politics » Undiplomatic

1 December 2008 Charles J. Brown
05:11 pm

When Stupidity Strikes

It’s good to know that really smart people are running things over at CNN (h/t: Think Progress)

It’s as if CNN learned everything they think they need to know from “Gone Quiet,” that horrible episode of The West Wing where Hal Holbrook, playing “the Assistant Secretary of State” for Curmudgeonly Old American Affairs, lectures President Bartlett. Memo to CNN (and Aaron Sorkin, for that matter): there are something like forty Assistant Secretaries of State, and none of them have anything to do with domestic constituencies.

This just demonstrates the degree to which the MSM doesn’t understand the most basic mechanics mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy. But then again, they never had to learn any of this under Bush, did they?

As If Anyone Cares

John Bolton — John Bolton! — offers his reaction to the appointment of Susan Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations:

John R. Bolton, who was one of Mr. Bush’s ambassadors at the United Nations, would not discuss Ms. Rice’s selection, but said it was unwise to elevate the position to the cabinet again.

“One, it overstates the role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy,” Mr. Bolton said. “Second, you shouldn’t have two secretaries in the same department.”

Apparently Bolton has forgotten that Jeane J. Kirkpatrick held Cabinet rank in the Reagan administration. Last I checked, nobody has ever suggested that she was a second Secretary of State, or that her role somehow overstated the “role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy.” If they had, Kirkpatrick herself probably would have laughed them out of the room.

This demonstrates just how far removed Bolton is from the mainstream of foreign policy: he can’t bring himself to be gracious about the appointment of the successor to the man who succeeded him. I’m not arguing for intellectual dishonesty here, but all Bolton had to say was “I congratulate Dr. Rice and wish her the best. That said. . .blah blah blah. . .I continue to freaking hate the UN. . .blah blah blah.”

Setting aside the obvious ax he has to grind (or is it a wrecking ball?), Bolton argument that elevating the post to Cabinet rank somehow creates a second Secretary of State reminds me of a friend of a friend who was yammering on about how she didn’t think that beauty was that important in a relationship, to which my friend, who happens to be quite attractive, smiled sweetly and said, “Jealous?”

It’s must be galling to see others get what you never had: respect. It must be doubly galling to know that, unlike Bolton, Ambassador Rice will have the ear of her President. Oh, and that she’ll actually get confirmed. And that even leading Republicans will vote for her.

I’d say I feel Bolton’s pain but I’d be lying.

Now He Tells Us

Tonight ABC will run a new Charlie Gibson interview with Dubya (full transcript here). Apparently, our President-in-name-only has finally found the portion of his brain called “regret,” and is ready to admit what the rest of us figured out oh, say, SEVEN FREAKING YEARS AGO:

GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

GIBSON: You said you were not going to be in the business of nation-building. And so much of what you had to do was nation-building.

BUSH: Well, what I said was, in the course of a debate, I said the military shouldn’t be used to build nations. In this case, it turns out the military, in my judgment, was needed to remove threats to our security, and after that removal, the military, as well as our diplomatic corps, needed to help rebuild after tyrannical situations. . . .

GIBSON: You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

You guess? You guess? Oh. My. God. I don’t even know where to start.

For someone firmly convinced that history will absolve him, Bush certainly seems to have forgotten that history is particularly unforgiving when you admit that you’ve completely screwed up.

Every time I think that Bush can’t sink any lower, he finds a new way to make himself look like an idiot. Too bad Gibson didn’t ask him to explain the Bush Doctrine. Something tells me he would have been more in the dark than Sarah Palin.

The Foreign Policy Team: No Surprises

President-elect Obama named his National Security team. No surprises.

That extends to the reaction: the MSM is focusing on the “team of rivals” meme, and the netroots are debating whether they should be concered that “centrists” will hold the three key positions. I think both are missing the key story here, which I and others outlined last night in reaction to the NYT story on the Obama Administration’s plan to mount the most ambitious restructuring of U.S. national security institutions since the Truman Administration.

I’ll have more later on ten key posts, beyond the Deputy Secretaries and Deputy National Security Advisor, to watch for as the transition moves forward.

