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"Some advice for our friends in the media, don't focus on Clinton, focus on Jim Jones, someone personally more close with John McCain than Obama. And with an office in the West Wing, it will be Jones who has the day-to-day ear of Obama, not Clinton. In fact, of the three big national security posts, it's possible a President McCain could have picked Jones and Gates as well," says First Read. David Corn agrees, and gives some background:
Jones is an intellectual and a former Marine. He was not gung-ho on the Iraq invasion. He is regarded as a forceful leader who understands the value of diplomacy. He is no pushover, no ideologue. He appears to have the backbone and standing to be the guy in the middle of the national security vortex--someone who can referee (if it comes to that) bureaucratic disputes that arise between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and Langley. Given his experience, he should be able to advise Obama and oversee the flow of information and views that come from State, Defense, and the intelligence community. It's a tough job--and perhaps the most critical post within Obama's national security team.One thing to note is that Obama isn't just doubling down, but tripling down, on military credibility. Jones is, as Corn sagely notes, a marine. But Bob Gates is being kept on largely because he's earned a significant cache of respect, and maybe even a bit of fear, from the military brass. As for Clinton, most folks say that the genuine surprise of her time in the Senate has been her deep immersion in military issues on the Armed Services Committee. She could have taken that assignment and just traded it in for national security credibility, but by all reports, she engaged deeply with the issue, and ended up earning a lot of respect from a non-trivial number of military thinkers. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that all of Obama's national security nominees "have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena. The shift, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states." That's not the sort of thing that major papers surmise. Someone is telling them that this is a key priority for the national security team. But it will require a lot of delicate diplomacy with the military, and a crew of advisers who are versed on military interests and unafraid of pushback. Which might explain why Obama picked the group that he did. Spencer Ackerman has more on this.