President Barack Obama is finally getting to put Susan Rice, America’s Ambassador to the UN whose nomination for Secretary of State died after Republicans and Arizona Sen. John McCain in particular went after her on Benghazi. It’s no secret Obama greatly respects her and was angry over how she was treated. Now he’ll be naming her as his national security adviser — a post that the Congress, and McCain cannot stop him from giving her.
In a major shakeup of President Obama’s foreign-policy inner circle, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, is resigning and will be replaced by Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said late Tuesday.
The appointment, which Mr. Obama plans to make on Wednesday afternoon, puts Ms. Rice, 48, an outspoken diplomat and a close political ally, at the heart of the administration’s foreign-policy apparatus.
It is also a defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. The post of national security adviser, while powerful, does not require Senate confirmation.
Mr. Obama also plans to nominate Samantha Power, a National Security Council official, as Ms. Rice’s replacement at the United Nations on Wednesday. Ms. Power, who has written extensively about genocide, is closely allied with Ms. Rice on human rights issues.
A central member of Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy team since he first took office, Mr. Donilon, 58, has exerted sweeping influence, mostly behind the scenes, on issues from counterterrorism to the reorientation of America to Asia from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The bottom, blunt line on Rice is that she became a political scalp and a high-concept symbol for Congressional Republicans, Republican partisans and particularly the conservative entertainment complex. NBC’s First Thoughts puts the appointment in perspective:
At 2:15 pm ET, we’ve learned, President Obama will announce that national security adviser Tom Donilon is stepping down, and that he’s replacing Donilon with UN Ambassador Susan Rice. And NBC’s Peter Alexander reports that Obama will nominate former foreign-policy adviser Samantha Power to be UN ambassador. Obama tapping Rice as national security adviser — a position that doesn’t need Senate confirmation — will ruffle some Republicans who will shout, “Benghazi!!!” But those released Benghazi talking-points emails make it clear that Rice wasn’t responsible for crafting them. Also, Rice’s loudest Benghazi critics often forget that she’s closer to John McCain and Lindsey Graham when it comes to the use of American power. And folks, don’t calls this a shakeup: That Donilon was going to step down in the second term and that Rice was going to replace him was perhaps the worst-kept secret in Washington. As for Power, she does face Senate confirmation, but she should have a fairly easy time, as she has quietly been reaching out to key Senate Republicans for months. One thing Power will have to deal with today: Everyone bringing up her infamous “monster” comment about Hillary Clinton during the ‘08 campaign. The two patched things up a long time ago, but the two aren’t exactly close.
Meanwhile, it’s being reported that Samantha Power, who has long been a close Obama adviser and served on the staff of the National Security Council until stepping down in February of this year, will be nominated to succeed Rice as United Nations Ambassador. Given that Power has long been recognized as a primary advocate for the so-called “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, and was among those who advocated U.S. intervention in Libya, one can expect that her confirmation hearings will be contentious, although it seems unlikely that Republicans will find the votes to block her nomination or that there will be enough opposition to mount a successful filibuster.
At the very least, this seems to be another example of Obama taking a defiant tack against Republican opposition, much like yesterday’s decision to appoint three judges to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Denied the chance to make her Secretary of State, Obama is making Rice his closest foreign policy adviser in the White House and there isn’t a single thing that the GOP can do about it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.