One other note: Obama’s press conference reflects the reality that the terrorist attacks in India haven’t really percolated to the top of people’s thinking about U.S. national security. Yes, Obama did mention it, but in the context of terrorism and not its potential impact on Indian-Pakistani relations. Equally importantly, nobody in the press bothered to ask a follow-up question.

Madam Ambassador

Congratulations to Susan Rice, who will be appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations tomorrow as part of President-elect Obama’s rollout of his National Security team.

I’ve never worked directly for Susan, but I’ve had the opportunity to work with her, both when I was at State (and she was Assistant Secretary for African Affairs) and since then. She’ll make an outstanding Ambassador, helping to bring to an end whatever residual hostility remains from the Bolton era.

Two brief observations:

1. According to the NYT, Obama will return USUN to Cabinet rank, a position it has held for most of the past thirty years. That is a strong indication of just how seriously Obama regards the need to work multilaterally. It’s no coincidence that the longest period that USUN was not in the Cabinet was during the Bush years. This also means, contrary to some progressives’ (and Obama foreign policy experts’) fears, there will be a strong progressive voice at the Cabinet table. What is not yet clear is whether Rice also will be a member of the principals committee that usually makes most foreign policy decisions.

2. Rice faces a tremendous challenge: working with UN states to achieve a number of important US goals while at the same time pushing the UN to continue its currently stalled efforts at reform. Much like the USG itself, the UN is a mess. There isn’t much that the US can do from outside to fix the problem, but Rice should not hesitate to be a vigorous advocate for change. Her biggest obstacles will be the UN bureaucracy, which has viewed past reform efforts as challenges to their sinecures, and the developing world, which all too often has viewed the UN as a jobs program.

Weekend Link Dump

Light linking this weekend — I think everyone was too stoned on tryptophan to blog much. . .

Spencer Ackerman, writing last July, profiles up-and-coming women in national security, two of whom are now playing a key role in the Obama transition.

Spencer, again, suggests that Dick Holbrooke would be a perfect choice for U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. Kevin Drum counters that Obama should send him to Pakistan instead. And Patrick Barry asks why not make him a senior special envoy covering both countries as well as Afghanistan.

The BBC reports on the death of Jorn Utzon, the man responsible for designing the iconic Sydney Opera House.Steve Clemons makes the case why why Colin Powell should be Obama’s special Mideast envoy.

Helene Cooper profiles James L. Jones, who Obama most likely will name his National Security Advisor tomorrow.

Nate Silver patiently explains why progressives should stop freaking out about the people Obama picks and start focusing on the progressive policies he is most likely to implement.

Gayle Smith, David Sullivan, and Andrew Sweet outline the strategy President-elect Obama should use to get ahead of global crises.

Jeff Stein explains why the Mumbai attacks mark the end of the 9/11 era and the start of something that is likely to be even more lethal.

If your time is limited, start with Cooper, Silver, and Stein.

The Fake Controversy over Samantha Power

Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell is the definitive study of the shifts in U.S. policy toward genocide over the last half of the 20th Century. Her most recent book, Chasing the Flame, looks at the career of the late Sergio Viera de Mello, who was killed by a 2003 suicide bomb attack on the UN Compound in Baghdad.

Power is one of the smartest, most able thinkers out there when it comes not only to human rights issues but aso foreign policy in general. She was one of Obama’s earliest foreign policy advisors and she is is an excellent choice for his transition team.

God forbid that any of that actually would be reported by the MSM. Noooo — all they want to talk about is that she once said something mean about Hillary:

Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who was forced to resign from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last spring after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “a monster,” is now advising the president-elect on transition matters relating to the State Department — which Clinton is slated to head. . . [S]he is part of a team that is likely to work directly with Clinton, a potentially awkward situation for the two women.

Samantha Power

Okay, let me get this straight: Obama is smart and pragmatic in asking Hillary, who said plenty of not-so-nice things about the next President when they were rivals, to be Secretary of State. But Hillary is supposedly incapable of acting in the same way when one one person working on the transition at State happened to say something unfortunate about her six months ago.

