On The Sly
Laura Rozen has an interesting item about a secret dinner Barack Obama had with some foreign policy experts outside his circle of official advisers:
[Lee] Hamilton, the longtime House member from Indiana who cochaired the Iraq Study Group, the 9/11 Commission, and numerous others over the years, has become a kind of wise-man mentor to Obama. Last Thursday, the Wilson Center president assembled a small collection of scholars on the Middle East and South Asia for a meeting that stretched through dinner for hours into the night.
Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner: Iran scholar Haleh Esfandiari; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid (who had flown in from Lahore); Obama friend and foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power of Harvard University (who accompanied PEOTUS to the meeting); incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; and a few others. Obama told the group, none of whom reached would discuss the details, that he already felt in the bubble and was trying his best to meet with independent experts. [...]
A source close to Hamilton explained that he had a long relationship with Obama, and noted that many former Hamilton staffers had gone on to be key staffers and foreign policy advisors to Obama.
Among them: Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who wrote speeches and was a policy advisor for Hamilton for several years; Obama’s top foreign-policy advisor Denis McDonough; who worked for Hamilton on the staff of the House International Relations Committee, Obama Mideast advisor Daniel Shapiro, who worked for Hamilton as his professional staff member on the Middle East when Hamilton was chairman of the then-House Foreign Affairs Committee in the 103rd Congress (1993-94); Dan Restrepo, a top Obama Latin America advisor now with the Center for American Progress who worked for Hamilton on the Hill; and Mara Rudman, who worked for Hamilton on the Hill and is now a member of the formal Obama transition team.
There are a few noteworthy things about this. One is that Roger Cohen was observing earlier this week, echoed by many others, that it might be good for Obama to have some people of Arab or Persian ancestry in his brain trust on Mideast issues and not just a spectrum of Jewish-American opinion. And evidently Obama sees some truth to this or he wouldn’t be reaching out to this group. But so how come there aren’t any names like this being bandied about for the top jobs? And then there’s the matter of this national security team featuring Denis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, Daniel Shapiro, and Samantha Power with Lee Hamilton in the background as an eminence grise. That sounds to be an awful lot like the Obama national security team I remember from the campaign. What ever happened to those guys? Or to non-Hamilton folks like Scott Gration and Richard Danzig? Obama feels like he’s already “in the bubble” but it appears to be a bubble overwhelmingly of his own devising. The names we’ve got for the most senior positions—Gates, Lynn, Flournoy, Clinton, Steinberg, Slaughter, Jones, Donilon—are all well-qualified people, but it’s really striking that none of them are Obama’s people. It’s not surprising to me that he might start to feel uncomfortable with that situation, but I don’t really see why he created the situation in the first place.
32 Responses to “On The Sly”
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January 16th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Maybe it came from wanting Clinton to be his SoS so badly that he gave her the choice to fill out the state department as she pleased, which I believe has been reported.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
the one area where Obama noticeably does not feel particularly confident about himself. odd. but, I mean, we all know that Obama has a little bit of a weakness for “bipartisan conventional wisdom”-based solutions, despite his own superior instincts. its almost, like, a social thing. knows he’s right, but is afraid to act on it.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
DTM, that’s a good point. One of the reasons people aspire to executive power is because they want to reward their allies and, by extension, punish/shut out their enemies. Obama lacks that sort of instinct, for better or for worse, and as a consequence seems to have missed out on the opportunity to surround himself with the sort of loyalists he would normally want as people to implement his policies.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
As president, it will presumably be more difficult to schedule an off-the-record dinner with informal advisors. Perhaps this is, in part, why Obama is adamant about holding on to his Blackberry and his email account — he wants to keep a back channel of communications to knowledgeable friends and allies that, for coalition-building reasons, he hasn’t put in official positions of power.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I’m just curious what this means:
Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner:
Does this mean that it is not a formal government function? That notes/transcriptions were not kept, whereas they might be if he had dinner with his regular advisers? Clearly it wasn’t so “off the record” that it wasn’t reported…
That somehow makes the dinner sound as though it was improper in some way. What gives?
