A Working Class Hero is Something to Be

Both Tom Edsall of HuffPo, here, and The Wall Street Journal, here, take a look at Obama and Hillary's foreign policy advisers and try to draw conclusions about what the personalities mean for a future presidency. While many of them served in the Clinton administration, and most of them serve in respectable Democrat-oriented think tanks, universities, and investment banks, as out-of-power Democratic foreign policy advisers have traditionally done, I think it's fair to say that here Clinton really would be Clinton II and if you liked that, you'll like this. It's the Democratic Establishment, for better and for worse. Obama's faces are fresher and more open to questioning the verities of the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. It's not that they define themselves in opposition to these places; it's just that they are less invested in the kinds of analyses that have traditionally defined bipartisan Establishment thinking. If the secretary of state is not Holbrooke, it'll be Biden. You could do far worse, and believe me, we have. (The Republicans abandoned their bipartisans long ago, and its members had to either fight or switch. Most switched, and ended up lending their legitimacy to the Bush debacle until its debacle-like qualities were evident to all.)

Obama's refusal to endorse the war, his early embrace of Samantha Power during his first year in the Senate and his association with Sarah Sewall and Larry Korb, mentioned above, speak extremely well both of his self-confidence and his willingness to look at problems anew. An Obama presidency may have a steeper learning curve than a Clinton presidency in foreign policy, but it may learn more worthwhile things. (I wish I could include Edwards in this post, but I have no idea who his foreign policy advisers are, and after reading his Foreign Affairs piece, I'm still not sure what he thinks our foreign policy ought to be, except different ...)

Read the whole Altercation here.