This is ridiculous. If Hillary is who Obama thinks she is, she will pick the best and brightest to be on her team. In the case of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, she would be hard-pressed to find someone better than Power to serve as Assistant Secretary (assuming, of course, that Power wants the job). But even if she does pick someone else, it doesn’t mean she won’t rely on Power to advise her during the transition.

One other thing: they at least could understand how the transition works. Power is a member of the Agency Review Team for the State Department. There are two team leads (Tom Donilon and Wendy Sherman), and twenty-three people on the team (including some working out of USAID). In addition, there is a separate Policy Review Team, of which Power is not a member. So she is one out of something like 100 people working on national security issues, and one of roughly 30 or 40 working on State and USAID issues.

Yes, she is likely to be in the room with Hillary, particularly during briefings. But this isn’t High School Musical — it’s not like they’re going to have lockers next to each other or something. Does WaPo think they’re going to see each other in the cafeteria and reenact the gang fight from West Side Story? They’re adults, for crying out loud. They got over this a long time ago.

But in Washington — or at least the Washington found only in the MSM’s fevered fantasies — the titillation of potential conflict matters more than policy expertise. This is the Washington that reports on Rahm Emanuel’s “dead, dead!” monologue as if no one has ever seen the Godfather movies. This is the Washington that assumes that the old Obama-Hillary rivalry means that they can’t work together. This is the Washington that would rather remind the world of something someone said (and almost immediately apologized for) six months ago rather than focus on her record as an analyst and thinker.

This isn’t news, it’s gossip and speculation. The entire story is predicated on the possibility that Hillary might find it awkward to have Power on her team. There’s not a single shred of evidence that there’s any tension, or even if they’ve met (now or earlier). As such, it belongs in WaPo’s “Reliable Source” gossip column, not in the front section.

Photo: Angela Radulescu via Flickr, using a CC license.

Obama: The Science President?

In a September 11, 2008 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, Jacob Hacker noted the difference between the expert and the partisan:

Politics is about power more than truth, about winning more than being right. But expertise is about truth more than power, and being right is the whole point. The authority of the expert cannot survive long when expert judgment is seen to hinge on grudges or biases.

The same can be said about the difference between campaigning and governing, and the reality check of outcomes in the physical world makes science and technology an easier area than most others to assess what is “right” or “true” when evaluating the actions of governments and politicians.

The outgoing administration had little regard for facts on the ground in any area of governance, foreign or domestic, and frequently emphasized the importance of firmness with which a belief or position was held instead of the solidity of data or facts supporting it. In this sense the election of either Obama or McCain would have been a welcome change.

During the recent election, neither candidate campaigned to be the “science president.” That’s not surprising since science has never been a major issue in any presidential election. Both McCain and Obama identified some laudable science and technology goals: encouraging biodefense research (McCain in particular more realistically emphasizing detection over Obama’s come-lately drug development strategy); improved math and science education with a reduced focused on the very distracting creationism debate; continuing the President’s Emergency Aids Fund (PEPFAR, for which President Bush should be credited); and encouraging innovation and immigration of foreign PhDs.

Although I would agree with most science policy groups and publications that, on balance, Obama was and is more “science-friendly” than McCain, the election of Obama is not without some downsides: continuation of scientifically illogical subsidies for corn ethanol; the creation of a $10 billion/year clean-tech venture capital fund unclear about what niche it would be filling; and a commitment to doubling the NIH budget over the next 10 years when the world needs to put much more economic capital towards development and commercialization than towards basic research.

For at least the next four years, President-elect Obama (and Congress) will have to interact with the private sector to create the science and technology positions with which the US will interact with the world. As a final nod to the election and the campaigns of both men, I next will focus on the confluence of energy, environmental/climate, and economic issues that both campaigns agreed require immediate action.

Headline of the Day

From Think Progress:

What’s on tap today: Obama to address economy, Bush to pardon Turkey

That about captures it.

Not Progressive Enough? (Second Try)

Sorry for the earlier, interrupted posting. Let’s try again.

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates notes the debate among progressives over whether Obama’s appointments to date are not progressive enough:

I’ve been in conversation with a couple lefty friends over Obama’s early steps as President-elect. I get why people were pissed that Obama would save Joe Lieberman. He truly didn’t deserve it. Man, when Joe Leiberman says “bipartisan” I feel like someone is cursing at me. I also think Chris Hayes has a good point:

“Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one.”

