Potential Defense Secretary

The Cabinet: Defense Secretary

By John M. Donnelly, CQ Staff

Under the unusual system of civilian control of the United States military, the person with the best office in the Pentagon’s “E Ring” is No. 2 in the chain of command and is the principal military policy adviser to the president. Under the orders of the commander in chief, the secretary can call all the shots he wants at the Defense Department, which includes the separately organized military departments of Army, Navy, and Air Force; the Joint Chiefs of Staff providing military advice; the combatant commands; and all defense agencies and field activities.

For McCain

Joseph I. Lieberman

Senator from Connecticut

He became McCain’s first choice for a running mate who would shake up the campaign, but the notion of a pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-abortion-rights former Democrat on the ticket — even one as hawkish as Lieberman — threatened to throw the GOP convention into turmoil. Still, McCain would probably give one of his closest Senate friends his choice of Cabinet jobs. And national security issues form by far the strongest public policy bond between the two. They have been on the Armed Services Committee together for 16 years, both supported launching the Iraq War and both backed the deepening involvement there through the 2007 troop “surge.” And both take a generally combative approach to Iran. Democrats might also be happy to send Lieberman to the Cabinet in order to be rid of someone they see as a turncoat — especially if the party gains enough Senate seats in November that it can afford to, at least nominally, give one up. (Lieberman’s two-year replacement would be picked by Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell.)

Robert M. Gates

The current secretary

During his two years at the Pentagon he has earned a reputation as a candid, practical executive who has had a steady hand on the helm compared with his more divisive predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. McCain knows firsthand that Gates has a solid relationship with congressional Democrats. Indeed, at a Senate Armed Services hearing recently, Democrats praised the secretary more than Republicans. McCain might place a premium on continuity of command, considering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and stay with Gates, who was CIA director from 1991 to 1993 and president of Texas A&M University for four years. Gates, however, may have different ideas: He talks fondly of his retirement home in the Pacific Northwest and carries a device that counts down the days until the inauguration.

Tom Ridge

Former Homeland Security secretary

An affable man with an extensive government r??sum??, he was the first secretary of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005. Right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he resigned during his seventh year as governor of Pennsylvania to serve as White House homeland security czar. He and McCain, a fellow Vietnam combat veteran, became friends as House freshmen in 1983 — and Ridge was on the GOP vice presidential short list, scratched off because his support for abortion rights was sure to roil the conservative base. He’s now a self-employed security consultant.

For Obama

Jack Reed

Senator from Rhode Island

He was touted as running-mate material this summer after accompanying Obama on his trip to the Middle East — selected, along with Nebraska’s GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel, because Obama has come to trust Reed’s expertise on military affairs. A West Point graduate and former faculty member who was a company commander of fellow paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division, Reed now chairs the Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. From that position, he has been out front in Democratic efforts to legislate a reduced U.S. military presence in Iraq. He is considered a serious student of security issues and is well-liked on both sides of the aisle.

Richard J. Danzig

Campaign’s senior national security adviser

A former Harvard and Stanford law professor and international lawyer at Latham & Watkins, he was undersecretary and then secretary of the Navy in the final three years of the Clinton administration. Soft-spoken and erudite, he would be an obvious alternative to a more politically potent figure. But Danzig knows his way around the Pentagon and can handle himself in public, as he’s shown in his appearances during the campaign. He has suggested the need for a balance, in dealing with other nations, between confrontation and cooperation. He has said the United States should try to engage rather than isolate Russia in the wake of its invasion of Georgia. He has also said defense spending under Obama should not dip much, primarily because of the cost of restoring military readiness.

Robert M. Gates

The current secretary

He may well be asked by Obama to stay on as the 22nd Defense secretary for the same reasons it would be attractive for McCain to keep Gates on the job: his sharp skills, his winning political ways and the benefit of continuity in wartime. For Obama, Gates would send a signal of bipartisanship at a time when the “global war on terrorism” has become increasingly charged with politics — just as former GOP Sen. William S. Cohen of Maine was picked by Democrat Bill Clinton in his second term to run the Pentagon and smooth frayed relations with Capitol Hill. Particularly if the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to deteriorate and security gains in Iraq falter, Obama could give the retention of Gates serious consideration.

