If, as expected, Barack Obama is elected in ten days, attention will turn almost immediately to the transition.  Several friends close to the Obama campaign have shared some of the speculation they’ve heard on who will be named to Obama’s foreign policy team.  Several other bloggers, including Steve Clemons and Marc Ambinder, have heard similar rumblings.

There are two problems with such rumors.  First, as one of the commenters over at Steve’s site noted, they usually are little more than trial balloons designed to find out what folks think of a particular candidate.  Perhaps the best recent example of this were the stories that Evan Bayh was a sure thing for Obama’s VP.

Second, as one of my friends said to me recently, “people are anxious about Obama winning, but they’re just as (if not more) anxious about whether they’re going to be offered a job.”  I’ve heard that too — in fact, it’s not just concern about being offered a job, but also worrying about whether they’ll be offered the right kind of job.  If past is prologue, it is often the candidate who starts the rumor in order to advance his or her own cause.  Most of the time, it doesn’t work.

Given the degree to which the Obama team has managed to remain leak-free so far, I find it hard to believe that its discipline would start breaking down now, especially given the fact that, as Ambinder reported, most senior campaign staff have excluded themselves from transition deliberations in order to remain focused on winning the election.  In addition, Obama remains focused on the campaign, meaning he is unlikely to havesigned off on any of these appointments.

One rumor I’ve heard (as has Steve) is that Obama will announce a number of key appointments as early as Friday, November 7th in order to speed up public vetting and, to the degree possible, Senate confirmation.  If that’s the case, I’m guessing that any announcement will be limited to the national security team (State, Defense, National Security Advisor), the Attorney-General, and the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Treasury.

I’ll leave speculation on the last three to others more qualified than me, but I would like to offer my thoughts on who is (and who should be) on the short list for the first three (as well as their Deputies and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations).  To be clear, this is more speculation than reporting.

Secretary of Defense:  The most likely scenario has Obama keeping current SecDef Robert Gates for at least one year, and appointing a key Obama team member as Deputy Secretary — probably either Richard Danzig , who was Secretary of the Navy under Clinton, or Scott Gration, who is a retired three-star general.  The deputy will then step in after learning the ropes.  The other strong contender is Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, but I would be surprised if Gates doesn’t stay for at least six months.  The long-shot outsider is Wesley Clark, who has not played a prominent role in the Obama campaign.

National Security Advisor:  The safe money is on Susan Rice, who has been one of Obama’s top foreign policy aides during the campaign, and has managed the 300-odd (now probably closer to 600) members of the two dozen foreign policy advisory teams.  Susan would be a fine choice, but I’m not sure that she’s a lock.  Some are suggesting Gregory Craig, who headed policy planning in State under Clinton and served as one of Clinton’s attorneys during the impeachment trial (only to break with the Clintons fairly early in the campaign).  Although that certainly is plausible, I think Craig may be a better fit as Deputy Secretary at State.  I’ve heard through the grapevine that James Steinberg, who currently is managing the foreign policy transition team and who served as Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton Administration, also is a strong contender.

Should either Craig or Steinberg get the top post, then Rice probably would be named Deputy National Security Advisor (the other two are unlikely to serve in that role).  Other possible candidates include Dennis McDonough, who formerly served as Tom Daschle’s chief foreign policy advisor; Mark Lippert, who has been Obama’s chief foreign policy aide in the Senate; and Sarah Sewell, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping Operations in the Clinton Administration.  Samantha Power, who also served on Obama’s staff is a long-shot, but I think she’s more likely to be named Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (she would be an outstanding choice).  All four have been part of Obama’s inner circle of foreign policy advisors (although Power had to resign after calling Hillary a “monster”), but none are senior enough to get the top job.