. . .I think [Bowers's] point still stands, and it also illustrates, again, why the whole “Team of Rivals” bit is such hokum. What you really have is a “Team of Moderates.” Obama’s a moderate himself, so I’m not sure how much he is going to be disagreeing with these folks. I think calling them “the center right of the Democratic Party” is a bit much. I’d go with centrists, moderates or even “progressive moderates,” if that makes any sense.

I think that’s about right. This question — “Where, within the Democratic party, do these people fall on the ideological spectrum?” — has always struck me as rather silly. After eight long awful years out of power, eight years where our ideological rivals did tremendous damage to this nation, we’re now arguing whether Tom Daschle is progressive enough to implement a saner health care agenda. And we’re not even at the inauguration yet.

This is why Republicans spend so much time mocking Democratic unity. I’m not in favor of monolithic adherence to Democratic party policy, but I do think that at the very least, we could give the first Democrat in a generation to be elected with a majority of the vote the benefit of the doubt when it comes to appointments.

The argument among ourselves only reinforces the tendency of the MSM to argue that Obama’s appointments, which may be centrist in terms of Democratic party politics, are thus “center-right” and that we remain a center-right nation. That’s patent nonsense, of course, but we only contribute to it with our own debate (not to say that the debate shouldn’t happen, only that sometimes such debates can have unintended consequences).

In terms of where a President Obama will land on the ideological spectrum, my answer is that no matter how “centrist” his appointments may be, only two things matter: 1) his marching orders and 2) that all his appointees share a vision of how America — and the world — works that is way, way, WAY to the left of the Bush team. The man is a clear-eyed realist, and given the surrealism of the past eight years, that may be the most reassuring fact of all.

In the end, those are the things that will matter, not whether Tom Daschle is more centrist than Howard Dean.

Not Progressive Enough?

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates notes the debate among progr

Department of Unintentional Parodies

I wish this was a parody, but it’s not. . .

I’ll give the “Our Country Deserves Better PAC” credit for one thing — there are more people of color in their ad than there were at the entire Republican National Convention.

h/t: Ambinder

Weekend Link Dump

Something new here at Undip: a weekly compilation of other blogs and stories worth reading (but on which I don’t have time to offer my own observations):

Bruce Ackerman on the challenge facing new White House Counsel Greg Craig: reducing his office’s power and authority;

Brian Bender on John Kerry’s new role: Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee;

Max Blumenthal on Malaak Shabazz’s condemnation of al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri’s comparing Barack Obama to a “house negro” (Shabazz is Malcolm X’s daughter);

Steve Clemons on the risks and benefits of a Clinton appointment;

Daphne Evitatar on the current conflict between State and DOD over Guantanamo detainee policy;

Anatol Lieven’s memo to Obama on what he should and should not do when it comes to foreign policy;

Robert Reich on the idiotic argument that we should save Citigroup and let GM fail;

Paul Richter on Richard Holbrooke’s delusion belief that he should be Obama’s Secretary of State;

David Schorr on the need for a coordinated State-Defense-USAID budget strategy — one that includes significant funding and personnel increases for both State and USAID;

Peter Scoblic on Marine General James L. Jones, who has emerged as the frontrunner for National Security Advisor.

Transition Watch: Anger in the Ranks

Even if you read this morning’s NYT story about the rapprochement between Obama and Hillary Clinton, you might have missed one little sentence toward the beginning of the story:

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.

Last week, I raised the question of whether this would happen and what the impact would be on both the Obama-Clinton relationship and the morale of those in the foreign policy community who chose to support Obama rather than Clinton:

During the primaries, the Clinton campaign asked foreign policy experts to remain “exclusive” to Hillary (meaning they could not also offer advice to other candidates). That’s not an unreasonable position, even if the other leading candidates (including Obama) chose not to follow suit. I know many people in the foreign policy community who volunteered for the Clinton campaign because they thought she was the best candidate. But I also know a few who, because of ambition, felt that they had to work for her even though they preferred another candidate. When Obama ultimately won, all of them were welcomed by his campaign and integrated into Obama’s existing campaign apparatus.

