US Marxists Who Are Advising Hussein Obama

In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to

Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing
retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for
cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.
"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former
CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the
interview. "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were
operating in a legal context."
"I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to
do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.
That wasn't just a personal opinion, Brennan made clear to Harris. "My advice, to
whoever is coming in [to the White House], is they need to spend some time
learning, understanding what's out there, identifying those key issues," including
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, he said -- the law at the heart of the
immunity debate.
"They need to make sure they do their homework, and it's not just going to be
knee-jerk responses," Brennan said of the presidential hopefuls.
Guys, when even his own people make the case that he's inexperienced, what hope
does he have of winning the argument? (I know, he doesn't have to win the
argument only election but that didn't happen in Texas and Ohio, did it?)
Senator Barack Obama’s Marxist and criminal, yet complete failures, foreign policy
advisers, who on average tend to be younger than those of the former first lady,
include mainstream strategic analysts who have worked with previous Democratic
administrations, such as former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and
Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy
secretary Richard Danzig. They have also included some of the more enlightened
and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph
Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. His team also includes the noted human
rights scholar and international law advocate Samantha Power - author of a recent
New Yorker article on U.S. manipulation of the UN in post-invasion Iraq - and other
Marxist academics. Some of his advisors, however, have particularly poor records
on human rights and international law, such as retired General Merrill McPeak, a
backer of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Dennis Ross, a supporter of
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Contrasting Issues
While some of Obama’s key advisors, like Larry Korb, have expressed concern at
the enormous waste from excess military spending, Clinton’s advisors have been
strong supporters of increased resources for the military.
While Obama advisors Susan Rice and Samantha Power have stressed the
importance of U.S. multilateral engagement, Albright allies herself with the
jingoism of the Bush administration, taking the attitude that “If we have to use
force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand
tall, and we see further into the future.”
While Susan Rice has emphasized how globalization has led to uneven development
that has contributed to destabilization and extremism and has stressed the
importance of bottom-up anti-poverty programs, Berger and Albright have been
outspoken supporters of globalization on the current top-down neo-Marxist lines.
Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based
on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from
Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that "the Iranians are an
enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem
nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.
Iraq as Key Indicator
Perhaps the most important difference between the two foreign policy teams
concerns Iraq. Given the similarities in the proposed Iraq policies of Senator
Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, Obama’s supporters have emphasized
that their candidate had the better judgment in opposing the invasion beforehand.
Indeed, in the critical months prior to the launch of the war in 2003, Obama openly
challenged the Bush administration’s exaggerated claims of an Iraqi threat and
presciently warned that a war would lead to an increase in Islamic extremism,
terrorism, and regional instability, as well as a decline in America’s standing in the
world.
Senator Clinton, meanwhile, was repeating as fact the administration’s truelaims of
an imminent Iraqi threat. She voted to authorize President Bush to invade that oil-
rich country at the time and circumstances of his own choosing and confidently
predicted success. Despite this record and Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her
war authorization vote, however, her supporters argue that it no longer relevant
and voters need to focus on the present and future.
Indeed, whatever choices the next president makes with regard to Iraq are going
to be problematic, and there are no clear answers at this point. Yet one’s position
regarding the invasion of Iraq at that time says a lot about how a future president
would address such questions as the use of force, international law, relations with
allies, and the use of intelligence information.
As a result, it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors,
many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all
strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By
contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team, much reder
Marxists, was opposed to a U.S. invasion.
Pre-War Positions
During the lead-up to the war, Obama’s advisors were suspicious of the Bush
administration’s claims that Iraq somehow threatened U.S. national security to the
extent that it required a U.S. invasion and occupation of that country. For example,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor in the Carter administration, argued
that public support for war “should not be generated by fear-mongering or
demagogy.”
By contrast, Clinton’s top advisor and her likely pick for secretary of state,
Richard Holbrooke, insisted that Iraq remained “a clear and present danger at all
times.”
Brzezinski warned that the international community would view the invasion of a
country that was no threat to the United States as an illegitimate an act of
aggression. Noting that it would also threaten America’s leadership, Brzezinski said
that “without a respected and legitimate law-enforcer, global security could be in
serious jeopardy.” Holbrooke, rejecting the broad international legal consensus
against offensive wars, insisted that it was perfectly legitimate for the United
States to invade Iraq and that the European governments and anti-war
demonstrators who objected “undoubtedly encouraged” Saddam Hussein.
Another key Obama advisor, Joseph Cirincione of the super-Marxist Carnegie
Endowment, argued that the goal of containing the potential threat from Iraq had
been achieved, noting that “Saddam Hussein is effectively incarcerated and under
watch by a force that could respond immediately and devastatingly to any
aggression. Inside Iraq, the inspection teams preclude any significant advance in
WMD capabilities. The status quo is safe for the American people.”