State:  Joe Biden is likely to play a central role in foreign policy decision-making, and may serve as a de facto Secretary of State.  That means that certain individuals who otherwise would be interested in the job, may pass on it.  Among Obama’s current advisors, Anthony Lake, who served as National Security Advisor in the Clinton Administration, would be a strong contender, but I hear that he has made it pretty clear that he’s not interested.  Other names I’ve heard include Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, John Kerry, and Bill Richardson.  Although Obama will want to demonstrate bipartisanship, he would get significant pushback from Democrats were he to appoint Republicans to both State and DOD.  That would exclude Hagel and Lugar, unless Gates doesn’t stay.

That leaves Richardson and Kerry.  Given the fairly dynamic figures that have held the post more recently, Obama will want someone who can be an effective leader with the capacity to push back against Biden (when necessary).  He also should pick someone who can fix what’s wrong with the current bureaucracy, including the challenges facing existing foreign assistance and public diplomacy operations.  That pretty much excludes both Kerry and Richardson, who are neither assertive nor reformers.

Steve Clemons believes that, if those are the choices, Obama should go with Kerry — largely because of Clemons’s concerns (which I share) about Richardson’s temperament, mistreatment of staff, and tendency toward personal self-aggrandizement.  Richardson also might face the toughest confirmation fight, given his erratic tenure as Secretary of Energy and a talent for exaggeration that exceeds even Joe Biden’s.

But I’m not so high on Kerry either.  Despite his brilliant speech at the convention, Kerry is, in many ways, a slightly younger version of Warren Christopher, Clinton’s first Secretary of State.  Christopher was a weak Secretary, lacking the energy to reform the Department (not that his three successors did much better) or the charisma to influence policy.  Kerry also would reinforce the now-outdated perception of the Department as a striped pants-wearing East Coast elite out of touch with mainstream America.

There are two other factors concerning Kerry that Steve may not have considered — neither of which is likely to prevent him from taking the job, but still should be remembered as we discuss the possibility of it.  First (and sadly to say), Ted Kennedy probably doesn’t have long to live; Kerry may hesitate to leave his state with two fairly junior Senators (then again he may not).  Second, assuming that Chris Dodd wants to continue playing a central role in managing the Congressional response to the financial crisis, Kerry is next in line to succeed Biden as Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.  Again, that may not prevent him from taking the job, but I could see Obama encouraging him to play that role for at least a couple of years.

So where does that leave us?  I see four likely scenarios:

• Obama goes with Reed, Danzig, or Gration at DOD, enabling him to pick Lugar or Hagel at State;
• Obama picks Kerry or Richardson;
• Obama picks a younger, more dynamic figure from his inner circle (Danzig, Rice, or Craig are the most likely);
• Obama goes long and makes an unexpected pick.

If it’s the fourth scenario, let me throw out some names:  former Vice President Al Gore; former Senator Gary Hart (who has done some of the more creative thinking out there); and former Congressman (and 9-11 Commission co-chair) Lee Hamilton.  Gore would have the gravitas, the ability to push back when Biden gets a bit assertive, and experience in trying to reform government institutions.  Hart also has those qualities, although his track record as a reformer is more the result of his post-Senatorial career promoting change from outside the political process.  Hamilton flunks the dynamic leader test, but his leadership on the 9-11 Commission demonstrates that he understands the structural challenges.

Let me suggest three other possibilities, all of which would pass the dynamic leader and reformer tests: Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, and Eric Holder.  Neither Feingold or Boxer has much executive experience, but Hagel, Lugar, and Kerry don’t either.  Of the two, I think Feingold is more likely, if only because James Doyle, a Democrat, would appoint his replacement, while Schwartzenegger would pick Boxer’s.

Holder, who served as Deputy Attorney-General in the Clinton Administration, is usually viewed as a leading candidate for the top job at Justice.  But when Obama announced his national security advisory group back in June, Holder was on the list.  He certainly passes the dynamism test, and he also should be able to shake up the foreign policy apparatus.