If Hillary were to become Secretary of State, I presume that she, like most Secretaries, would be given significant leeway in picking most (if not all) of her senior advisors (meaning in the case of State the two Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and those Assistant Secretary postions not assigned to career foreign service officers). It would be logical (and not unreasonable) to conclude that she probably would favor those who served her during the primaries.

But doing so could create two problems. First, the team of rivals could turn into rival fiefdoms, with Obama supporters dominating the NSC (and Defense) and Clinton supporters dominating State. Given the fact that the next Administration urgently needs to reintegrate State into existing foreign policy structures (and give it the resources both to achieve its mission and play a more robust role in intra-agency negotiations), Obama needs to end existing inter-agency rivalries, not create new ones.

Second, there was no love lost among the two camps’ advisors during the primaries. The Clintons attacked those they viewed as disloyal (such as Bill Richardson and Gregory Craig), which angered many in the Obama campaign. In addition, I heard from more than one friend that they were warned that they could forget about a role in a Clinton administration should they not support Hillary during the primaries. Given those realities, Obama risks angering those who did support him, and some of his supporters may regard Hillary’s likely selection of her loyalists to senior posts as a betrayal.

It’s too early to say whether the issue of competing fiefdoms will pose a problem, but it’s already pretty clear that Obama foreign policy types, particularly those who chose to support him back when he was far from a sure thing, are not at all happy with this development.

Even though it’s a Sunday, I’ve already heard from several bitter and angry friends. They are wondering why they stuck their neck out twenty months ago only to see Hillary’s supporters get the plum foreign policy jobs. At the time, they supported Obama not to get a job (after all, Hillary looked like a near-lock then) but because they sincerely believed that Obama represented a new and fresh approach. Most knew that they were taking a big chance — after all, they had been warned of the consequences were they not to support Hillary. (And again, I believe that most of those who supported Hillary did so because they thought she was the best person for the job.)

My friends would be less than human if they did not want some reward for the chance they took. Now, they feel, their payoff is to see the key jobs at State go to those who played it safe.

Although it’s true that Hillary might appoint some Obama loyalists to her team, most of my friends don’t think that’s going to happen.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has been hearing such things: over the weekend, several stories reported astonishment, anger, unhappiness, and bad morale within the Obama foreign policy ranks. The Telegraph (UK):

[A] little after lunch on Wednesday two Obama aides went to a local coffee shop to talk. Both were veterans of the campaign. . . . [T]hey agreed on one thing: “He’s making a mistake.” As one of the participants told a friend later that night: “She’ll do a good job but she’ll do it for herself, not for Barack. I can’t bear the drama again.”

Then there’s this anonymous Obama team member, quoted by Michael Crowley over at TNR:

With General Jim Jones looking a strong bet for National Security Advisor, Hillary Clinton slated for State, and Bob Gates staying on at DOD, it appears increasingly likely that the three senior foreign policy positions in the Obama Administration will be filled by people who were not active Obama supporters during the campaign.

Moreover, these principals are likely to bring their own hanger-ons – Hillary alone is likely to absorb into State the foreign policy advisors from her primary campaign, not necessarily their Obama counterparts. So how do you think that makes the “Gang of 300” who staffed Candidate Obama on foreign policy issues, wrote white papers, served as surrogates for him, etc. during the long campaign feel?

I still believe that Hillary would be smart to pick an Obama loyalist to the Deputy Secretary position. As I’ve noted, if Obama can reach out to his rival, why can’t she do the same?

I have to wonder what both Susan Rice and Samantha Power are thinking. After all, they were two of the earliest to support Obama. Now Rice is likely to get no better than Deputy National Security Advisor and Power may not get anything at all — does anyone seriously think that Hillary would want someone who called her a “monster” to serve as her Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor?

Okay This Whole Breathless Transition Reporting Thing Is Getting A Bit Out of Hand

From the change.gov blog:

President-elect Barack Obama visited Manny’s Cafeteria and Deli in Chicago today to pick up two cherry pies and three corned beef sandwiches — including one for himself and one for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

President-elect Obama ordered his sandwich on rye bread with mustard.