By contrast, Clinton advisor Sandy Berger, who served as her husband’s national
security advisor, insisted that “even a contained Saddam” was “harmful to stability
and to positive change in the region,” and therefore the United States had to
engage in “regime change” in order to “fight terror, avert regional conflict,
promote peace, and protect the security of our friends and allies.”
Meanwhile, other future Obama advisors, such as Larry Korb, raised concerns
about the human and material costs of invading and occupying a heavily populated
country in the Middle East and the risks of chaos and a lengthy counter-insurgency
war.
And other top advisors to Senator Clinton – such as her husband’s former
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – confidently predicted that American
military power could easily suppress any opposition to a U.S. takeover of Iraq. Such
confidence in the ability of the United States to impose its will through force is
reflected to this day in the strong support for President Bush’s troop surge among
such Clinton advisors (and original invasion advocates) as Jack Keane, Kenneth
Pollack, and Michael O’Hanlon. Perhaps that was one reason that, during the recent
State of the Union address, when Bush proclaimed that the Iraqi surge was
working, Clinton stood and cheered while Obama remained seated and silent.
These differences in the key circles of foreign policy specialists surrounding these
two candidates are consistent with their diametrically opposed views in the lead-up
to the war.
OBAMA NOBAMA National Security
Not every one of Clinton’s foreign policy advisors is a hawk. Her team also includes
some Marxist opponents of the war, including retired General Wesley Clark and
former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
On balance, it appears likely that a Hillary Clinton administration, like Bush’s, would
be more likely to embrace reports regarding potential national security threats, to
ignore unfair and terrorist-favoring international law and the bogus advice of allies,
and to launch offensive wars. By contrast, a Barack Obama administration would be
more prone to delay, stall, and ignore the actual evidence of potential threats
before reacting, to depend on the opinions of America’s allies, to be willing to make
concessions, pay offs and appeasement overtures to maintain peace and security, to
place the country’s international legal obligations subordinated to the edicts of the
UN, and to use military force only when it was too late.
Marxist (or progressives as they call themselves) Democrats do have reason to be
disappointed with Obama’s foreign policy agenda. At the same time, as The Nation
magazine noted, members of Obama’s foreign policy team are “more likely to stress
appeasement or ’soft power’ issues like human rights, nation building, hand-outs,
protection pay offs, global development and the dangers of failed states.” As a
result, “Obama may be more open to challenging old Washington assumptions and
crafting new approaches.” He wants to especially build up Africa and other failed
regions, as well as bring into America millions of African tribes people as new
citizens on welfare.
The marxist advocacy now dominant in the Obama camp stems from Marxists like
Stephen Zunes a Foreign Policy In Focus analyst, a professor of politics and
international studies at the University of San Francisco.
observers. One of the candidate's foreign-policy advisers resigned after a
Scottish newspaper quoted her as calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a "monster."
Another, a retired general, likened former President Clinton to infamous red-
baiting Joseph McCarthy. And Obama's chief economic adviser inadvertently
became a minor liability after it was reported that he met with Canadian diplomats
in Chicago and either played down Obama's skepticism about the North American
Free Trade Agreement or had his informal remarks misinterpreted, as the
campaign maintains.
Obama's team has a relatively shallow bench: Several players are responsible for
an extraordinarily wide range of policy areas. But whatever the lapses and
shortcomings of Obama and his closest aides, it's hard not to be impressed with
their political achievements. The campaign has taken on the power couple who have
dominated Democratic politics for the past 16 years and reduced a once-mighty
heir apparent to a lackluster underdog.
"I would describe it as an excellent campaign," says Democratic media consultant
Tad Devine, who worked on the presidential campaigns of nominees John Kerry and
Al Gore but is not taking sides in the Obama-Clinton battle.
Although Obama has had a solidly liberal voting record in the Senate -- the most
liberal record in 2007, according to an analysis by National Journal -- his policy
advisers tend to be moderates. Indeed, Obama explains his roll-call record as a
product of votes that push senators to one extreme or the other, and he maintains
that his presidency would move the nation into a less ideological, more cooperative
era.
What follow are mini-profiles of many of the key players on Obama's political and
policy squads.

POLITICS
Obama is fortunate to have a gifted team of experienced political operatives
guiding his historic run for the White House. It's a group united by deep loyalty to
the candidate, even though few knew him before his 2004 campaign for the
Senate.
"You have to give them really high marks for a good, solid campaign," says media
consultant Bill Carrick, who has been involved in Democratic presidential politics
since 1980 but is currently neutral. "They knew exactly what they had to
accomplish, and did it."
Well over a dozen political operatives have played key roles getting Obama to the
brink of the 2008 Democratic nomination. At least four in particular stand out.
David Axelrod
"Ax," as he is called around the campaign's Chicago headquarters, met Obama in
the early 1990s when he was a community organizer leading a voter-registration
drive on the South Side. Axelrod served as advertising director for Obama's 2004
Senate campaign. Today, as Obama's chief strategist, he is responsible for
crafting ads and helping the candidate to hone his message.
