Jack Reed: The Democratic senator from Rhode Island, now in his third term, wields influence in several important ways. As a senior member on the Banking and Armed Forces committees, he has finance and national security credentials, while commanding special attention from the president. Mr. Reed was under serious consideration to be Barack Obama’s running mate last year before taking himself out of the running.
Short and soft-spoken, the 59-year-old Mr. Reed grew up in a working-class family, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and served as an Army Ranger and in the 82nd Airborne Division. He has master’s and law degrees from Harvard.
When asked which senators the administration most listens to on financial matters, a top Obama economic official listed Mr. Reed as one. (The others are the freshman Mark R. Warner of Virginia and Charles E. Schumer of New York.) Mr. Reed is generally supportive of the Obama administration’s financial regulatory proposals and wants to comprehensively regulate derivatives, while favoring an interagency council, rather than the Federal Reserve, to monitor big financial firms for systemic risk.
On military matters, he and the Armed Forces Committee chairman, Carl Levin of Michigan, have more sway than any other members of Congress. Mr. Reed is one of a handful of lawmakers Mr. Obama consults regularly on Afghanistan, which Mr. Reed and Mr. Levin visited this August. He has expressed skepticism about a troop surge there, saying “the burden of proof” is on the commanders to justify it. Yet he’s also adamantly against any deadlines or timetables for drawing down U.S. forces.
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