What I want to know is what he did with the. . .wait for it. . .change?

Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Please tip your waitress.

Also, who was the third sandwich for? And the pies? What about all these promises of transparency?

What can I say? It’s been a long week and I’m a bit punchy.

The Odd Choice of Bill Richardson for Commerce

If anyone had any doubts that Hillary was going to take the Secretary of State job, the announcement that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, her chief competitor for the job, is being named Commerce Secretary should put them to rest.

I like Richardson. I’ve met him on a few occasions, and wrote a couple of speeches and did some press for him when he was U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. He would have made a fine Secretary of State, and his experience as an executive would have helped him reform Foggy Bottom. But I find his selection to head Commerce quite odd.

I don’t know whether Richardson will do well at Commerce, or it he’s the right pick. But it seems to me that he would have been a far better choice for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. As Governor of New Mexico, Richardson pursued a number of environmental initiatives, including a major effort to make the state government carbon neutral.

I wish him the best at Commerce.

Weekend Buzz: New Order

Before we get completely lost in the transition, let’s not forget that we just elected Barack Obama President of the United States. Somehow this seems appropriate: New Order performing True Faith, live at the 1998 Reading Festival:

I had no freaking idea New Order was this good live.

Hillary: In Case You Were Wondering. . .

I’m not going to comment anymore on Hillary until it’s official. This is, after all, the fourth or fifth consecutive day that we’ve heard it’s a done deal.

Transition: Constant Leaks or Conscious Tactic?

For all the talk today (both in the MSM and on the blogosphere) about leaks springing in the Obama campaign, I find it interesting that no one has noticed that each supposed leak (Emanuel, Craig, Daschle, Holder, Napolitano, and Geither) has happened on a different day. That’s pretty remarkable timing — if the ship is leaking, why is it that there is only one leak in any news cycle?

Either there’s a single source who is sharing information as it crosses his/her desk, or there’s something else going on here: a carefully timed series of sotto voce announcements designed to ensure that there are no problems with each candidate.

For example, reports that Eric Holder is the leading candidate for Attorney General helped surface Republican concerns about Holder’s role in Bill Clinton’s pardon of rogue financier Marc Rich. Obama’s vetters knew about the issue, but they didn’t know whether it would be a major problem. By leaking Holder’s name, they gave Republicans the opportunity to raise the issue fairly early in the process, thus helping the Obama team assess whether the pardon could sink the nomination.

This isn’t the first time the Obama team has done this. Think back to the veepstakes, when numerous media outlets reported that Indiana Senator Evan Bayh was going to get the nomination. Subsequent negative reaction to Bayh — including an online campaign opposing the pick — may have helped end his chances for the job.

A slow leak tactic also would explain why a transition team that has be so careful about process has repeatedly “surprised” Senate Republicans. For example, Arlen Specter, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee groused to the press that he had not yet been consulted, and was one of the first to raise the issue of Holder’s role in the Marc Rich saga (although he also said that he did not see it as an impediment to confirmation).

There is, of course, one outlier here: Hillary. Each day brings fresh reports — Hillary is unsure whether she wants the job, Hillary is changing her mind again, Senate Democrats are carving out a new senior position for her so as to keep her in the Senate, and this afternoon, Hillary is taking the job.

Meanwhile, every time the press reports that it’s a done deal, the timing of the announcement keeps getting pushed further down the road. Last week, it was this week. Earlier this week, it was before Thanksgiving. Now it’s sometime after Thanksgiving.

If you read these stories carefully, it quickly becomes apparent that Hillary is the exception that proves the rule. Most if not all of the leaks are coming from the Hillary camp; the Obama team has offered little confirmation other than to say that she is a candidate and that discussions remain “on track.”

I think the Obama team knows exactly what it’s doing. Stories to the contrary — including the one in today’s WaPo — are little more than idle speculation.

Meh.

Spencer Ackerman and Matt Yglesias are two of my favorite bloggers. Both offer consistently thoughtful commentary on foreign policy.

But neither seems too interested in moving beyond the small circle of bloggers in which they operate. Today, for example, they both discussed the issue of sub-cabinet appointments at State should Hillary get the job — and the potential blowback from Obama loyalists. Good points all — especially since I made most of them four days ago.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting anything other than they should expand their horizons — they just might learn a few new things in the process.