In terms of who definitely won’t get the job, my money is on Richard Holbrooke, who would have been the frontrunner had Gore won in 2000.  Holbrooke is smart, capable, and has the confidence to be an effective leader, push back against against Biden, and reform the foreign policy apparatus.  Unfortunately, he also has a track record of angering the wrong people at the wrong time, and treats his staff as abysmally as Richardson does.  According to what I’ve heard, neither Rice nor Lake like him much.  CQ’s inclusion of him as one of the three most likely candidates (along with Rice and Richardson) is laughable, especially given the fact that he was consciously excluded from the senior foreign policy advisory team created after Obama brought the Clintonistas on board.

Deputy Secretary of State is a much more significant position than it used to be — Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick, and John Pointdexter all were important players during the Bush years, and both Zoellick and Pointdexter left cabinet-level positions to take the job.  If Obama goes with one of the more senior figures as Secretary, then he’ll want someone younger and more dynamic to lead the charge on foreign affairs reform.  As I noted earlier, Gregory Craig would be a solid choice, although his role as Elian Gonzalez’s father’s attorney may hurt his chances for confirmation (something he wouldn’t face were he to be named National Security Advisor).  Susan Rice also would be a good pick, although my gut says she’ll want to stay closer to the White House.  If he doesn’t get one of the top two jobs at Defense, Richard Danzig also is a possibility.  Two other possibilities are Morton Halperin, who served as head of policy planning under Albright, among other positions over the years; and Dennis Ross, Clinton’s Middle East guru.

Some Presidents have made the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations a Cabinet-level position.  Bush did not (thank God in the case of John Bolton); Obama should do so, even if he does not name someone in the near future.

In terms of who would be best for the job, Obama should pick someone who not only can play the role effectively, but will be seen as credible advocate to the rest of the world.  My choice would be Harold Hongju Koh, current Dean of Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Clinton years (full disclosure:  Harold is my former boss and a close friend) — although he’s far more likely to be on any short list for the Supreme Court.  Another possibility is former Senator Timothy Wirth, who now heads the U.N Foundation.  A third is former Deputy Secretary of Treasury Stuart Eisenstadt, though he is more likely a candidate for Secretary of Treasury or U.S. Trade Representative.

So who do I want and who do I think will get it?  First, here’s who I would like to see named:

• Secretary of Defense:  Jack Reed or Richard Danzig (although I could live with Gates staying on);
• Deputy, DOD:  Danzig or Gration
• National Security Advisor:  Susan Rice or Jim Steinberg
• Deputy, NSC:  Susan Rice if she doesn’t get the top job, Mark Lippert if she does
• Secretary of State:  Chuck Hagel (unless Gates stays on, in which case I’d like to see Russ Feingold)
• Deputy, DOS:  Greg Craig or Mort Halperin
• USUN:  Harold Koh

Now here’s who I think will get it:

• Secretary of Defense: Robert Gates
• Deputy, DOD:  Richard Danzig
• National Security Advisor:  Jim Steinberg
• Deputy, NSC:  Susan Rice
• Secretary of State:  Bill Richardson
• Deputy, DOS:  Greg Craig
• USUN:  Tim Wirth

Share your ideas in the comments below.

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I’ve always respected blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald.  I haven’t always agreed with him, but I thought he was a valuable voice in the blogging community — and an important champion of civil liberties in this country.

I don’t respect him anymore.  Yesterday, he mounted a major hatchet job against Morton Halperin, suggesting that his supposed shift on FISA was the product of some sort of misplaced ambition.  I think it’s a scurrilous attack, and completely unjustified.

I should state three things up front.

First, I know Mort. I had the opportunity to work with him at the State Department during the Clinton Administration, when I was Chief of Staff to Assistant Secretary Harold Hongju Koh in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and he was Director of Policy Planning.  That said, I neither contacted nor consulted him before writing this post.