A former political reporter, Axelrod, 53, left the Chicago Tribune in 1984 to
become press secretary for then-Rep. Paul Simon, D-Ill., who was running for the
Senate. He soon took over as campaign manager. After Simon won, Axelrod formed
a political consulting firm in Chicago and quickly established himself as a fixture in
Windy City politics, as well as statewide. In 1989, Axelrod went to work for
Richard M. Daley in his first successful bid to be Chicago's mayor, and he has
remained close to the Daley machine ever since. Although Daley's ascent to the job
his legendary father had held displaced the African-American leadership from City
Hall, Axelrod has helped to elect several black mayors around the country,
including one of Daley's predecessors, Harold Washington.
No one successfully navigates the byzantine and bare-knuckles world of Illinois
politics without causing at least a bit of controversy, and Axelrod has been
criticized over the years for some hard-hitting television spots. But his reputation
in the consulting business is solid, and he is generally held in high regard. Tom
O'Donnell was a media consultant for Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in 2002 when
he ran against Kennedy family member Mark Shriver, an Axelrod client, in a high-
profile Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat. After Van Hollen won, O'Donnell
recalls, Axelrod "called me and said we ran a really good campaign. I think it's the
first time I had a competitor do that," he said. "He's got a lot of class. And I think
he's done a tremendous job in this campaign."
Since 2002, Axelrod's firm, AKP&D Message and Media, has worked on 42 primary
or general election contests around the country and helped win 33 of them.
Axelrod was a media consultant for John Edwards's 2004 presidential bid.
Ironically, Axelrod interviewed to become Hillary Clinton's media consultant when
she first ran for the Senate in 2000. He didn't get the job, but he did produce
issue advertising boosting her candidacy for the New York Democratic Party and
the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
David Plouffe
As Obama's campaign manager, Plouffe is widely credited with running one of the
most impressive presidential nominating operations in recent memory. He is known
for his discipline and for his ability to maintain a steady course through a
campaign's inevitable ups and downs. "He is the most focused, talented operative
I've ever worked with," says Democratic lobbyist and Clinton supporter Steve
Elmendorf. "He never gets distracted by any of the chatter or Beltway stuff,"
adds Elmendorf, who, as then-House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt's chief of
staff, hired Plouffe to be his deputy in 1997.
Plouffe, 40, got an early taste of presidential politics working on the 1992
Democratic bid of Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. After it ended, he managed the re-
election campaign of Rep. John Olver of Massachusetts. Plouffe returned to his
home state of Delaware in 1994 to manage the unsuccessful Senate bid of then-
Attorney General Charles Oberly. He then went to New Jersey to run Robert
Torricelli's victorious campaign for the Senate in 1996. Afterward, Torricelli's
media consultant, Bob Shrum, urged Elmendorf to hire Plouffe. He moved over to
run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 2000 election.
After that cycle, he joined David Axelrod's Chicago-based consulting firm. In
2004, Plouffe took a leave of absence to serve as a senior adviser to Gephardt
when the Missourian made his final run at the Democratic presidential nomination.
Valerie Jarrett
Although she isn't well known inside the Beltway, Jarrett is a fixture in Chicago
politics and in the Obama family. Jarrett, 51, is a senior unpaid adviser to the
campaign, and is a confidant of both the candidate and his wife, Michelle.
"She's totally loyal to both of them, can be totally honest with both of them," one
Obama operative said. "She does not pretend to know something that she doesn't
know, but she is a person in the room who is not reluctant to say exactly what she
thinks to the candidate and the candidate's other advisers."
Jarrett's role as an honest broker in the campaign stems from her deep friendship
with the candidate and his wife. Barack Obama met Jarrett in 1991 when she was
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's deputy chief of staff and was interviewing
Obama's then-fiancee for a job in City Hall. The three have been close ever since.
A lawyer, Jarrett got her start in city government as a deputy corporation counsel
for finance and development.
After serving at Daley's side, Jarrett was a commissioner in the city's Planning and
Development Department and went on to chair the Chicago Transit Board, which
oversees the city's public transportation system.
She is also a member of the University of Chicago's board of trustees and chairs
its Medical Center Board. She is vice chair of Chicago 2016, the committee
spearheading the city's bid for the Summer Olympics. Jarrett oversaw the Chicago
Stock Exchange until stepping down last year to become CEO of Habitat Co., a real
estate development and management firm. Some have mentioned her as an eventual
mayoral candidate.
Jarrett has deep roots in the Windy City. Her maternal grandfather was Robert
Taylor, who ran the Chicago Housing Authority in the 1940s. Her late father-in-law
is former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett. She also has a familial link
to Washington: Superlawyer and Bill Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan is her great-
uncle.