Daschle, Napolitano, and Foreign Policy

Two brief foreign policy-related observations about word that Obama has asked former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services and current Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security.

1. Daschle and Hillary Clinton. The appointment of a prominent figure like Tom Daschle to what heretofore was a relatively minor (or at best mid-level) Cabinet post points to Obama’s commitment to healthcare as a major issue.

One of the main arguments in favor of Clinton taking the SecState job is that she is years away from a committee chairmanship in the Senate. In addition, she’s unlikely to play a leading role on her signature issue, healthcare. Both Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus have made it clear that they intend to lead the effort to get some form of universal coverage through the Senate, and Kennedy rebuffed her efforts to establish (and lead) a special subcommittee on healthcare reform.

Late in the primary season, when it appeared increasingly likely that Hillary was going to lose, some pundits speculated that Obama would offer her the HHS job, both to reconcile the two factions and to demonstrate the prominence of healthcare issues in his Administration. As it turns out, he has tried to do both these things, but not together: he offered Hillary State and HHs to Daschle and equally prominent figure.

What nobody else seems to have noticed is that this puts Hillary in a bind: she either becomes Secretary of State or returns to the Senate. There no longer is any other option for her.

2. Napolitano. I’ve already written about the challenges posed by the Bush Administration’s nearly wholesale exclusion of the State Department from national security decision-making, but Homeland Security had it even worse: neither Ridge or Chertoff participated in principals’ meetings.

That needs to change under Obama; if he chooses Napolitano, as reported, DHS will get a strong advocate and effective administrator. What it will not have, however, is someone with national security experience. To addess that, Obama should choose someone who knows those issues — for example, Rand Beers or Dick Clarke — to serve as Deputy Secretary.

Evening Transition Thread

At this pace, by the time Obama takes office, the Stock Market just might hit 2000.

Talk amongst yourselves, but whatever you do, don’t check your retirement portfolios.

Why Hillary Still Might Say No

David Frum makes a good point today on why Hillary Clinton might sitll have doubts about becoming Barack Obama’s Secretary of State:

[If Hillary] says yes—poof, there vanishes her independent power base. She serves at the pleasure of the president. More consequential still, in order to pass the vetting process, she must open to Obama’s team all the tangled financial records of the Clinton family. If there is any part of her that imagines, say, a primary challenge to Obama in 2012, or even a campaign to replace Biden on the ticket in the VP slot, that hope diminishes with the opening of the files. She will have done Obama’s oppo research for him. From then on, she is utterly exposed and vulnerable. She gets only what Obama chooses to give.

Karen Tumulty and Massimo Calabresi report that some of her friends and advisors are urging her not to take the job:

Her allies point out that the move would not be without its negatives. Friends like New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter are counseling her not to take the job. They say she would be giving up important work in the Senate, particularly on the health-care-reform cause that is her passion. Others warn that her job description at Foggy Bottom would mean she’d lose her own voice.

Ultimately this may come down to Clinton’s sense of her place in history. Her run helped make both Obama’s candidacy — and even Sarah Palin’s — possible. But no matter how historic it may have been, I have to believe that Hillary wants more than to to be the first woman to mount a competitive campaign: she wants to be the first to win.

If that’s the case, then how does taking this job in an Obama administration move her closer to that goal? Albright and Rice already shattered that particular glass ceiling. There is nothing historic about being the third woman to serve as Secretary of State.

Were she to achieve some momentous breakthrough — say a permanent Middle East peace — the job could help advance her cause. But how much, really? Over the past several decades, foreign policy achievements (e.g. G.H.W. Bush, whose tenure included both the end of communism and the successful prosecution of the Gulf War) haven’t translated into electoral success. In contrast, foreign policy disasters (e.g. Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, G.W. Bush and Iraq) have helped ended Presidencies.

I may be wrong. Hillary may see this as a rare opportunity to help Obama move the country (and the world) away from the disasters of the past eight years. It may be that, like many before her, she is willing to set aside her ambition to serve loyally the man who defeated her.

