Obama's National Security Team - Rumors Edition

Laura Rozen rounds up the rumors. From her gloss it sounds like James Steinberg will be National Security Advisor, Bob Gates could stay in as SecDef if he wants to, but rumors abound about Secretary of State.

Apropos the swirling rumors of who is going where, Steve Clemons defends the role that personalities play in the formation of policy. Clemons writes:

We have already seen that John Bolton differed from Zalmay Khalilzad. Bob Gates was a radical departure in views and performance from Don Rumsfeld. The battle over John Bolton's confirmation at the United Nations in which this writer and blog were so involved was never about John Bolton personally, it was about stopping the further ascension of Jesse Helms-style pugnacious nationalism.

Dennis Ross, in the Democratic Party case, has different views of global affairs and a different sense of strategic priorities and how to approach them than James Steinberg. Susan Rice, who along with Gayle Smith, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Anthony Lake and Samantha Power, is a harbinger of an important new discussion the nation needs to have on 21st century national security threats and global justice does not have the same "structuralist" and "realist" tilts of a Charles Kupchan, Rand Beers, Robert Hutchings, Fareed Zakaria, or Gregory Craig.

Richard Holbrooke and Rahm Emanuel convey different approaches to national security and the conduct of power than a Tom Daschle and Chuck Hagel.

Very true. Of course, when President Bush appointed Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld to key positions, I assumed we'd get the hard-headed yet "humble" foreign policy we had been promised. So we shouldn't over-determine outcomes based on personalities either...

UPDATE: Joe Klein makes the case for Richard Holbrooke as Secretary of State.