Ex-Bill Clinton aides to join State Dept.

[December 24, 2008]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two former Clinton administration officials were named Tuesday to join the State Department in high posts when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes secretary of state.

James Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser under President Bill Clinton, was chosen as deputy secretary of state. Jacob J. Lew, who was Clinton's budget director, was named to oversee management and budget issues as co-deputy, a unique arrangement for the department.

President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden also named Thomas E. Donilon, another Clinton administration veteran, to be deputy national security adviser.

Antony Blinken, chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was named as Biden's national security adviser. Biden is the committee's outgoing chairman.

"The team that we have assembled is uniquely suited to meet the great global challenges facing us today," Obama said in a statement. "They join a strong team of leading experts and accomplished managers and I look forward to working with them in the years ahead."

Donilon, a politically savvy lawyer, served from 1999-2005 as vice president of Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance company recently taken over by the government amid the economic crisis. In Bill Clinton's first term, he was chief of staff and a speechwriter for Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

In a unique division of authority, Steinberg is expected to focus on foreign policy issues while Lew handles day-to-day operations. Hillary Clinton is also known to be exploring the appointment of special mediators for trouble spots such as the Middle East.

Steinberg and Lew require Senate confirmation; Donilon and Blinken do not.

While Steinberg's appointment would fill the traditional State deputy role codified under the Bush and Clinton administrations for taking on broad policy and administrative functions, Lew's nomination would break new ground, providing Clinton with a strong advocate for increased funding and resources.

Steinberg, 55, initially had been considered a candidate for national security adviser, but gravitated toward State with Obama's decision to appoint Gen. James Jones to oversee the National Security Council.

Steinberg served President Clinton as national security adviser from December 1996 to August 2000. Before that, he was the State Department's chief of staff and director of its policy planning staff.

Steinberg was an early advocate for setting withdrawal dates for U.S. combat forces in Iraq. In 2005, he wrote that the growing insurgency in Iraq was due partly to "indigenous hostility" over the presence of U.S. and coalition forces and that removing most of them would improve security.

He also has criticized the Bush administration's heavy use of U.S. military and economic power as cure-alls for global challenges. The result has been a pugnacious, us-or-them approach that's undermined U.S. influence abroad, he has argued, and frustrated international cooperation on other critical issues, like climate change and pandemic disease.

Lew, 53, is chief operating officer of Citi Alternative Investments, a division of Citigroup. He is well schooled in federal budget issues from his stint running the Office of Management and Budget. He spent several years in senior positions at OMB under Clinton before being named director in 1998

Steinberg said he welcomed the job in an e-mail late Monday to staff at the University of Texas at Austin, where has served for three years as dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

If confirmed, "it will be a great privilege to serve with President Obama, Secretary of State-designate Clinton and the entire national security team at this time of great challenge but also of great opportunity for the United States and the world," he said.

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On the Net:

University of Texas:
http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/
faculty/james-steinberg/

[Associated Press; By MATTHEW LEE and BARRY SCHWEID]

Associated Press writer Richard Lardner contributed to this report.

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