According to Marc Ambinder, reporter for the Atlantic and soon to be WH correspondent for the National Journal there are three women who need to be watched for possible promotions within the WH.
All three of these women are ripe for possible promotion. What's interesting is that these are hardworking insiders.
Three Women to Watch in New WH
As part of Obama's plan to "reinvent" himself post Nov. Elections, he feels that he needs to surround himself with more women. Hence, according to Marc Ambinder, these are three names to watch.
The first is Carol Browner who is seen by Obama as handling the oil spill crisis with the tools that she had available and therefore is possibly, the next COS (and the first woman).
Browner supervised the response to the BP oil well spill, and the President is said to think that she did a terrific job with the limited sets of tools the government turned out to have. Browner knows the administrative rule-making process, and there will be plenty of that over the next two years. Finally, as anyone who knows Browner can attest to, she can be tough.
The second individual is Michele Flournoy, currently the undersecretary defense of policy at the DOD. She's, according to some Pentagon folks, the frontrunner (!) for Secretary of Defense. She would be the first woman for this position and she would also be a democrat.
There's a cadre of characters in the Pentagon who are convinced that Obama will ask his undersecretary for policy, Michele Flournoy, to be his next Secretary of Defense when Robert Gates steps down next year. Flournoy played a significant role in the Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review, although her name was largely absent from Bob Woodward's account of the process. That's either because Flournoy figured out how to help Woodward without self-aggrandizement, or because Woodward simply missed her contributions to the debate. (My suspicion is on the former.)
Flournoy is a scholar, a strategist identified with neo-liberalism and brass-knuckle bureaucrat wrapped in one, and she's a Democrat. That's important, because Obama has told several people --- and this is reflected in the Obama canon -- that he never again wants Democrats to fear the Defense Department and vice-versa. Flournoy, former president of the Center for New American Security , the nursery for many senior national security officials, has been a professor at the National Defense University, and was a senior policy and strategy adviser for President Clinton.
The final individual to watch is Secretary Rice at the UN. Though the article notes that Obama may consider her for Secretary of Defense, I'm thinking she would be the most likely to replace Secretary Clinton should she step down. Her experience seems to belie that.
Just a note to watch these women. I've been clamoring on Flournoy for a while now, and think that she would be a fantastic SecDef.