News Round Up: Hillary & Obama to Seal the Deal; Obama Announces National Security Team

by Damozel |  It is indeed official:  Obama selects Hillary for Secretary of State.   The Caucus reports:

The Obama and Clinton teams have been preparing the ground for this announcement for days. Mr. Clinton, who has extensive business and philanthropic interests around the world, agreed to a nine-point plan beyond existing law to avoid potential conflicts of interest, including for the first time the release of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation by the end of the year.

The rest of the team seems to be pleasing to a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans.

Mr. Obama plans to announce that he is keeping Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has run the Pentagon for the last two years, and will appoint Gen. James L. Jones, a retired Marine commandant, as national security adviser. Rounding out his national security team, Mr. Obama will name former Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. as his choice for attorney general and Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona as secretary of homeland security, the Democrats said. Mr. Obama also will nominate Susan E. Rice, his foreign policy adviser and a former assistant secretary of state, as ambassador to the United Nations, a job that will be given cabinet rank, as it had under President Bill Clinton....

Reports of the selections drew praise from a retiring Republican elder. “The triumvirate of Gates, Clinton and Jones to lead Obama’s national security team instills great confidence at home and abroad,” said Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, “and further strengthens the growing respect for the president-elect’s courage and ability to exercise sound judgment in selecting the best and the brightest to implement our nation’s security policies.” (NYT)

Hurray!  Hillary will be Secretary of State!  And I'm not in the mood to listen to naysayers, so LALALALLALALALALA I can't heeeeear you.

Instead, I will go directly to Taylor Marsh, as avid a Clinton supporter as a Hillary-lover like me could wish:

We've come a long way from the primaries, haven't we? Yes we have.

What this nomination says about President-elect Obama is loud and clear. He's not only confident and someone who does not fear strong viewpoints on national security matters and foreign policy, but he's inviting them, sure in his own place as president as well. But as you can see from the CNN video above, Obama's entire national security team, including Joe Biden, is a "water's edge" powerhouse.

Obama once again proving ideology will not be his guidepost.

What HRC can bring to the world stage is monumental and something only she can do, especially given her work across many years on women's rights alone.....

President-elect Obama stands out even brighter with the announcement of his national security team, which reveals continuity, steadiness and that he has no intention of letting one minute go by once he's inaugurated. As for the change promised, Obama will have a seasoned team to deliver on his vision. It foreshadows a presidency in which he will be well served.

"...We don't intend to stumble into the next administration." - President-elect Barack Obama

Obama's choices on national security prove his point.

I suppose I ought to be a little concerned that so many Republicans seem to be so damned pleased.

Republicans Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Lugar both said that Obama's potential appointments for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Jim Jones as National Security Adviser showed a pragmatic, non-ideological approach to addressing international concerns. They gushed even more over the president-elect's apparent decision to keep Defense Secretary Bob Gates at his current post....

Other Senators, including Democrats Claire McCaskill and Jack Reed, followed suit, saying that Obama had siphoned off the cream of the crop when it came to staffing his foreign policy team. Many TV pundits concurred, arguing that the president-elect had done the best he could to hit the ground running come January 20th.  (HuffPost)

They're not worried about Hillary, it turns out, so much as they are about Bill.

While Lugar said that as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he would support her appointment to State, he raised concerns about the former president's financial dealings. Speaking hours after it was reported that Bill Clinton would reveal some 200,000 donors to his presidential library, the Indiana Republican seemed un-impressed.

"I would vote in favor of Senator Clinton knowing what we have here today," said Lugar. "I suspect that I am not alone in suggesting that questions will be raised. And probably legitimate questions....I would just suspect that given all of the ties and the influence that he has, the relationships. He is a major player in foreign policy. Mrs. Clinton will be the Secretary of State. They are married, a team."

Both Reed and Lugar, it should be noted, thought the former President could serve a constructive even crucial role as a diplomat and mediator to the burgeoning hostilities between Pakistan and India.

Torie Clarke, the former Department of Defense spokesperson, echoed many of the vague concerns that Lugar had previously voiced.

"Her entire life, it's not just what she does and how she performs. What about Bill Clinton and his role? And I look at all the things they've agreed to do. It's one thing to say that on paper, it's a whole other thing to put that into execution."

Eh.  Better to have him in the tent pissing out, etc.  He's going to be a player no matter what Obama decides.  Might as well have him and his connections and resources on the team.  And why don't we wait to see whether Bill does what he promised before we worry about whether he will or he won't? 

And once more, and with feeling, STFU, George Will.  When have you ever been right about anything?

George Will, the conservative columnist, raised more substantive criticisms of the selection, noting that, beyond her husband, Clinton would have to manage a huge bureaucracy with many different philosophical factions and competing interests.

"She's run two things in her life," Will said, "her campaign, that did not go so well. It was faction ridden, it leaked a lot. And before that, the health care event that they could not even get to a vote in a congress they controlled. Her record as a manager raises caution signs." (HuffPost)

Meanwhile, the military seem to be warming up to Obama.  Their comments about the Bush Administration are quite telling.

[A]ccording to several senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials who would speak about their incoming leader only on the condition of anonymity [most important] is the expectation of renewed respect for the chain of command and greater realism about U.S. military goals and capabilities, which many found lacking during the Bush years.

"Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders," said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid," Nash said. "In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting." (WaPo)

The military guys are happy that Hillary was tapped for SoS.

Obama's expected retention of Robert M. Gates as defense secretary and expected appointment of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser have been greeted with relief at the Pentagon.

Clinton is respected at the Pentagon and is considered a defense moderate, at times bordering on hawkish. Through her membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee...she has developed close ties with senior military figures.(WaPo)

Some of my progressives are unhappy:  they say that this is not the change we fought, etc. etc.  I've said all I have to say about that.

Memeorandum has more discussion here.

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