Maybe Give This Guy a Job? UPDATED BECAUSE HE HAS ONE

Politico’s Ben Smith adds to Laura Rozen’s report on President-elect Barack Obama’s South Asia-themed dinner last week. Ben learns that Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi was there, along with an important defense adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret).

That raises a question: why doesn’t — as best I can tell — Gration have a job in the administration?

Now, maybe he will. But building on something that both Laura and I have reported, it’s somewhat bizarre that of the campaign’s foreign policy inner circle, only U.N. Ambassador-designate Susan Rice has a senior position. Richard Danzig isn’t going to be deputy defense secretary. We’re still waiting to hear about Gration, Ben Rhodes, Denis McDonough and Samantha Power, all of whom were instrumental to designing the Obama campaign’s foreign policy positions. Obama, from what I understand, is still close with all of them, but it’s still unclear where, if anywhere, they’ll find themselves during in the administration.

(For all the Obama-Kremlinologists out there, let me be really, really clear that I am just musing on this on my own behalf, not channelling any of the aforementioned individuals’ thinking. So please no speculation to the contrary.)

Update: Thanks to alert commenter RecordChecker, it appears that Gration will be NASA Administrator. So that’s one down! Apologies for missing this.