Source: CQ Weekly

Potential Secretary of State

The Cabinet: Secretary of State

By Adam Graham-Silverman, CQ Staff

For McCain

Joseph I. Lieberman

Senator from Connecticut

Taking the most prestigious post in a Republican Cabinet would complete his tortured political journey. In 2000, he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee, but soon thereafter he broke with the party over the central foreign policy issue of the day, the war in Iraq, and won his fourth term as an independent in 2006 despite losing the Democratic primary. But through all this his bond with McCain has strengthened, and they share a similar view of the world and the United States’ proper role in it. They want to toughen sanctions against Iran to stop its suspected nuclear weapons program, minimize Hamas in renewed efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peace and push more robust peacekeeping in Sudan’s Darfur region. Lieberman would likely win confirmation from Senate Democrats eager to be rid of him, though his seat would be filled by a Republican governor until 2010.

R. James Woolsey Former

CIA director

He is closely identified with neoconservative leaders who pushed for war with Iraq and broader use of U.S. military power. Unlike many of them, he has not been tarnished by service in the Bush administration. He called for Saddam Hussein’s removal as early as 1998 and shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks suggested Iraqi complicity. Like McCain, he is eager to reduce U.S. dependence on oil, casting energy as a security issue more than an environmental one. In almost 40 years in Washington, he has served as U.S. arms control negotiator, undersecretary of the Navy for Jimmy Carter and CIA director under Bill Clinton, with whom he had a distant relationship. He endorsed McCain in April 2007 and has been advising him on security and energy since. John D. Negroponte Deputy Secretary of State Although he’s a Bush loyalist, he would represent a steady, conservative hand with a long history of experience across diplomatic and intelligence issues. Before taking the No. 2 slot at State last year, he was the first director of National Intelligence under a reorganized intelligence bureaucracy, and before that the first ambassador to Iraq after the country regained its sovereignty in 2004. He spent Bush’s first term as ambassador to the United Nations. He was confirmed overwhelmingly to these posts despite allegations he deliberately overlooked death squads run by the Honduran government against leftist groups while he was ambassador there in the 1980s.

For Obama

Susan E. Rice

The campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser

She was on the National Security Council from 1993 to 1997 and was the assistant secretary of State for African Affairs during Bill Clinton’s second term. On leave from her current job as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution — where she focused on global poverty, failing states, and international peacekeeping and conflict resolution — she has been Obama’s chief public surrogate on foreign policy issues and has at times been a publicly harsh McCain critic. She also has led Obama’s charge for a renewed focus on Afghanistan as the heart of the war on terrorism. Ricea??s first political foreign policy job was on the 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign, when she was 24.

Richard C. Holbrooke

Vice Chairman of Perseus

His career has been a robust mix of foreign service and investment banking. He has been at the Washington private equity fund management company since his two-year tour as U.N. ambassador ended with the Clinton administration. In that job, he shone new light on the security implications of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. As an assistant secretary of State, he was the architect of the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia. Clinton then nearly picked him to his second-term secretary of State, going with Madeleine K. Albright instead. Once a top adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid, he now strongly supports Obama and his approach to foreign policy. Still, his personal conflicts with some Obama advisers are well known, and he received questionable home loans through disgraced lender Countrywide.

Bill Richardson

Governor of New Mexico

He was the U.N. envoy for two years before Holbrooke, then spent the rest of the Clinton administration as Energy secretary. Despite those ties, after his own bid for the Democratic nomination came to a quick end last winter, he endorsed Obama, hailing him as “a once-in-a-lifetime leader,” over Hillary Rodham Clinton. Since his election as governor in 2002, he has cast himself as an international mediator, traveling to Sudan to negotiate a cease-fire in its Darfur region and broker the release of a Western journalist accused of spying and to North Korea to recover the remains of U.S. soldiers. Richardson also spent seven terms in the House, where he sat on the Intelligence Committee.

