Endless Nameless

Ladies and gentlemen, in all its blind-quote splendor, I have today at the Washington Independent an avalanche of Obamanik agita over the prospect of HRC’s team arriving at the State Department. Sinister Rouge, I don’t know whether you’ll hate this or love it, but here it is:

Some progressive Obama supporters think the arrival of Clinton at the State Dept. will mean they’ll be frozen out. That would have implications for their advancement in subsequent Democratic administrations.

“Basically, you have all of these young, next-generation and mid-career people who took a chance on Obama” during the primaries, said one Democratic foreign-policy expert included in that cohort. “They were many times the ones who were courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many of them supported Obama in the first place. And many of them would likely get shut out of the mid-career and assistant-secretary type jobs that you need, so that they can one day be the top people running a future Democratic administration.”

In the foreign-policy bureaucracy, these middle-tier jobs — assistant secretary and principal-deputy-assistant and deputy-assistant — are stepping stones to bigger, more important jobs, because they’re where much of the actual policy-making is hashed out. Those positions flesh out strategic decisions made by the president and cabinet secretaries; implement those policies; and use their expertise to both inform decisions and propose targeted or specific solutions to particular crises.

I tried to keep the focus on what the implications of the Clintonista/Obamanik fissures might be on the institutional apparatus of the department. But there’s no getting around the fact that this is a gossipy piece.