10:22 pm
The 300 is… Me.
One of the downsides of having been largely offline over the past 36 hours is that I’m just now getting caught up on the news. So I know I’m late to this story, but I think I’ll make this worth your time.
In case you missed it, the New York Times had a big exclusive today: it turns out that there are three hundred people advising Barack Obama on foreign policy!!
Gasp.
I don’t know which part of this amazed me more: that the Times regarded this as news or that the blogosphere swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
You see, I have a little different perspective on all of this.
I am… wait for it… cue the movie music…
ONE OF THE 300!
Yes, you may touch the hem of my robe.
But wait a second. Something is wrong here. Where is my crimson robe? My spear? My six pack abs? If I’m going to throw myself off a cliff, I want my six-pack abs!
Oh wait, wrong 300.
But I’m pretty sure I am one of that other 300 — the Obama 300. Well, maybe not after this post.
About nine months ago, I contacted some folks who I knew were already involved in the Obama campaign. I let them know that I was willing to help out on policy. A little while later I got an email thanking me for my interest and assigning me to a team of other people interested in the same issues. Every few weeks, the team leader sent out an email asking us to draft or comment on something. He also passed on a request from the campaign for us to volunteer for the ground campaign, which I and many others were more than happy to do.
More recently, we’ve started to organize ourselves a bit more, and have been tasked to write some briefs on specific issues. We’re even dividing into more specialized subgroups.
But I have absolutely no illusions about this. We are not Barack Obama’s “mini State Department,” as the Times claims. In fact, one of the main purposes of these teams is… to keep us out of the way of the people actually making the decisions.
You see, every four years, every presidential campaign is inundated with officeseekerwannabes, some idealistic, some not so much. There are newbies who have never before been involved in a campaign, worker bees who have served in mid-level policy positions in previous administrations, and Prominent People who don’t have much time but want to help where they can. All of them have some sort of expertise on a given issue. All of them want the candidate to win. And almost all of them know that if you want a job in the next administration, you have to put in your time.
So what is a campaign to do? You can’t have three hundred people advising a candidate, no matter what the Times may think. If a campaign is smart (and that certainly is true of the Obama campaign) they do what any sensible organization does: they form committees. Except they call them “foreign policy advisory teams,” invite all the officeseekerwannabes to join, and then (for the most part)… ignore them.
Am I being cynical here? A little. But my disdain is for the Times’s breathless reporting, not the process.
Here’s the thing. Four years ago, I co-coordinated one of these groups for the Kerry campaign. I was one of two people who designated roles, set deadlines, assigned responsibility for drafting, and held conference calls. Lots and lots of conference calls. It was our job to get stuff done when the campaign needed it. I wrote two of the five “core” position papers as well as a few smaller ones and the relevant sections of the platform and the debate prep book.
I’m not trying to brag — I just want to give you a feel for what was (and is) involved. There were plenty of other people who did even more.
Did we have any influence on the Kerry campaign? I have no idea. I know that the people managing foreign policy for Kerry — Rand Beers, Dan Feldman, and Susan Rice, among others — did a good job of making us feel like we were being heard — just like I was trying to do with the people on my team. But I never actually heard a talking point I wrote come out of Kerry’s mouth.
Our team had 50 people on it. There were 20 teams. Now think about that for a moment. Do the math.
So why weren’t there reporters covering the number of people on the Kerry team four years ago?
Oh. Wait. There. Were. Took me five minutes on the Google to find the stories. Except back then, we were called a “mini-NSC” instead of a “mini-State:”
“I’ve put together for Kerry a small group of mostly younger foreign policy advisers, a sort of mini-NSC,” says [Dan] Feldman, 36. Feldman says he helped pick the group by the expertise of its members to mirror the various directorates within the National Security Council, including experts on areas like the Middle East or Africa and on topics such as counter-terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. “We have a weekly conference call, write position papers, and do opposition research on the Bush administration,” says Feldman.
Nice going Times. You just ran a front-page story that is virtually the same as one reported by you and others four years ago.
And no matter what the Times may think, Obama doesn’t have The 300 because he is a neophyte on foreign policy. In fact, from my experience, he is better briefed on national security issues than either Bill Clinton or John Kerry were at this point in their campaigns. The core group of people — the ones actually advising him — have done their jobs well. But you know what? He’s pretty smart too.
That core group also happens to have done this before on previous campaigns. They know a process like this works. But they also know that it happens to be a great way of putting together a pool of… potential candidates for jobs that need to be filled quickly, given the fact that we’re fighting two wars and everything.
And do you think Obama is the only candidate in this cycle to put together such a team? Hillary Clinton had as many people helping her, and no one suggested she was inexperienced. I have a friend who was going to play a similar role for Mark Warner before he decided not to run. I know people who were trying to do something similar for Richardson, and I’m sure Edwards did too. And what about all the stories about Giuliani’s scary brain trust? Remember them? Were they there because Giuliani was a neophyte?
In fact, I would be suspicious of a candidate who doesn’t have something like this in place.
Paging John McCain. Senator McCain, flashing red courtesy phone please.
McCain said today that he doesn’t have — or need — a similarly sized group.
I don’t believe him. He is either
- lying;
- oblivious; or
- the first candidate in twenty years not to have at least 300 people in the national security community trying to line themselves up for a job.
And given his string of gaffes on things as basic as the existence of Czechoslovakia and the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, he should think about adding a few more. Say, I don’t know, maybe 300?
I’ll have more on stupidities of the Times story tomorrow.
Loading ...
