Cast of hundreds advises Obama on foreign policy

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

Quote:

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:

Quote:

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:

Quote:

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

faithful_servant · #2 (**permalink**) 07-18-2008, 07:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by saltwn

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

This is curious:

I wonder if McCain is?

And here's another tid bit:

People keep saying the McCain is just Buch pt. 3, from the sound of this, Obama's not much more than Clinton 2.5. Same bunch of people who so utterly and completely flopped in the foreign relations end of thing for Clinton are now heading up advising Obama.

cnredd · #3 (**permalink**) 07-18-2008, 08:04 PM

If you think 300 foreign policy advisors is bad, just imagine the kind of bloated government we'd have to look forward to...

cnredd · #4 (**permalink**) 07-18-2008, 08:44 PM

Excellent commentary I found on this while surfing...

Three Hundred??

Quote:

Barack Obama has 300 advisors on foreign policy. What?? That includes the Winnie-the Pooh fellow and 299 other “experts” who, we are led to believe, didn’t catch Obama’s “syntax” error on “undivided Jerusalem.” Did not one of the 300 know about the history of presidential summitry? And none of them thought it might have saved a heap of trouble for Obama if once during his primary campaign he had a briefing with General Petraeus or trip to Iraq?

One of several things is going on. One possibility: this unwieldy and bloated operation is utterly ineffective and doesn’t prevent or catch errors. There are lots of them, but they aren’t very good, even according to other Democrats. Or: they are there for window dressing to provide the patina of national security expertise when, in fact, the major foreign policy objectives are really driven by domestic ideology (e.g. we can’t admit Iraq has anything to do with Al Qaeda or the netroot will go nuts).

Most troubling is the possibility that the performance of the campaign’s foreign policy apparatus is a preview of the Obama administration’s foreign policy apparatus. There are apparently hundreds (if not thousands) of folks waiting to join the State and Defense Departments who hold beliefs that defy evidence and logic. They honestly believe that Iraq is unimportant, unconditional direct talks with Iran will unlock the promise of world peace, we can talk up protectionism at home without scaring our trading partners, and the less input from military commanders in war zones the better.

Take your pick as to which theory makes the most sense. But 300? I guess it takes a lot of people to script a foreign trip so tightly that there is no room for a gaffe.

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