Obama opts for establishment advisers

ANALYSIS

By Anne Gearan

updated 12:32 p.m. ET Nov. 26, 2008

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's campaign credo: Change is good. President-elect Barack Obama's credo: When it comes to war and peace, maybe wisdom is better.

Obama has assembled a national security brain trust populated by graybeard establishment figures with decades of combined experience and even a few medals. He is entrusting critical wartime management to people with unassailable credentials and low buzz factor.

The best example of the Obama Battleplan Version 2.0 is Robert Gates.

Obama's insurgent candidacy was founded on his opposition to the Iraq war and a promise to end it, fast. But with a crushing global financial crisis supplanting Iraq as Job One, the Democrat has turned to the very man running the Iraq and Afghan wars for the current Republican president, officials confirmed to The Associated Press.

"The old ways of thinking and the old ways of acting just won't do," Obama said at a news conference Wednesday.

At a Wednesday morning press conference, Obama pushed back against the notion that he was stocking his national security team with safe, centrist figures with Republican and Clinton administration backgrounds. "This has been sort of conventional wisdom floating around Washington that 'well, you know there's a recycling of people who were in the Clinton administration,'" he said.

Obama sought to turn the criticism on its head, suggesting that a critical era at home and abroad required strong Washington hands, but overseen by a chief executive pressing for change. "What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But I understand where the vision for change comes from first, and foremost; it comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing."

"The old ways of thinking and the old ways of acting just won't do," Obama said.

Gates, who has served as President George W. Bush's defense secretary for two years, will remain in the Cabinet for some time, probably a year, according to an official familiar with discussions between him and the president-elect. His appointment would fulfill an Obama pledge to include a Republican in his Cabinet.

"You have a young president still trying to establish his bona fides and he has to have a seasoned team," said Stephen Flanagan, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Where do you go to get a seasoned team? Well, to people seasoned in one previous administration or another.

A source close to the current Pentagon leadership cautioned that Gates had not agreed to a specific exit date. Like those describing Obama's job offers, the source spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama has not announced the personnel choices.

Jones no liberal
For the critical inside job of national security adviser, Obama wants a 6-foot-4 retired Marine general who hung his hat most recently at the Chamber of Commerce. A Democratic official said retired Marine Gen. James Jones was Obama's pick to head the National Security Council, the part of the White House structure that deals with foreign policy.

Jones, 64, has been a respectful critic of some Bush administration war strategy, especially in Afghanistan, and his priorities and world view seem in line with Obama's. But he's no lefty. The former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe was named last year to head an energy initiative for the Republican-friendly Chamber, and he also served as a special Mideast peace adviser for the Bush administration.

Democratic officials earlier confirmed that Obama had offered the prestigious post of secretary of state to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Clinton pick brings a vanquished opponent into Obama's fold. It also means the 47-year-old Obama is hiring a respected foreign policy wonk who argued during the tense Democratic primary that she was the person you really wanted answering that 3 a.m. phone call of doom.

'He has to have a seasoned team'
Obama is expected to announce his national security roster next week.

Flanagan counts Gates and Jones as career public servants without a strong ideological stamp. Clinton, 61, may carry ideological baggage, but she also brings a record of bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and tested Midwestern stick-to-it-iveness.

The Gates pick affords Obama some time to cope with the crumbling economy even as it risks disappointing the anti-war Democrats who launched him.

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