Obama’s inner circle
Clearly he means to hit the deck running. (Some say he’s running already.) At any rate, within a month of his historic victory, President-Elect Obama — goaded rather than distracted by the threat of America’s economic collapse and the Mumbai attacks — had announced his main White House staff and cabinet appointments.
The two heavyweight Secretaries – Hillary Clinton at State and Robert Gates at Defense – will have to be kept from each other’s throats.
The names drew everything from praise (from Republicans and the ideological middle of the country) to skepticism (from the cognoscenti) to dismay (from Obama’s Democratic base), to uncertainty on the part of a wider, watching world that is looking to him to end, in no uncertain terms, the Bush administration’s imperialistic and barbarous ways, once and for all.
Above all, in their high-profiled heterogeneity, Obama’s ‘team of rivals’ raised the question: what’s he actually planning to do as President?
Here are some notes on Obama’s inner circle.
There’s a clear difference between the people with whom Obama is surrounding himself in the White House, and his cabinet. The former are in the main Obama loyalists: old friends and fellow-farers from Obama’s Chicago days. They include:
Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett: a close friend and mentor of the Obamas since the 1980s, and chief confidante of his presidential campaign. Jarrett is a member of the black Chicago ‘royalty,’ and a great-niece of that African-American power broker from the Carter years, Vernon Jordan.
Eric Holder, the Attorney General-designate, highly regarded, and a strong opponent of Guantanamo (though tarnished during his time in the Clinton White House when he recommended a presidential pardon for Clinton financier and fugitive Marc Rich).
Susan Rice, Ambassador to the UN — a post which, significantly, Obama has restored to cabinet level. Rice, moreover, will be reporting directly to Obama rather than to Secretary of State Clinton, as the UN Ambassador normally would, Rice having come rhetorically to blows with Clinton during the Democratic primaries. (By itself, this amendment of the traditional chain of command constitutes a tether on the not-necessarily-reliable Secretary of State.)
Rice, Jarrett and Holder are, like Obama himself, all African-American Ivy Lea-guers. There’s also, incidentally, a Caribbean connection: Holder is the son of a Barba-dian, and his maternal grandparents were both Barbadians. Susan Rice’s mother is the daughter of Jamaicans.
Then there’s:
Senior Advisor David Axelrod, who at 13 was selling buttons for Robert Kennedy’s short-lived presidential campaign, and later became a journalist with the Chicago Tribune before setting up shop as a political strategist. In that capacity he helped a number of African-American candidates become mayors, and Deval Patrick win the governorship of Massachussetts. This year, Axelrod was the brilliant chief strategist of the Obama campaign, and the author of its ‘Change’ slogan. But his relationship with Obama goes back more than a decade: it was Axelrod who vetted Obama’s famous 2002 anti-Iraq war speech, for example. Axelrod also served in 2006 as the chief political adviser for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel for the US House of Representatives elections, in which the Democrats gained 31 seats.
White House Chief of Staff Emanuel, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, who, though he was a member of the Clinton White House, disappointed the Clintons during the primaries by declining to endorse Hillary, and, late in the day, came out instead for Obama. Emanuel is a close friend of Obama (the two are the same age), and, as ‘the decider’ on a day- to-day basis of who gets to see the President, and of what gets onto the President’s desk, his power is going to be great. No shrinking violet, Emanuel has a reputation for banging heads in Congress to get results, and he was the architect of the Democrats’ gains in 2006. A devout Jew and unambiguously pro-Israeli, his support was crucial to Obama’s courting of the Jewish vote; and he’s also the President-elect’s conduit to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, the power behind Obama’s throne — until recently.
The odd men out in Obama’s inner circle are both aging white men:
James Jones, Obama’s pick for National Security Advisor: a surprise because Obama hardly knows him (prior to September he’d only spoken to him twice), and also because the 6 ft 4 ex-Marine Corps commander at least tacitly supported the Iraq war which Obama made his name opposing. Jones, however, has argued passionately (1) that Iraq is distracting attention from the real problem, Afghanistan, and (2) that the Afghan situation can never be solved by military means alone — both core Obama positions. Jones is also reportedly a stern disciplinarian with, moreover, uncommon diplomatic skills, and it would appear that Obama is counting on him, not only for ‘hard’ military advice in a crisis, but also to keep the two heavyweight Secretaries, Hillary Clinton at State and Gates at Defense, from each other’s throats. (In GW Bush’s first term, Powell and Rumsfeld spent most of their time fighting each other, National Se-curity Advisor Condoleezza Rice having been a complete failure in that regard.)
Vice-President-elect Biden, who, since his campaign gaffe about Obama being tested, has been painfully silenced. With Clinton at State (and Susan Rice at the UN), Biden also almost certainly loses the role he would most have cherished, that of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisor. His second string is his experience at working the Senate, and from his own staff picks it would appear that, as with Emanuel, that’s now the main role for which Obama has him preparing.
Now, the Democratic base is happy enough with Obama’s troika of African-American White House advisors; and they interpret Obama’s re-elevation to cabinet level of the post of ambassador to the UN as a signal from the President-elect that the days of American unilateralism are over. But they’re not sure about Biden and Jones; and they’ve been in an uproar over Clinton at State and Gates staying on at Defense.
That’s why Obama has taken to explaining that he ‘expects’ his team to carry out his policies.
Irked by a reporter who asked how his appointment of a number of Washington insiders squared with his campaign message of change, Obama replied: “Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing [it].”
Some TV talking heads marvelled at what they saw as the young African-American’s self-confidence. Others warned that it was, instead, the kind of pride that comes before a fall.
Two things, however, seem clear.
One is that, by lining up his forces on the right (Clinton, Gates, Biden, Jones), Obama has given himself the political cover he will need if he chooses to govern from the left. (Who better than Gates, eg, to end ‘Iraq’?)
Also, Obama’s laid-back, dispassionate manner has sometimes been interpreted to mean the Golden Boy is temperamentally mild. But his two campaigns, in the primary and the general, were revolutionary. And the team he’s surrounded himself with so far suggests that, come January 20, sparks are going to fly.