Repartay

One thing I failed to consider when evaluating Hillary as Secretary of State were the potential implications for lower-tier, but very important jobs. Spencer Ackerman explains.

“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.

More from Matt Yglesias here and Greg Sargent here. Though it’s clear Obama would dictate the larger direction of foreign policy, I think these concerns are at least somewhat legitimate. Much of the impetus for invading Iraq came from ideological hard-ons like Doug Feith (who was in the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for W.), so it really is quite important insofar as a general ideological inclination can inform the tendencies of a given Department.