Team of Mentors: Biden, Kerry, and Hagel Are Obama's Senate Mafia

The president's emerging second-term national-security team will likely include a longstanding cabal in place before Obama reached Washington.

Michael Hirsh,
The Atlantic

December 19, 2012

Promising Practices

Michael Hirsh

The Atlantic

In the summer of 2008, while the two of them were on a trip to Afghanistan, then-Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, gave a bit of advice to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"I told Obama he should pick [Joe] Biden as his running mate," Hagel recalled in a 2010 interview. "I said, 'He understands governance better than anyone else. In particular, he understands Congress. He understands how it fits together like no one else you could get. He's got the political piece. He 's got the policy piece. There's nobody in his league.'"

On August 25 of that year, Obama did indeed name Biden as his vice-presidential nominee. The move surprised many people. But apparently not Hagel.

Today, Hagel is reportedly President Obama's top choice to be defense secretary, while John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and another old Obama colleague from the Senate who has influenced the president's thinking on Afghanistan (as have Hagel and Biden), is expected to be named secretary of state, perhaps this week. Biden, meanwhile, has become one of the most powerful and influential vice presidents ever, even by his own testimony. "I literally get to be the last guy in the room with the president," Biden said in a speech in 2012. "That's our arrangement."

It's difficult to say what the presence of this Senate "team of mentors" might mean for Obama's second-term foreign and defense policy, but they will probably counsel extreme caution in most things, with a wild-card possibility of bold new action in other areas, for example Mideast peacemaking. Kerry and Hagel, a generation older than Obama, are both Vietnam vets known for their prudence and judiciousness (Hagel even came out against Obama's "surge" in Afghanistan). That suggests something close to the status quo on Iran's sanctions policy, and Obama's mix of tough realpolitik and engagement toward China. But interestingly, both Kerry and Hagel are also men who've fallen somewhat into eclipse with something to prove. In Hagel's case, the onetime GOP star found himself persona non grata in his party after his fierce opposition to the Iraq invasion and later the surge. As Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Kerry has had to claw his way back to respectability in the Democratic Party after his humiliating loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential race, a defeat made all the more embarrassing by the "Swift-boating" attacks Kerry endured over his record as a war hero in Vietnam.