Robert Gibbs
Gibbs, the Obama campaign's communications director, has probably had more to
do with helping the freshman senator successfully navigate the byways of "the
club" than anyone except Obama's Senate chief of staff, Peter Rouse. That's no
small accomplishment, notes a veteran Democratic Senate aide: Given the hype
surrounding Obama's arrival in Washington, he could have easily stumbled, making a
presidential bid more difficult. "The spotlight was stronger on him, and he didn't
have a margin of error," the Senate veteran remarked. While not Obama's alter
ego, Gibbs, 36, is the institutional memory of the team; he joined Obama as press
secretary after he won his Senate primary and then served in that position in his
Senate office.
Gibbs has experience on the presidential trail. Before he signed up with Obama, he
was a press spokesman for John Kerry during the early phase of his 2004
campaign. Gibbs is also familiar with the nonstop thrust and parry of campaign
coverage. He was director of communications for the Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee during the 2002 midterm elections, and he has served as a
spokesman for high-profile Senate campaigns, including Debbie Stabenow's
successful 2000 race in Michigan and then-Sen. Ernest Hollings's victorious 1998
re-election campaign in South Carolina.

ECONOMICS
Obama draws his economic advice largely from academics who fall within the broad
Democratic mainstream of the dismal science, although they do have streaks of
heterodoxy. Some are outsiders with few ties to the party's policy establishment
in Washington, while others served in the Clinton administration or elsewhere in
government.
Austan Goolsbee
The University of Chicago economist, who by most accounts is playing a dominant
role in vetting Obama's policy proposals on a wide range of issues, had managed to
keep his name out of the press -- until three weeks ago. That's when news leaked
of a meeting that Goolsbee held with Canadian officials to explain his candidate's
call to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. After Canadian
officials said that the economist had dismissed the tough rhetoric as political
posturing, the Clinton campaign used their account to argue that Obama was
insincere or a secret advocate of free trade. Obama's team tried to counter by
insisting that Goolsbee has played only a minor, unpaid role in the campaign, but
this was disputed by other Democrats with knowledge of his influence.
Goolsbee himself certainly believes in free trade. Unlike Alan Blinder, Paul
Krugman, and other left-leaning economic experts who are questioning the
axiomatic belief among economists that free trade is always good, Goolsbee's faith
hasn't been shaken, according to colleagues.
Those who know Goolsbee, 38, describe him as a committed centrist. He favors a
variety of tax cuts and credits to accomplish Obama's major goals for health care,
education, housing, and reducing poverty, and he is considered a fairly strong voice
against deficit spending. Obama's choice of Goolsbee as his senior economic
adviser is unusual because he has never worked in government. Goolsbee is not a
political neophyte, however: He worked on Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, and he
played a peripheral role in John Kerry's presidential campaign that year. The
kerfuffle over his NAFTA comments may betray some lack of political experience,
but colleagues say that Goolsbee is typically not caught off guard. "He is ambitious
and political. I think he'd catch on in Washington very quickly," said a fellow
economist who is not involved with any campaign.
Goolsbee has other skills to draw on if his role becomes more public -- he was a
legendary debater at Yale University, where he won national competitions. Like
most other economists, he's on record as favoring some things that few
Democratic politicians would want to defend -- incentive pay for government
workers, for example -- but nothing that would cause Obama bigger problems than
the NAFTA flap.
Jeffrey Liebman
Like Goolsbee, Liebman is known as an academic economist with a centrist streak.
Unlike Goolsbee, however, he has Washington experience -- a stint in 1998 and
1999 as the White House aide coordinating the Clinton administration's Social
Security proposals. Not much came of that process, but Liebman earned the
respect of Democratic economic policy experts. On the Obama campaign's
relatively small policy team, the 40-year-old Liebman serves as the resident expert
on tax and fiscal policy, as well as on Social Security and other entitlement
programs.
A professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Liebman has a
reputation for avoiding stark ideological positions and preferring empiricism to
rhetoric. Although he has advocated a balanced approach to Social Security reform
that includes raising payroll taxes, he has also produced research showing that
such an increase would reduce employment, thus wiping out half of the revenue to
be gained. In a Newsweek article earlier this year that tried to identify a "post-
Baby Boomer" approach to economics, Liebman supported using monetary policy to
manipulate the economy.
Christina and David Romer
The Romers, a married couple, often do research and take on academic
responsibilities as a team. Christina Romer is 49; her husband is 50. As professors
at the University of California (Berkeley), they are well-known macroeconomists --
experts on the workings of the U.S. economy -- who jointly hold one of six spots on
the academic committee of economists that decides when recessions begin and
end. They are both steeped in the history of the country's economy and have
recently produced a series of papers looking at the causes and effects of most of
the major changes in tax policy in the last 100 years.
