President-elect Barack Obama’s national security team shows a person who is tolerant of strong personalities and has kept his promise to appoint a bipartisan team of rivals.

While it remains to be seen how this meld of holdovers and new faces will work, the names on the team do show a respect for having people not afraid to speak their minds and who perhaps are less willing to swallow blindly a partly line. Obama described his team as pragmatists. They are.

After replacing Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates acts with respect toward the military, has managed the war in Iraq effectively and with candor. Given Obama’s opposition to the war and Bush’s foreign policy, it truly is a testament to Gates’ competence that he would be kept on.

Tellingly, retired Gen. James Jones, who will be Obama’s national security adviser, rebelled against Rumsfeld from within the Pentagon during the war and advised Obama and Sen. John McCain during the presidential campaign.

Jones’ appointment is another non-partisan pick aimed at competence and pragmatism, not the ideological approach brought by Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton’s appointment prompted reporters to dig out incendiary quotations from the presidential campaign tossed back and forth between the Obama and Clinton camps. Questions about Clinton’s disagreements with Obama are appropriate, but ultimately their foreign policy differences beyond the Iraq war lack much substance.

Some have described the team assembled as one filled with hawks. That’s an exaggeration. Gates had no role in planning and promoting the war and was brought in by Bush to clean up the mess that was made.

From within the Pentagon, Jones urged high-ranking military leaders to question Rumsfeld and derided the war as “a debacle” before it started, according to Bob Woodward’s book, “State of Denial.”

And we suspect Clinton’s vote to authorize the war was, at least in part, a product of her ambition and the country’s war fever — a grave mistake made by many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.

Cabinets often look good at the beginning. In 2000, Bush’s team seemed very smart. As defense secretary, Cheney had effectively run the Pentagon during the Persian Gulf War along with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Rumsfeld was himself a former defense secretary, and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was considered a brilliant foreign policy mind and provost of Stanford University.

Obama’s greatest strength may be his desire to talk to people with a wide range of views and make up his own mind. He has assembled a team that will help him do that.

State Journal-Register