January 16th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
a Metric reference? If so, bravo
January 16th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
It’s easier to rectify the bubble problem than it is to change the reflexive reaction of the DC political establishment. There are worse things in the world than having Samantha Power assembling kitchen cabinet foreign policy advice and maybe that’s even more effective than having her in a policy job in government. Obama has said again and again that he is the one that calls the play and others execute it. I think Gates and Clinton are about executing the play more than drawing it up.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I guess it will take us a long time to know and understand the many deals that were struck, power arrangements that were brokered and ransoms that were extracted by heavyweight players along Obama’s path to the White House. We may never know them all. But no doubt some of his appointments reflect commitments Obama was required to make in order to acquire key supporters – or at least to neutralize potential adversaries.
I was listening to another account last night about Barton Gelman’s book on Cheney, and it still remains stunning how actively and deliberately Cheney worked to keep Bush in the dark on so many issues, and to control, manage and limit the information Bush received. By meeting with these outside groups from time to time, Obama at least sends a strong message to his own administration team that they should represent facts to him straight during briefings, because he has sources of nutrition in his information diet beyond the ones those to which his department and agency heads might try to restrict him.
Who is Obama’s inner circle? Who, among all these appointments, are the people Obama really trusts deeply, and are those to whom he will turn when he needs to escape the infighting and bureaucratic scheming and form his own judgments among smart friends. Jarret? Axelrod?
January 16th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
along the lines of joejoejoe’s comment, 2 related potential reasons why he’s fashioned this particular bubble:
1. He’ll have excellent people working for him in an official capacity, AND he’ll have excellent and even more loyal people advising him in an unofficial capacity. If you install all of “your” people in your administration, you then wouldn’t be able to count on the “old hands” like Clinton, Gates, Jones, etc. to give you unvarnished advice on a regular basis. Right now, that’s their job.
2. Making that their job now helps with the politics and “post-partisan” image making. And that affords you an incredibly deep bench–Gration, Danzig, Power, McDonough, Shapiro, etc.–from which to mint all-star starters 3 or 4 years from now.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
DTM – I hope so. but in relation to the point Mr. Yglesias was making, it seems like he may have boxed himself out of his own realm of preferred policy here just by going with so many people who are, let’s face it, hawks and n00bs. where is Samantha Power? where are the OTHER people who realized Iraq was wrong? etc.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
You think Obama should hire some people of Arab or Persian decent for foreign policy advice? Hoo boy, wait till TNR hears about this.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
at last you mention Samantha Power, I’ve been asking about her role for some time. The only response i got until now was “Samantha who?”. I wish someone would dig into this, is she blackballed because of the quote about Clinton?
January 16th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
While Samantha Power is undoubtedly a humanist, I don’t think her understanding of what US foreign policy should be is too advanced beyond, “OMG THERE”S GENOCIDE HAPPENING SOMEWHERE LETS SAVE EVERYONE”
That’s a very unnuanced critique of her <_<
January 16th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
This is a weak post by Matt’s standards: Bubble doesn’t have to do with WHO you feel comfortable with but with the notion of groupthink… everyone agreeing. Which is what Obama according to people doesn’t like – he likes the argument part of the process.
Then he writes “And then there’s the matter of this national security team featuring Denis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, Daniel Shapiro, and Samantha Power with Lee Hamilton in the background as an eminence grise. That sounds to be an awful lot like the Obama national security team I remember from the campaign. What ever happened to those guys?”
We don’t yet know the composition of the NSC. That is where most of the inner Obama folks will likely go. And that makes complete sense. The TOP dudes at State and Defence, especially in the midst of an econ crisis, would go to experienced folks…. ie people from the Clinton admin and who know Hillary better. And really, let’s admit this, Clinton and Obama FP people really are the same on most issues. The difference is that the Obama people may be a little less cynical, more daring to try new things.
January 16th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Matt writes:
“that it might be good for Obama to have some people of Arab or Persian ancestry in his brain trust on Mideast issues and not just a spectrum of Jewish-American opinion.”
Indeed.
I think we may be seeing a historic shift in which “Jewish-American opinion,” which was bulwarked by huge profits during the long-running Financial Bubble, is losing the objective basis of its power over American foreign policy. Whether Obama yet realizes that or not, however, is a different question. Most of his official nominations so far have been extremely deferential to the old pre-Crash status quo.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
I bet they spent the whole night drinking bourbon and playing Diplomacy.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Meanwhile, we have this from his Ambassador to the UN:
Obama’s envoy to UN says Israel ‘treated unfairly’
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3657005,00.html
“Change We Can Believe In”
Yeah, right, thanks, Obama.
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