WASHINGTON — The spoils go to the victors in politics, and usually a candidate's campaign advisors are generously rewarded with top jobs in the government when an election is won.
The exception has been President Obama's team of campaign foreign policy advisors, who have fared poorly in the new administration's frantic job competition. The president, who ran as a liberal, has filled out his government with appointees more in the political center.
Obama had more than 300 foreign policy and military experts advising his campaign, including many original Iraq war opponents. Most held views somewhat to the left of those of his chief Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose team included more original Iraq war supporters.
But prospects for the Obama supporters dimmed when the new president gave control of the three biggest national security fiefdoms to Clinton as his new secretary of State, holdover Robert M. Gates as Defense secretary, and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones Jr. as national security advisor.
Now, with the national security jobs nearly filled, the Clinton team is dominating the senior ranks of the State Department and the Pentagon. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has the highest-ranking job for an Obama team member, but the post has not been traditionally considered a Cabinet-level position.
Steven C. Clemons, a foreign policy specialist at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, described the job scramble as a game of musical chairs in which the Obama squad members have often found themselves without a chair.
"If they're not running into Hillary people, they're running into Republicans," he said.
Many of the Obama advisors are frustrated and indignant that after months of helping the campaign, they were thanked in November and directed to apply for a job on Obama's change.gov website -- along with hundreds of thousands of others.
One of the dismayed former advisors is Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant Defense secretary during the Reagan administration who answered the call to help the campaign a few weeks after it was formed in January 2007.
Korb, who works for the Democratic-affiliated think tank Center for American Progress, was co-leader of Obama's military policy advisory team.
At one point after the campaign, Korb wrote a letter urging that some of the hardest-working members of his team be hired by the Obama administration. "I never heard back," he said.
