Widely seen as the most likely of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks, Michele Flournoy precipitously fell from contention for defense secretary over the past two weeks.
Defense commentators believe both Biden’s personal relationship with his reported choice, retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, and pressure to choose more black Cabinet members were factors in the decision.
“I was surprised,” said Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon, who had Flournoy’s chances at being tapped for defense secretary at 90%.
“But as the weeks went by, I started to think, well, you know, maybe something else is going on,” O’Hanlon told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
Something else was going on.
The Congressional Black Caucus saw the likes of white people such as John Kerry tapped to be climate czar and Susan Rice passed up for the secretary of state job in favor of Antony Blinken.
“I think that we will see several other people of color announced this week and next,” South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, who was instrumental in getting Biden the Democratic nomination, told CNN on Monday.
“I trust Joe Biden,” he added. “I’ve been on the phone with him as recent as this morning. I feel very good about what he is doing. And I’m going to let him make his own announcements.”
The first sign Flournoy was in trouble was when defense secretary was left off the rollout of Biden’s national security team on Nov. 23.
Meanwhile, former military leaders and members of Congress continued to push for Flournoy.
“I certainly communicated to the Biden people that I think Michelle Flournoy is hands down the best-qualified person for the job,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith told reporters on a video call on Monday.
“It takes a certain amount of understanding of bureaucracy in the Pentagon in order to make changes stick. Michelle has that,” he said. “It’s not to say that there aren’t other people that could fill the position well, but I think we have a clear case where she is the most qualified at this point.”
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Adm. Jim Stavridis told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview that he knew Flournoy to be rock solid based on four years of working together.
“I found her to be highly intelligent and excellent communicator, a sound strategic thinker,” he said. “We would say in the Navy, ‘a good shipmate,’ somebody you’d want to work with, somebody who is true to her word and has integrity.”
In the end, O’Hanlon said he believes it came down to Biden’s personal relationship with Austin, having worked with him on Iraq during the Obama administration.
“Clearly, there’s some kind of a special connection, and I hadn’t appreciated just how much Austin and Biden dealt with each other on the Iraq issue,” he said.
Austin would still need a Senate waiver to serve in the civilian role, having retired from the military in 2016. Defense secretaries must be out of uniform for seven years, according to the law.
Flournoy had been criticized by liberals for consulting work and ties to defense contractors. But Austin, too, consulted and was on the board of military contractor Raytheon Technologies.
O’Hanlon also rejected rumors that Flournoy had any skeletons in her closet.
“I’m almost 100% sure that’s wrong,” he said, praising Flournoy’s integrity and predicting that she could still be named defense secretary in the coming years.
“There were enough people who were routinely, in the last few weeks, raising the idea that the other candidates for [defense secretary] had to be black if they weren’t female,” he said.
O’Hanlon said the conversation lingered with no pushback from the Biden team.
“I have to assume it was generally correct,” he said. “And that, in fact, this did become an issue of sort of coalition politics for the Democratic Party writ large.”
