Political Wrinkles - View Single Post - Cast of hundreds advises Obama on foreign policy

saltwn · #1 (**permalink**) 07-18-2008, 07:05 PM

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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.

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.

Obama's core team is led by Susan 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, Bill 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 Craig, a former top official in the Clinton State Department who served as the president's lawyer during his impeachment trial; Richard Danzig, a navy secretary in the Clinton administration; Mark Lippert, Obama's former Senate foreign policy adviser, who just returned from a navy tour of duty in Iraq; and McDonough.

McDonough and Lippert are paid by the campaign and based in Chicago, and the rest are outside advisers who volunteer their time from Washington...(more of the Herald Tribune article)...BBC NEWS | Americas | Viral video mocks US campaign

Well I'd say he's at least putting his campaign contributions to good use.

This is curious:

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Obama is not yet receiving the government intelligence briefing that is typically made available to a presidential candidate upon becoming his party's nominee.

I wonder if McCain is?

And here's another tid bit:

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