Potential Energy Secretary

The Cabinet: Energy Secretary

By Coral Davenport, CQ Staff

Energy policy is at a crossroads, considering the major strategic and economic decisions ahead for the next Congress and administration. The Energy secretary drives those decisions, and is also in charge of planning and administering energy research and development programs. The department also directs efforts to safeguard the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, coordinates research and development of new nuclear weapons systems, promotes nuclear non-proliferation abroad and operates the civilian nuclear waste repository and the four regional power administrations.

For McCain

Heather A. Wilson

Congresswoman from New Mexico

Albuquerque’s House member since 1988 gave up the seat to run for the Senate this year and lost the GOP primary by 3 percentage points. But she’s still regarded in GOP circles as a political and intellectual force, especially on energy issues. As representative of a district that’s home to Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as a member of the Intelligence Committee, her experience dovetails with one of the Energy Department’s primary jobs: managing the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Her background as an Air Force veteran and former National Security Council staffer also gives her a background well-suited to the Energy job. On the Energy and Commerce Committee, she’s supported boosting nuclear energy, a high priority for McCain. Like McCain, she has not been shy about bucking her party’s leadership and says she has always regarded herself as an iconoclast who makes up her own mind.

R. James Woolsey

Former CIA director

Now the McCain campaign’s chief energy adviser, he’s gained attention in recent years for his efforts to portray the nation’s fossil fuel dependence as a national security threat, with frequent testimony to Congress and on major national panels. He is a vocal advocate of alternative energy and plug-in hybrid cars. He’s held presidential appointments under the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton and is closely identified with neoconservative leaders who pushed for war with Iraq and broader use of U.S. military power.

Frederick W. Smith

FedEx Corp. founder and chief executive

The national co-chairman of McCain’s campaign committee could be a wild-card pick for Energy. As head of a company that consumes an estimated $3 billion of fuel every year, he is a leading advocate of energy conservation, working with the group Environmental Defense to promote hybrid delivery trucks. His company also operates some of the country’s largest solar power installations and he has been profiled as a “highly visible leader on the topic of oil dependence” in the book “Freedom from Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States’ Oil Addiction” (written by Obama energy adviser and former assistant Secretary of State David B. Sandalow). Smith is also co-chair of the Energy Security Leadership Council, a project of the nonpartisan group Securing America’s Future Energy.

For Obama

Ernest J. Moniz

Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist

The professor served as undersecretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, as well as associate director for science in the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. His research has focused on theoretical nuclear physics, and while serving in the Energy Department, he also led a comprehensive review of the nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship program and served as the Secretary’s special negotiator for Russian nuclear weapons materials. That gives him background to guide the department’s management of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. It’s expected that in an Obama administration the department would expand its focus on energy policy and climate change, but Moniz has credentials there, too, as co-director of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, which focuses the science of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Edward G. Rendell

Governor of Pennsylvania

If he helps Obama carry one of the biggest swing-state prizes in the election, he could have his pick of a number of administration jobs, even though his first choice for president was Hillary Rodham Clinton. First elected governor in 2002, he has made promoting alternative energy a cornerstone of his administration: he helped push through a law requiring that 18 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources, backed by hefty funding for renewable energy infrastructure and green jobs. Those policies are right in line with what Obama has proposed doing nationwide.

Philip R. Sharp

Resources for the Future president

He was one of the most prominent forces in the federal energy and environmental policy debates during his 10 terms as an Indiana congressman, starting with his efforts in the late 1970s to usher Jimmy Carter’s energy package into law and continuing through the enactment of a sweeping 1992 law designed to address oil conservation, stiffen nuclear power plant licensing and promote alternative fuels. He rose to third ranking on the Energy and Commerce Committee before retiring in 1994. He spent most of the next decade at Harvard’s Kennedy School before taking over Resources for the Future, a highly regarded nonpartisan organization that conducts research on energy and environmental policy issues, in 2005.