But almost a year later, neither Holbrooke nor Mitchell is looking as confident about his status in the administration or prospects for success. Holbrooke, who once seemed to relish his access to both Obama and Clinton and built a staff of more than two dozen aides while commanding veto power over department South Asia hires, is now described by administration and Hill sources as recently sidelined by the White House, and working in more of a support role for Clinton. Reported clashes with the leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan have brought Holbrooke’s ability to work effectively in those countries into question, while his reputation for cultivating the media is also said to have become a source of irritation at the White House.
I don’t know how anyone can write these stories without asking the obvious question: where is Holbrooke’s personal archivist in all of this? As far as Mitchell, the rumor mill has him leaving the administration at the end of the year. If he does leave, his reputation will not have suffered from a year of Middle East negotiations in which he played the quiet diplomat, doing his best to be pragmatic as Clinton and Obama were making a hash of the peace process and constantly complicating his efforts. There was concern about Mitchell at the beginning of the year, but in the last six months I’ve not heard a single Republican complain about his work — those complaints were reserved entirely for the clumsy attempts made by Clinton and Obama to rein in Israeli settlements while simultaneously failing to obtain any concessions from Israel’s Arab neighbors and Palestinian “partners.” Holbrooke has managed to fall from grace in a much more dramatic fashion. After starting the year by fighting a bunch of very public turf wars with his fellow envoys and the NSC (is there really any doubt that Holbrooke was the source for so many attacks by liberal columnists on Jim Jones?), he has suddenly become a marginal figure, forced to defend himself, rather meekly, from charges of irrelevancy in an interview late last month only to disappear on a ski vacation in Telluride just as the administration went into countdown mode on the Afghanistan decision. The irony is that Holbrooke counts among his defenders the most sycophantic of Obama supporters (Joe Klein comes to mind). Now these journalists must sit idly by as another one of their champions — and sources — ends up on the outside, looking in. Update: A friend writes:
Rozen calls this “envoy fatigue.” But because she’s focused on foreign policy, she’s missing the bigger picture. “Envoy fatigue” is too narrow. What’s really happening is “Wise Man Fatigue” — the high-profile statesmen that the Obama Administration really brought in to lend gravitas to their policies are figuring out that the Obama Administration isn’t really serious about giving them power. The best example of this comes from outside the foreign policy realm: Paul Volcker, the former Fed Chairman who Obama used as a prop in his campaign, and whom Obama named to an advisory board in early 2009. Now that Volcker’s gravitas is no longer useful to the administration, he finds himself utterly out in the cold.
Update II: A knowledgeable Republican emails:
You’re wrong re Mitchell. He is certainly discredited where it counts–Israelis and Palestinians mistrust him now. And there is no evidence that he meekly followed Clinton/Obama policy rather than being part of making that policy (of hating Bibi, trying to humiliate him, trying to ram a settlement freeze down his throat from day one, working against him rather than with him). His own team, which he after all assembled, is particularly awful, dysfunctional, and Bibi-hating. I don’t know where you got this view of Mitchell.