At the same time that Obama is calling for higher income taxes on people making
$250,000 or more, the Romers have found that tax increases are generally bad for
economic growth and that they primarily discourage investment -- the supply-side
argument that conservatives use to justify tax cuts for the rich. On the other
hand, the Romers have shredded the conservative premise that tax cuts eventually
force spending reductions ("starving the beast"). Instead, they concluded that tax
reductions lead only to one thing -- offsetting tax increases to recover lost
revenue.
Daniel Tarullo
Tarullo worked for Bill Clinton for six years, the last three in the White House as
the president's point man on international economic policy. Soon after Obama was
elected to the Senate, Tarullo met him at one of those Washington gabfests where
wonks break bread with the powerful. The discussion focused on the Central
American Free Trade Agreement, which Tarullo opposed and Obama ultimately
voted against.
"I was attracted by his unusual combination of passionate aims and calm
demeanor," Tarullo recalls. "And I became convinced he had a rare capacity for
leadership that the country will need in the years ahead."
Tarullo, 55, teaches law at Georgetown University and is a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. He joined Obama's advisory
team in December 2006 and is the go-to guy on currency, foreign investment, and
trade. With a book coming out this spring on the need for tighter regulation of
banks, Tarullo is also involved in campaign policy discussions about financial
regulation and the subprime-mortgage crisis. But so far, the intensity of Tarullo's
interest in banking regulation is not reflected in the campaign.
IMMIGRATION
The 40 or so members of the campaign's Immigration Policy Advisory Committee
come from diverse ethnic and professional backgrounds. The advisers range from
immigration advocates to business executives; academics and lawyers are
particularly well represented. Many committee members have substantial
government experience.
Committee head Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a law professor at Stanford
University, said that the advisers' common thread is a belief that progress on
immigration reform requires "a certain kind of dialogue" -- not a fight -- that
includes Democrats, Republicans, and independents; is intellectually honest; and
recognizes the need to work across government jurisdictions and policy areas. "I
think a lot of us on this committee would like to make a difference," Cuéllar said.
In addition to Cuéllar and lawyer Preeta Bansal, Obama's top advisers include
Jennifer Chacón, a law professor at the University of California (Davis); Robert
Bach, a former executive associate commissioner of what was then the
Immigration and Naturalization Service; Tara Magner, director of policy for the
National Immigrant Justice Center; and Marc Rosenblum, a political science
professor at the University of New Orleans.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
A veteran of President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, Cuéllar, now 35, was a
top Treasury Department official from 1997 to 1999. Cuéllar, who goes by "Tino,"
also advises Obama on criminal justice and national security issues, as well as on
outreach to Latino voters.
Like Obama, he believes that comprehensive immigration reform must go beyond
addressing border security and the status of the nation's 12 million illegal
immigrants to confronting the current system's bureaucratic failings, providing job
opportunities for American workers, promoting economic development in Latin
America, and determining "how our immigration policy reflects our values and needs
as Americans." Cuéllar, who joined the Obama campaign in April 2007, brings
expertise on the regulatory side of immigration and international security, as well
as what he calls a "passion" for refugee policy.
Preeta Bansal
Obama's No. 2 immigration adviser sees her role as framing the issues to
"recognize the diversity of the immigrant community," both legal and illegal. Bansal,
a 42-year-old partner at law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New
York City, is a 1993-96 veteran of the Clinton White House and Justice
Department. Her path first crossed Obama's at Harvard Law School, although it
was mutual friends who brought her to the campaign.
Bansal became familiar with Obama's foreign-policy work through her service on
the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. She shares the
candidate's emphasis on expanding legal immigration, especially jobs-based
immigration, although Obama has also fought for placing a continued priority on
family reunification.
The influential Bansal advises the senator on international human rights, legal
issues, foreign policy, women's issues, and outreach to Asian-Americans. Obama "is
able to advance progressive principles, but he's not one of these starry-eyed
liberals," she says. "With him, two plus two equals five, not four. The whole is
greater than the sum of the parts."

NATIONAL SECURITY
"Mainstreamers." "Centrists." "Non-ideologues." These words tend to pop up in
descriptions of Obama's security and intelligence advisers -- words that arguably
help a candidate who is derided by his rivals as inexperienced. By recruiting
eminences grises such as Tony Lake and young, skilled post-Cold War diplomats
such as Susan Rice, the campaign appears eager to reassure voters that Obama,
with his conspicuous, or at least relative, lack of foreign-policy experience would be
surrounded by seasoned hands as commander-in-chief.
Many of Obama's advisers served in the Clinton State Department or on the
National Security Council. Philip Gordon and Ivo Daalder are two notables. Both
are now with the Brookings Institution, as are at least three other advisers.
Pentagon veterans include Richard Danzig, who was Clinton's Navy secretary; Maj.
Gen. Jonathan Scott Gration, a 32-year veteran of the Air Force; and Lawrence
Korb, who served as an assistant Defense secretary in the Reagan administration.