Second, I respectfully disagree with Halperin on the FISA bill.  I do not think that he should have supported it, nor do I think that Congress should have passed it. So the purpose of my post here is not to defend Halperin’s decision to support the bill, but rather to condemn Greenwald’s ad hominem attack.

Third, as I have acknowledged repeatedly in this blog, I am one of 300-odd “informal foreign policy advisors” to the Obama campaign.  I don’t know whether Halperin is as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me.  There are more than three hundred of us, after all, and if he is like me, he occasionally fires off memos to key people in the campaign.  That’s what informal policy advisors do.

In his post (and in the transcript of his Salon Radio interview with Halperin), Greenwald lays out his brief like a prosecutor who has only circumstantial evidence on which to build a case.  At the core of Greenwald’s argument are two events:  a June 9, 2008 letter opposing a version of the FISA bill sponsored by Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), which Halperin allegedly signed on behalf of the Open Society Policy Center (OSPC); and Halperin’s July 8 op-ed in The New York Times, in which he came out in favor of a different version of the FISA bill as “our best chance to protect both our national security and our civil liberties.”

But instead of paraphrasing, let me reproduce Greenwald’s core argument:

What made his Op-Ed particularly confounding was that a mere one month earlier — on June 9, 2008 — Halperin had signed a letter on behalf of OSPI, [sic] also signed by numerous other civil liberties and advocacy groups, in which he expressed steadfast opposition to the FISA “compromise” (which was then known as the “Bond compromise,” after GOP Sen. Kit Bond). A copy of that June 9 letter opposing the FISA bill, which Halperin joined on behalf of his group, is here (.pdf).

[snip]

Manifestly, there was only one meaningful change that occurred between Halperin’s June 9 opposition and his July 8 support: namely, it was in that interim — on June 20 — that Barack Obama announced that he would support the FISA bill, and many have speculated (and it is just speculation) that Halperin, who has served in numerous administrations over the past four decades (beginning with the Nixon administration) and is eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it. Lending even stronger support to that hypothesis is a document I obtained that Halperin wrote and which Obama’s office circulated to numerous Democratic Senators, dated June 22 (only two days after Obama announced his support for the bill), in which Halperin heaped praise on the FISA bill and urged Democratic Senators to support it (Halperin’s June 22 memo to Senators is here).

[snip]

Halperin clearly decided to repudiate his own opposition to this bill in order to offer himself up to Obama as the public shill supporting the bill, so that Obama defenders could gain cover for themselves by saying things like “even life-long civil libertarian Mort Halperin says this is a good bill.”  [Emphasis from original.]

So Greenwald would have us believe that Halperin’s naked political ambition has led him to violate his principles in order to curry favor with the Obama campaign.

Let me start by picking a couple of nits, not for their own sake, but to demonstrate just how sloppy Greenwald’s argument is.  First, Halperin was the executive director of the Open Society Policy Center, not President of the Open Society Policy Institute.  Second, Halperin’s service began not with the Nixon Administration, but rather the Johnson Administration, in which he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Now let’s move on to Greenwald’s most important piece of evidence:  the June 22 joint letter that Halperin allegedly “signed. . .on behalf of OSPI” was in fact an institutional sign-on letter.  If you go to the PDF, you’ll see that organizations signed, not individuals on behalf of organizations.  This is an important distinction because when it is an institutional signature, it signifies that the organization, not its head, supports a position.

I wouldn’t split this hair, except that Greenwald uses it as supposedly devastating proof that Halperin opposed FISA before he supported it.  But the fact that OSPC supported a position is not in any way, shape, or form evidence that Halperin supported the position. I have yet to work for an organization with which I agreed all of the time.  Sometimes you set aside your personal opinions and act according to what the institution decides is its best course of action.

That means that Greenwald has no real evidence to prove his core allegation:  that Halperin changed his opinion between June 9 and July 8.

