[dehai-news] (NY Times) A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy


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From: emmanuel (emmanuel@bayou.com)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2008 - 23:50:36 EDT


July 18, 2008
*A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy

*By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON — Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator
Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a
briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a
set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate
is likely to be asked about international relations during the day.

One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Mr. Obama supported the
decision by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a
timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements
with the United States. The answer, provided to Mr. Obama with bullet
points, was yes — or “a genuine opportunity,” as he put it in a speech
on Iraq this week.

Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a
huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a
mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national
security experience remains a concern to many voters.

“It is unwieldy, no question,” said Denis McDonough, 38, Mr. Obama’s top
foreign policy aide, speaking of an infrastructure that has been divided
into 20 teams based on regions and issues, and that has recently
absorbed, with some tensions, the top foreign policy advisers from
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. “But an
administration is unwieldy, too. We also know that it’s messier when you
don’t get as much information as you can.”

The group is on the spot this week as Mr. Obama is planning to make his
first overseas foray as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee,
with voters at home and leaders abroad watching closely to see how he
handles himself on the global stage.

Unlike George W. Bush, who entered the presidential race in 2000 with
scant exposure to national security issues, Mr. Obama has served since
his election to the Senate in 2004 on the Foreign Relations Committee
and has had a running tutorial from aides steeped in the issues. His
campaign says that he is well prepared and that he often alters and
expands on the talking points provided to him by his foreign policy
advisers.

Most of the core members of his team served in government during
President Bill Clinton’s administration and by and large were junior to
the advisers who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic
nomination. But they remain in charge within the campaign even as it
takes on more senior figures from the Clinton era, like two former
secretaries of state, Madeleine K. Albright and Warren Christopher, and
are positioned to put their own stamp on the party’s foreign policy.

Most of them, like the candidate they are working for, distinguished
themselves from Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy camp by early opposition
to the Iraq war. They also tend to be more liberal and to emphasize
using the “soft power” of diplomacy and economic aid to try to advance
the interests of the United States. Still, their positions fall well
within centrist Democratic foreign policy thinking, and none of the deep
policy fissures that have divided the Republicans into two camps, the
neoconservatives and the so-called pragmatists, have opened.

Mr. Obama’s core team is led by Susan E. Rice, an assistant secretary of
state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, who has pushed
for a tougher response to the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, and
Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton’s first national security adviser, who was
criticized for the administration’s failure to confront the genocide in
Rwanda in 1994 and now acknowledges the inaction as a major mistake.

The core group also includes Gregory B. Craig, a former top official in
the Clinton State Department who served as the president’s lawyer during
his impeachment trial; Richard J. Danzig, a Navy secretary in the
Clinton administration; Mark W. Lippert, Mr. Obama’s former Senate
foreign policy adviser, who just returned from a Navy tour of duty in
Iraq; and Mr. McDonough.

Mr. McDonough and Mr. Lippert are paid by the campaign and based in
Chicago, and the rest are outside advisers who volunteer their time from
Washington.

The group no longer includes Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Harvard human rights expert who resigned in March after she was quoted
calling Mrs. Clinton a “monster.” But Mr. Lake still talks to Ms. Power,
and Mr. Obama sent a long personal tribute that was read at her wedding
in Ireland this month.

Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has a far
smaller and looser foreign policy advisory operation, about 75 people in
all, and none are organized into teams. In 2004, the Democratic
presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, had a foreign policy structure
similar in scale to Mr. Obama’s, but it had limited influence on the
candidate, who had spent 20 years in the Senate, former advisers said.
Mr. Obama is not yet receiving the government intelligence briefing that
is typically made available to a presidential candidate upon becoming
his party’s nominee.

Mr. Obama’s infrastructure funnels hundreds of e-mail messages and reams
of position papers and talking points each day to members of the core
group, who in turn seek advice or make requests for more information to
team members down the line. Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy for Mr.
Clinton and the first President Bush and a member of the Obama
campaign’s Middle East team, is frequently asked by Ms. Rice, Mr. Lake
or Mr. McDonough for help on framing Mr. Obama’s comments on Iran’s
nuclear program and its potential threat to Israel.

“They’ve asked for substantive help: ‘Can I take a look at language on
Iran?’ ” Mr. Ross said. “Or sometimes I’ve been asked questions to
explain the administration’s approach on Iran.” Mr. Ross participated in
a conference call last week with Mr. Obama and other advisers to prepare
for the senator’s foreign trip, and he will travel with Mr. Obama in
Israel and the West Bank city of Ramallah and at other stops. Mr. Ross
described Mr. Obama in the conference call as focused on “drilling down”
into the issues on the trip.

Another person who has contributed outside advice is former Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell, whom Mr. Obama has been wooing. Mr. Powell, a
Republican, has a friendship of decades with Mr. McCain, but friends say
he has felt excluded from Mr. McCain’s foreign policy operation and was
impressed when Mr. Obama called on him in June. Mr. Powell also met
around the same time with Mr. McCain.

 From day to day, the main point of contact with Mr. Obama and his
foreign policy team is Mr. McDonough, who is soon to be joined in
Chicago by Mr. Lippert. “If there’s something big in the morning, we
will either e-mail or call Obama,” said Mr. Lippert, who performed a
similar job, although on a smaller scale, when he was Mr. Obama’s
foreign policy adviser in the Senate. “So instead of having 20 people at
your fingertips, you have 300. The pressure is there, the time is much
shorter, but the principle is the same — lining up the calls, briefing
the candidate, e-mails, op-eds, statements.”

Out in the netherworld of the 300, advisers often say they are unclear
about what happens to all the policy paragraphs they churn out on
request. “It’s all mysterious what we send him and what gets to him,”
said Michael A. McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford University who
leads the Russia and Eurasia team for the Obama campaign.

Other team leaders include Ivo H. Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings
Institution who has organized his 40-member nuclear nonproliferation
team into eight working groups, and Philip H. Gordon, another scholar at
the institution, who is in charge of Mr. Obama’s Europe team.

Although Mr. Obama’s team has yet to show any public evidence of deep
policy divisions, it has its share of personal tensions, not least those
born of integrating Mrs. Clinton’s former advisers into the effort. In
that process, the old Clinton administration hierarchy has been turned
upside down.

One person who is not a team leader — and who was not included in a
13-member “senior working group” that the Obama campaign announced last
month — is Richard Holbrooke, a United Nations ambassador under Mr.
Clinton who was mentioned as a potential secretary of state if Mrs.
Clinton had won the presidency. Mr. Holbrooke has long had a rivalry
with Mr. Lake, who was widely criticized in Washington for his
performance as national security adviser in the Clinton White House.

The Obama campaign has since said that Mr. Holbrooke, who mediated an
end to the war in Bosnia in 1995, is on the team. But Mr. Holbrooke, who
declined to comment, has found himself in the position of a general from
a defeated army who must now seek peace.

*******************************************************

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