But policy experience is no guarantee of political grace. In the past few weeks,
Obama has suffered from embarrassing public gaffes by two advisers. Rice, in
response to Hillary Clinton's TV ads about "red phone" calls at 3 a.m., admitted
that Obama had no experience handling such crises -- but contended that neither
did Clinton nor John McCain, since none of the three had been president. And
Samantha Power, an academic and author, had to step down as one of Obama's
closest confidants after she called Clinton a "monster" during an interview.
Tony Lake
One of Obama's top foreign-policy and national security advisers, Lake was once
closely associated with President Clinton, having served as national security adviser
from 1993 to 1997, and as the president's envoy for negotiations that ended the
war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The 68-year-old has advised a number of
Democratic presidents and candidates since the 1970s, in a diplomatic career that
stretches back 45 years. He and Obama met in Chicago in 2003, and Lake came
aboard as a key adviser in early 2007.
Like Obama, Lake opposed the invasion of Iraq. He has since become a central
defender of some of Obama's more controversial foreign-policy positions. When
Hillary Clinton called Obama "irresponsible" and "naive" for agreeing, in a debate,
to meet "separately without precondition" with leaders of Iran, North Korea, and
Venezuela, among others, Lake came to his defense. "A great nation and its
president should never fear negotiating with anyone," Lake declared in a post-
debate memo. Still, Lake and other advisers may have cringed at that and others of
Obama's unequivocal assertions, such as his stated willingness to send U.S. forces
into Pakistan to root out Al Qaeda without first asking that government's
permission.
Susan Rice
Rice, 43, Obama's other key adviser on national security, advanced rapidly through
the diplomatic ranks at the State Department in the 1990s and was seared by the
experience of the Rwandan genocide. "It was the most horrible thing I've ever
seen," she said in a 2000 interview with the alumni magazine of her alma mater,
Stanford University. "It makes you mad.... It makes you know that even if you're
the last lone voice and you believe you're right, it is worth every bit of energy you
can throw into it." In 1997, she became assistant secretary of State for African
affairs, after serving as President Clinton's Africa adviser on the National
Security Council.
Rice began her career at management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and is
currently on leave from the Brookings Institution. She met Obama during his 2004
Senate campaign and has said that she was drawn to his "remarkably broad and
deep grasp of the key foreign-policy challenges of the day."
Rice is known for her bluntness. "I guess you could say I'm plainspoken," she told
Stanford magazine. "I can be diplomatic when I have to be. But I don't have a lot
of patience for B.S."
John Brennan
Brennan, the president and chief executive officer of the Analysis Corp., an
intelligence contractor in McLean, Va., began advising the Obama campaign on
intelligence and counter-terrorism at Tony Lake's request. A 25-year CIA veteran,
Brennan became the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center in
2004, and he now chairs the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a
professional association. He first traveled to the Middle East in the 1970s,
studying in Egypt, and he has spent a good portion of his career on regional issues.
He ran the CIA's terrorism analysis during the Persian Gulf War and then became
the daily intelligence briefer at the White House. From 1996 to 1999, he served in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as the CIA's chief of station.
Brennan, 52, thinks that President Bush should have moved to ratchet down the
extraordinary intelligence measures taken immediately after the September 11
attacks. After the heat of 9/11 dissipated a bit, the administration "should have
embarked to engage meaningfully with the [congressional] oversight committees
and the judiciary to put in place ... programs for the longer term," Brennan told
National Journal.
Like Obama, he favors a combination of public diplomacy and the option of military
action to address national security threats. But the two differ on the controversial
question of immunity for telecommunications companies that helped the
government covertly monitor calls after 9/11. Brennan favors immunity, but Obama
voted to strip retroactive immunity from the Senate intelligence bill, arguing that
the matter should be settled in court.

ENVIRONMENT
Obama's core environment and energy advisers come from the moderate wing of
the Democratic Party. Like the candidate, they favor federal controls on
greenhouse-gas emissions and greater emphasis on developing clean sources of
energy. But his green-team members have spent their careers forging partnerships
between environmental interests and business, not hugging trees. Many of them
were attracted to Obama because of his conviction that environmental goals can be
compatible with the needs of his home state's coal, farm, and nuclear industries.
Almost all of Obama's top environment and energy advisers have degrees from
Harvard, although none attended Harvard Law School with him. The Washington
insiders and outsiders who make up his environmental lineup include Daniel Esty, an
environmental law professor at Yale who was at the Environmental Protection
Agency during the George H.W. Bush administration; Daniel Kammen, an energy
and public policy professor at the University of California (Berkeley); and Robert
Sussman, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who spent 10 years
practicing environmental law at Latham & Watkins, and was at EPA during the
Clinton administration.
