U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) hopes the next defense secretary works out better than the last one.
“There’s a basic question here,” says Durbin in praising the nomination of Ashton Carter. “and it’s the relationship of the White House and the Pentagon, and I think that really became the problem, when it came to our last secretary of defense. So I hope Ash Carter had that conversation with the president and goes into it understanding what he can do and the working relationship between the White House and the Pentagon.”
Carter would succeed Chuck Hagel, a former senator who lasted only about a year and was forced out.
Durbin, during a stop Friday in Springfield, also discussed Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner, who visited the Illinois congressional delegation Thursday in Washington. Durbin said he was impressed with Rauner’s tone as someone who was open to ideas from everyone.
As for how and why he could be optimistic despite a fractious campaign in which Rauner repeatedly gave contradictory statements about some of his stands and non-specific statements about others, Durbin looks to a political cartoon drawn 46 years ago.
“Herblock used to draw these cartoons of Richard Nixon,” said Durbin, referring to a Washington cartoonist of yore, “and they always showed him with this dark, shadowy beard, and then came the day that Nixon was elected president, and Herblock had a cartoon showing a barber’s chair, and he said, ‘Every president’s entitled to a clean shave.’”
Rauner was a number of new nominees that met with President Obama.