Perhaps the best example of the weakness of Greenwald’s case is the transcript of his interview with Halperin.  Greenwald approaches it not as a conversation or debate, but as a prosecutor dealing with a hostile witness.  He repeatedly tries to get Halperin to confess to the sin of ambition.  Not surprisingly, Halperin refuses to engage, and the interview falls apart.  Greenwald then cites Halperin’s refusal to debate the minutiae as further evidence of his alleged careerism.  It’s a circular argument, and not even a good one at that.

But Greenwald isn’t content with abusing the facts; he also thinks it’s necessary to make ad hominem attacks.  He states that Halperin has “served in numerous administrations. . .beginning with the Nixon administration,” as if Halperin is some sort of secret Republican who once served for that paragon of secrecy and deceit.  I could easily defend Halperin from this, but it’s better to let him do it himself.  This is the section of his NYT op-ed that discusses his service in the Nixon Administration:

When I was on the staff of the National Security Council, my home phone was tapped by the Nixon administration — without a warrant — beginning in 1969. The wiretap stayed on for 21 months. The reason? My boss, Henry Kissinger, and the director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, believed that I might have leaked information to this newspaper. Even after I left government, and went to work on Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign, the F.B.I. continued to listen in and made periodic reports to the president.

I was No. 8 on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” — a strange assemblage of 20 people who had incurred the White House’s wrath because they had disagreed with administration policy. As the presidential counsel John Dean explained it in 1971, the list was part of a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” My guess is that I earned this dubious distinction because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, though no one ever said for sure.

Greenwald never mentions any of this.  He doesn’t say that the information Halperin allegedly leaked to the NYT was the Pentagon Papers the Nixon Administration’s secret bombing of Cambodia.  He doesn’t acknowledge that Halperin refused to let Nixon, Kissinger, and Hoover intimidate him; in fact, he sued Nixon and won the case.  He doesn’t note that Halperin was on Nixon’s enemies list.  Those are no small things.  Instead, Greenwald merely says that Halperin worked in the Nixon Administration, which in the insular world of progressive blogs, will be read as an indictment.

Greenwald goes on to claim that Halperin, “eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it [emphasis in original].”  Greenwald acknowledges that this is “just speculation,” and offers no evidence to back his allegation. In other words, he is, by his own admission, using scuttlebutt and gossip rather than facts.

Greenwald does produce a memo Halperin wrote on June 22 (two days after Obama came out in support of the bill) to “interested parties” expressing his opinion that the bill was the best possible compromise available.  To be clear, Halperin does express his support for the bill.  But he also says the following:

In my view the service providers who assisted the government in violation of FISA should not be granted immunity. The original FISA legislation clearly provided that the companies were only to cooperate pursuant to the provisions of the law. The service providers should have had no reasonable doubt that the requests from the administration to provide support outside of the statute was both illegal and unconstitutional. The current court cases should be allowed to proceed unhindered by the Congress.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.  Greenwald chooses not to highlight it.

If that weren’t enough, Greenwald later added a postscript to his piece:

Several people have emailed to complain — correctly — that I was remiss in failing to note that Mort Halperin is the father of the incomparably execrable Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC News and now of Time. My apologies for the oversight. If there is any system more nepotistic and incestuous than our Beltway political and media institutions, I don’t know what it is.

So Greenwald would have us believe that the father should be held accountable for the supposed sins of the son, and vice versa, and that Mark Halperin’s success is based entirely on his “famous” father.  I don’t know Mark Halperin.  I have no idea how he got his first job in Washington.  But I’m guessing that his subsequent success just might be based on his own achievements and not because of his dad.

So in sum, Greenwald uses what at best could be called a mix of circumstantial evidence and gossip to condemn someone who has long championed the very causes that Greenwald professes to support.  He does so because Halperin happens to differ with him on a single issue.  If Greenwald was in court, his case wouldn’t stand.  But he’s not in court.  He’s online.  And somehow he has come to regard that as a free ticket to impugn a good man’s character.

Next time, he should try sticking to the facts.

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