Hillary isn’t just any other candidate. If she were, the conventional wisdom would say that she should take the job, just as Biden agreed to be Vice President despite his supposed reservations and Tom Daschle has now agreed to be HHS Secretary after being passed over for the position of chief of staff.

Hillary is anything but conventional. Her place in history may be secure, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t (or shouldn’t) want more. And Barack Obama, more than anyone else out there, will understand why if she decides to say no.

Nighly Transition Open Thread

Holder, Daschle. . . . The Dance Card is filling up quickly.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Cuba Si? Not on Dubya’s Watch

With only a couple of months left before the Bush Administration gets indicted leaves office, I was wondering whether Dubya would launch any last-minute foreign policy initiatives. Doing so would not be unprecedented — eight years ago, Clinton spent a lot of his time trying to secure Middle East peace.

According to Jim Hoagland in this morning’s WaPo, Bush isn’t interested in similar efforts, shooting down a proposal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to reach out to Cuba and Iran.

Unlike Hoagland, I think that is a mistake, particularly in the case of Cuba.

Someone (sorry — I can’t find the reference) once said that the best time to open the door to Cuba would be during the second term of a Republican president. The current transition to a new President makes even more sense. Given the fact that every President since Kennedy has been captive to the electoral influence of Florida’s Cuban exile community, the best way to break the cycle is to take action when there’s little or no impact on politics. And it’s not like the move would hurt Republican prospects — Cuban-American Members of Congress (and the 2012 Republican nominee) could condemn Bush’s decision.

I have no illusions about the Castros — in the early 1990s, I spent a year documenting the Castro regime’s use of psychiatric techniques (such as electro-convulsive therapy) to torture dissidents. But I share President-elect Obama’s view that the best way to secure change in rogue regimes is through engagement. The decades-old U.S. policy of isolating Cuba has failed to bring down the Castro regime and has done little to encourage domestic Cuban opposition. In fact, the current embargo only gives the Castros greater legitimacy in the eyes of average Cubans.

It’s been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell. Most Americans — and even most policymakers — no longer think that isolating Cuba makes any sense. It’s no longer a “Soviet aircraft carrier off the shores of Florida,” and it isn’t even the greatest challenge to American influence in Latin America (that dubious honor now belongs to Hugo Chavez and Venezuela).

Rice’s mistake may have been attempting to move directly to the idea of formally recognizing the Castro regime. According to Hoagland, Rice sent a team of senior diplomats to explore the that possibility a year ago. I agree with Hoagland that doing so would have represented moving too quickly and would have severely limited President-elect Obama’s options.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t steps that Bush could take to improve U.S.-Cuban relations. The first, and least politically costly, would be to end the current rule preventing Cuban-Americans from sending remittances to their Cuban relatives. Even the Cuban American National Foundation, the most vocal (and politically powerful) advocate of sustaining the embargo, has said it would support the change.

The second would be to seek an agreement with the Castros to permit more extensive cultural exchanges (including journalists). One of the most effective components of American public diplomacy during the Cold War was a series of exchanges that brought Soviet artists to the United States and sent American artists to tour the Soviet Union. The program helped give Soviet citizens an entirely different view of life in the United States than what they were seeing in Soviet propaganda. (The Soviets also recognized the value of such exchanges, and used them for the same purpose.)

The third would be to end the embargo and permit U.S.-Cuban trade. Allowing the flow of American goods into the country would do much to increase Cuban citizens’ opinion of the United States and end one of the Castro brothers’ most effective arguments against improved relations.

These measures would go a long way toward ending the freeze in Cuban-American relations without undermining the underlying policy — that the Cuban people deserve the opportunity to choose their own government. It also would do harm to Chavez and others who like to argue that the United States is only interested in advancing its neocolonialist policies.

So why would Bush oppose such efforts, even when they involve no apparent cost? The answer has nothing to do with Hoagland’s view that any reassessment of Cuban policy should be left to the next Administration and everything to do with politics: Jeb Bush may still think he can run for President in four years. Given Dubya’s current unpopularity, that certainly looks like the longest of long shots. But President Bush is unlikely to do anything now that would undermine his brother’s popularity in a key Republican constituency.

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