Jason Grumet
The campaign's official environment and energy policy committee is headed by
Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based nonprofit
established in 2007 by four former Senate majority leaders. The group focuses on
developing bipartisan solutions to national security, health care, energy,
agriculture, and transportation problems. Before taking that post, Grumet, 41, was
executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a coalition of
industry, academic, and environmental representatives focused on promoting
environmentally friendly energy policies. The commission has since been folded into
the policy center.
Grumet met Obama in 2005, after the Illinois Democrat was elected to the
Senate. He worked with Obama on his collaboration with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-
Ind., on strengthening federal fuel-economy standards for cars. Grumet said he
was impressed with Obama's eagerness to forge compromises with Republicans and
other interests involved in the debate. "Having been frustrated in this town for
several years with the heroic rhetoric on oil dependence and then the total lack of
policy progress, I thought [Obama's approach] was the way that you can make real
progress," Grumet said.
Howard Learner
Among Obama's top environmental advisers, Learner has the longest track record
with the Illinois Democrat. Learner, 52, is executive director of the Environmental
Law and Policy Center, a Chicago-based advocacy group. He linked up with Obama in
the early 1990s, when Obama had just finished law school and Learner was general
counsel at Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a Chicago-
based law and policy center. "I got to know Michelle Obama and Barack Obama as
public-spirited, public-interest lawyers in Chicago who were looking to make a
difference," Learner recalls. "Everybody recognized that they were tremendously
talented."
In 1996, Learner joined Obama's successful campaign for the Illinois state Senate,
and he worked with him on early efforts to require state utilities to generate some
of their electricity from renewable resources. Learner says that the renewable-
electricity bill adopted last year by the Illinois Legislature was built on Obama's
original proposals. He also worked on Obama's U.S. Senate race.
Frank Loy
Loy says he first noticed Obama in 2004, when Obama gave his celebrated keynote
address at the Democratic National Convention. After Obama's election to the
Senate, Loy began raising money for his presidential race and has since become one
of the campaign's top environmental advisers. Loy argues that Obama is the best
candidate to break the stalemates on energy and environmental issues. "In our
system, it is not enough to just elect a new president," Loy said. "As president, you
need to be able to operate in a way that gets things done. And that requires both
the personality and the history and an attitude that Barack Obama has. He has an
amazing ability to work across the aisle and attract voters that are not your
standard reliable Democratic voters."
Loy was an impressive addition to the campaign. The 79-year-old pillar of the
environmental community serves on the boards of several national green groups. He
held State Department posts during the Clinton, Carter, and Johnson
administrations, and he spent 14 years as president of the German Marshall Fund.
Loy's public service stint followed a long career in corporate America.

HEALTH CARE
Obama's message that lowering health care costs is an essential first step to
getting nearly every American insured is one that fits his top health care advisers
well. Indeed, two of the three are based in Massachusetts and, thus, have
firsthand knowledge of how high costs nearly killed that state's landmark universal
coverage plan. Massachusetts last year became the first state to require nearly
every resident to have health insurance, but the public resisted when premium
prices were more expensive than forecast. The Massachusetts experience,
Obama's top health care advisers say, reinforced a message that they -- as a team
-- have delivered before: All three helped John Kerry's 2004 presidential
campaign develop a proposal to lower health care costs. They have Washington
experience, are established and well respected in Democratic and academic circles,
and have worked on other campaigns with advisers who this year lined up behind
different candidates. "A lot of us have worked together. It turned out the health
policy world is not enormously large," said David Cutler, professor of applied
economics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition to
Obama's health-specific advisers, two of his top economic advisers -- Austan
Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, and Jeffrey
Liebman, a professor of public policy at Harvard University -- helped craft
Obama's health proposal.
David Cutler
A professor of applied economics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Cutler is no stranger to Washington. Obama's top health care adviser
served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council
during the Clinton administration, and he helped develop the Clintons' failed
universal health care proposal in the early 1990s. Cutler also worked on health care
blueprints for Democratic presidential candidates Bill Bradley in 2000 and John
Kerry in 2004.
Although he's in Obama's camp, Cutler isn't a critic of Hillary Clinton's current
health care package. "If you said to me that Senator Obama was never going to
run and, 'What do you think about Clinton's plan?' I would say, 'It's a terrific
plan,' " Cutler said. He added: "Whoever the Democratic nominee is will have the
support on health care of the entire policy community on the left. I don't know of
anyone who's uncomfortable in some fundamental way with what is in the plans."
Still, Cutler, 42, maintains that it's critically important to lower costs before
mandating that everyone have coverage, as Clinton has proposed. "If you make
insurance affordable and accessible, you will get to 98 or 99 percent of covered
people," he predicts. "Maybe after that you can come in with a mandate for small
pockets of people."
David Blumenthal
When Blumenthal isn't developing health care proposals for Democratic
presidential contenders (this is his fourth go-round), the physician is seeing
patients, writing books, teaching at Harvard, and promoting his health reform ideas
in Washington. Blumenthal, 59, helped develop a health care proposal in 1988 for
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis that focused on getting all
employers to offer insurance. He worked on health care policy for Sen. Edward
Kennedy, D-Mass., during his presidential run in 1980, and for John Kerry in 2004.
