The liberal site Talking Points Memo is often quite happy to carry Barack Obama's water, but sometimes they surprise you and do some pretty good reporting. They have done so today, explaining a lot of the back story that led to Chuck Hagel's departure as Secrtary of Defense.
No one is really without blame here, which you would expect when an inept president makes appointments for political reasons and not for reasons of quality governance. I am not a fan of Chuck Hagel and never have been. Anyone familiar with Hagel's history as self-aggrandizing senator who got himself attention by being the media's favorite Bush-bashing Republican could see that Obama only chose him for what he symbolized.
So Hagel probably was a very ineffectual Defense Secretary, but he was also a guy who could see how undisciplined the rest of the national security team was. And it was driving him bananas:
Previously, under former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and then-NSC chief of staff, now-White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Clemons said, there was a clear structure for how meetings were scheduled and how messaging was handled. Since Donilon's departure and McDonough's promotion, however, that structure was -- at least in Hagel's eyes -- diminished. Clemons gave the examples of who was in attendance and who was given the floor during NSC meetings.
"There was a tightness to the process that has degraded significantly," Clemons said. "I think there was tension between Hagel and Susan Rice and tension over what the appropriate conduct was in terms of managing Cabinet secretaries and their time with Obama."
While Hagel maintained a strong influence on Obama behind the scenes, Clemons said, he also failed on his own to be a forceful public advocate for himself and the administration. That might have ultimately made him easier to remove, as opposed to somebody like Secretary of State John Kerry, who is consistently pursuing a very public agenda.
"Hagel saw himself as an implementer of Obama's policies and not a maker of policies in the public, and perhaps that was a mistake," Clemons said. "There was a big gap between what people saw publicly of Hagel. ... That's one of the factors that undermined his effectiveness."
That's not to say these were purely stylistic differences, Clemons said. Hagel was usually the one who would be warning against reacting to what Clemons called "the emotional moment" on the crises in Syria and Ukraine.
"I think he did see undisciplined thinking taking hold. You can call that both a problem of process and substance," Clemons said. "He's been the guy who's saying, 'Be careful of impulsive, emotional campaigns that disrupt our relations more broadly. ... I think ultimately the biggest difference between Hagel and some of these other people that are dominating, those people that are caught up in the emotional moment about the misbehavior of one of these strategic actors fault those in the room who say, 'Be careful,' who advise caution."
Apparently you get farther in the Obama Administration if, like John Kerry, you have your own personal agenda and you push it everywhere you go. Hagel seemed more focused on seeing things operate in some sort of logical fashion, and that's not going to be an easy thing to find in this administration.
I suppose that probably made him an easy guy for Obama to get rid of, and we know Obama loves to find a scapegoat when his own policies and leadership are failing. But nothing is going to get better, either at the Pentagon or around the world, until Obama himself starts dealing with the world as it is instead of trying to pretend it's the world he wants to imagine it to be.
The same delusional thinking that made Obama think Hagel was up to the job of Defense Secretary is making him think the world's bad actors will behave themselves if only they recognize the force of personality that is Barack Obama. The fact that these things don't work is no surprise. The fact that Obama continues to learn nothing from them is pretty alarming.
