but not naive.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama_mon_nusep17,0,2613902,print.storywww.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama_mon_nusep17,0,4610954.story
chicagotribune.com
CAMPAIGN 2008
Obama's policy team loaded with all-stars
Criticized by some as lean on experience, the Democrat has drawn a huge circle of advisers with expertise honed in the circles of power
By Mike Dorning
Washington Bureau
September 17, 2007
Barack Obama's presidential bid may have a well-cultivated insurgent feel, as the candidate both benefits and suffers politically from a relatively thin record of experience in Washington.
But the swelling team of policy advisers who have joined his campaign shows a politician grounded in his party's intellectual mainstream and well-connected within the capital's Democratic establishment.
As Obama rapidly transitioned from a senator with less than three years in office to a presidential candidate who has delivered detailed policy speeches, he has assembled a personal think tank that easily outsizes any of the established Washington policy institutes that provide intellectual fodder for the political war of ideas.
On foreign policy alone, some 200 experts are providing the Obama campaign with assistance of some sort, arranged into 20 subgroups. On the domestic front, more than 500 policy experts are contributing ideas, campaign aides said. Veterans of previous election campaigns say the scale of the policy operation resembles the full-blown effort candidates typically undertake for a general election campaign rather than the more stripped-down versions common for the primary season.
Senior advisers include heavy hitters from the administration of President Bill Clinton, husband of Obama's primary rival.
Anthony Lake, Clinton's original national security adviser, is helping coordinate foreign policy. So is Susan Rice, a Clinton assistant secretary of state and protege of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general, is among those providing expertise on legal policy.
"These are not outsiders trying to tear down the temple," said Philip Zelikow, a former senior Bush administration foreign policy official and executive director of the Sept. 11 commission.
"If you guess that he's surrounded himself with people who are highly ideological, left-wing or dovish, you would guess wrong," added Zelikow, now a history professor at the University of Virginia. "These folks cannot easily be typecast by ideology."Free-market economic team
Key economic advisers include a few Washington veterans such as Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive and former chief of staff to then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the Cabinet member most closely identified with the Clinton administration's pro-free trade, business-friendly policies.
There are also several scholars from prestigious universities whose approaches are anchored in dominant market-oriented economic thought. One is Austan Goolsbee, a 38-year-old star University of Chicago Business School professor and New York Times columnist with centrist Democratic views who has argued for eliminating tax returns for many Americans with simple finances.
Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, described Obama's top economic advisers as "mainstream with a dash of creativity."
"These are people who think new thoughts -- within the mainstream, new without a capital N," said Blinder, now a professor at Princeton University.Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Voters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rightly disappointed by the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the two remaining Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. However, there are still some real discernable differences to be taken into account. Indeed, given the power the United States has in the world, even minimal differences in policies can have a major difference in the lives of millions of people.
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Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, who on average tend to be younger than those of the former first lady, include mainstream strategic analysts who have worked with previous Democratic administrations, such as former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig. They have also included some of the more enlightened and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. His team also includes the noted human rights scholar and international law advocate Samantha Power - author of a recent New Yorker article on U.S. manipulation of the UN in post-invasion Iraq - and other liberal academics. Some of his advisors, however, have particularly poor records on human rights and international law, such as retired General Merrill McPeak, a backer of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Dennis Ross, a supporter of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Contrasting Issues
While some of Obama’s key advisors, like Larry Korb, have expressed concern at the enormous waste from excess military spending, Clinton’s advisors have been strong supporters of increased resources for the military.
While Obama advisors Susan Rice and Samantha Power have stressed the importance of U.S. multilateral engagement, Albright allies herself with the jingoism of the Bush administration, taking the attitude that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future.”
While Susan Rice has emphasized how globalization has led to uneven development that has contributed to destabilization and extremism and has stressed the importance of bottom-up anti-poverty programs, Berger and Albright have been outspoken supporters of globalization on the current top-down neo-liberal lines.
Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that "the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4940
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