the military dimension to the job," said Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star general who was one of Jones's predecessors as NATO commander. "And his nonpartisanship at this juncture is really important. He provides a nonpartisan standard for the national interest -- that would be the presumption given his previous experience."

Said Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "I think that would be a very strong appointment. He's got very broad experience, both geographically and substantively, and he's been outstanding in everything he's done."

Mathews and other officials said they expected that Jones would also help impose order in the national security bureaucracy. Over the course of the Bush administration, national security advisers Condoleezza Rice and Steven J. Hadley have been criticized by some for not resolving interagency conflicts, although some of those disputes have receded in recent years.

Jones "is certain to be viewed as a very formidable figure," said David Rothkopf, who served in the Clinton administration and wrote a book about the NSC. "This is a general right out of central casting. He is extremely strong and forceful and thoughtful. . . . If you want a disciplined NSC process, this is your man."

Jones also has experience with many of the big issues that will confront the new administration. As NATO commander, he was intimately involved in assembling troops and other resources for the mission in Afghanistan. He also knows something about energy, a subject the Obama team expects to figure prominently in foreign policy discussions. Jones currently heads the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy.

He is known for being low-key but blunt: Journalist Bob Woodward wrote that Jones told then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace that he "should not be the parrot on the secretary's shoulder," referring to Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Sources said another possibility for the national security job is James B. Steinberg, a close Obama adviser who was deputy national security adviser to Clinton, but Jones appears to be the strong favorite.

Sources also said yesterday that Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has emerged as a leading contender for interior secretary. The son of a migrant worker who grew up in Tucson, Grijalva boasts a strong environmental record and chairs the House Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks, forests and public lands.

Also yesterday, transition officials announced the selection of five new White House staff members.

Patrick Gaspard, a longtime labor activist, will be the White House political director. He served as national political director for much of Obama's general-election campaign and was named deputy director of personnel for the transition effort. Prior to his work with Obama, Gaspard was a political operative for the Service Employees International Union.

Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. named Cynthia Hogan as his counsel. She has been his legal adviser since 1991, when she became a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Biden also named Moises V. Vela Jr. as his director of administration. Vela, a businessman in Denver, was a chief financial officer and senior adviser on Hispanic affairs for Vice President Al Gore.

Incoming first lady Michelle Obama has tapped Jackie Norris, who was Iowa state director for the Obama campaign, to be her chief of staff. Norris, a high school government and history teacher and longtime Iowa Democrat, was Iowa political director for Gore's 2000 presidential campaign and was finance director for future Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack in 1998.

In addition, the vice president-elect's wife, Jill Biden, has named Catherine M. Russell to be her chief of staff. A former adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she served as chief of staff for Jill Biden during the campaign and is the wife of Thomas E. Donilon, a co-chairman of Obama's transition team for the State Department.

Staff writers Michael A. Fletcher and Walter Pincus and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.