CHANGELINGS NEED NOT APPLY:

For Obama campaign advisors, there's no sure thing: Many liberal loyalists anticipated jobs in the new administration, but the president has filled out his foreign policy team largely with centrists connected to Clinton or the GOP. (Paul Richter, 2/11/09, LA Times)

Steven C. Clemons, a foreign policy specialist at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, described the job scramble as a game of musical chairs in which the Obama squad members have often found themselves without a chair.

"If they're not running into Hillary people, they're running into Republicans," he said.

Many of the Obama advisors are frustrated and indignant that after months of helping the campaign, they were thanked in November and directed to apply for a job on Obama's change.gov website -- along with hundreds of thousands of others.

One of the dismayed former advisors is Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant Defense secretary during the Reagan administration who answered the call to help the campaign a few weeks after it was formed in January 2007.

Korb, who works for the Democratic-affiliated think tank Center for American Progress, was co-leader of Obama's military policy advisory team.

At one point after the campaign, Korb wrote a letter urging that some of the hardest-working members of his team be hired by the Obama administration. "I never heard back," he said.

One of the most prominent members of the Obama national security team was Richard Danzig, a Navy secretary during the Clinton administration. He was a senior member of Obama's advisor corps, traveled with Obama and was widely expected to be either Defense secretary or deputy Defense secretary.

Instead, Obama tapped Gates. Danzig said in an interview that he talked to officials about positions below that of deputy Defense secretary, but has passed for now.

"Some excellent other jobs were raised with me, so I don't feel at all undervalued," Danzig said. "But I decided as a personal matter not to go into the administration, at least for now."

Another central figure on the Obama team was Brookings Institution analyst Ivo Daalder. A liberal on many foreign policy issues, Daalder oversaw nuclear proliferation issues.

But in the new administration, Daalder is expected to be named U.S. ambassador to NATO.

The responsibility for nonproliferation policy will go to two respected centrists -- Gary Samore, who will be in charge of proliferation issues at the National Security Council, and Robert J. Einhorn, who will be undersecretary of State for nonproliferation and international cooperation.

An important member of Obama's Mideast team, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer, has not yet taken an administration post. Kurtzer has sometimes been criticized by more conservative Israelis and staunch American supporters of Israel.

One Obama advisor on the Middle East who is in line for a job is Dennis Ross, a Mideast peace advisor in the Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations. Ross, who has strong support from the center and right of the pro-Israel community in the United States, is expected to be named a high-level envoy to Iran.

We should be especially sorry for those Republicans who stabbed President Bush in the back and then didn't get a job out of the deal, eh?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 11, 2009 9:46 PM