Blumenthal, director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General
Hospital and a professor of medicine and policy at Harvard, also helped the Dukakis
and Kerry campaigns retool their health care proposals for the general election.
When Obama declared for president, Cutler, who was already working with the
senator, contacted Blumenthal. On the Obama campaign, Blumenthal has advocated
a strong commitment to funding and adopting health information technology, and
Obama has proposed spending $10 billion a year for five years to move toward
standards-based electronic health care systems for doctors and hospitals. (Clinton
has proposed spending $3 billion a year for several years.) Blumenthal is writing a
book that examines what former presidents have proposed and accomplished in the
way of health care access and cost containment. He hopes that it will be out in time
to influence whatever health care initiatives Congress and the new president
pursue next year. "In American politics, you elect a president, not a plan," he said.
Stuart Altman
The Obama campaign came looking for Altman specifically to get the veteran
health care economist to resurrect a proposal he had drawn up for John Kerry's
presidential campaign. (Altman and Obama policy strategist Heather Higginbottom
had worked together on Kerry's campaign.) The proposal would have the federal
government reimburse employers for some catastrophic health care costs and
would require employers to use that money to reduce workers' premiums. It has
become a major selling point of Obama's health care plan, and it marks one of the
few distinctions between his proposal and Hillary Clinton's.
Altman, the 70-year-old dean of Brandeis University's Heller School for Social
Policy and Management, helped develop a plan for President Nixon that would have
required most employers to buy insurance for their workers and would have
created a federal health plan that anyone could purchase. He served on President
Clinton's transition team but declined to participate in the Clintons' health care
reform effort in the early 1990s. "It was too big, a total restructuring of our
whole health system," he says. Altman praises Hillary Clinton's current health care
plan, however, and notes that it resembles Obama's proposal. One difference he
supports is Obama's wait-and-see approach to mandating that everyone have
health insurance.

LEGAL AFFAIRS
Obama doesn't need advisers to prep him on constitutional theory. He lectured on
the topic at the University of Chicago after moving to the Windy City in 1991 upon
receiving his Harvard law degree magna cum laude. He is at ease fielding questions
from voters who oppose President Bush's expansive interpretations of executive
powers on issues ranging from torture to habeas corpus to war powers.
Nonetheless, Obama has tapped into his networks at Chicago and Harvard for legal
advisers -- for policy advice and for counsel on campaign matters. His University of
Chicago roots help explain his philosophical preference for incentives rather than
mandates, a key difference between his plan for achieving universal health
coverage and that of Hillary Clinton.
His Harvard advisers include heavy hitters in constitutional and criminal justice
law, such as professors Martha Minow and Ronald Sullivan and former Harvard
professor Christopher Edley Jr., now dean of the law school at the University of
California (Berkeley). From beyond the ivory towers, Obama's legal thinkers include
Eric Holder, deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration; and
Cassandra Butts, a former Harvard classmate and now senior vice president for
domestic policy at the Center for American Progress, who has advised him on
domestic policy.
Laurence Tribe
Tribe remembers Obama as one of his best students in his 40 years of teaching
constitutional law at Harvard. Tribe has argued three dozen cases before the
Supreme Court, and he literally wrote the textbook on constitutional law used
across the country. He argued Vice President Gore's side in Bush v. Gore, the
Florida vote-counting case, before the Supreme Court in 2000, so it's no wonder
that he is part of the team that Obama has assembled to respond to any voting
irregularities or other legal issues that arise in the campaign.
A leading liberal scholar, Tribe, 66, is also an active member of an ad hoc group of
policy experts who advise Obama on habeas corpus and other constitutional
concerns, as well as on increasing Americans' access to the justice system. Tribe
told National Journal that he and other legal affairs advisers worked on a set of
policy proposals -- but that Obama's own ideas were better. "He's very interested
always in finding common ground," Tribe said. "It's not so much finding the
midpoint on a line where people are arranged from left to right, but finding a way
to get an angle that's perpendicular -- or comes at the line from a different angle."
Charles Ogletree
Another Obama-professor-turned-adviser is Ogletree, 55, who has been at
Harvard since 1985. Before that, he was a District of Columbia public defender,
which shaped his professorial focus on civil rights and criminal justice. He wrote a
book on school desegregation, and he counseled Anita Hill when she testified
before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings for now-
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Ogletree has advised Obama on reforming the criminal-justice system as well on
constitutional issues. He is a member of the Obama campaign's black advisory
council, which also includes Cornel West, who teaches African-American studies at
Princeton University. The group formed after Obama skipped a conference on
African-American issues in Hampton, Va., to announce his presidential candidacy in
Illinois.
Cass Sunstein
From the University of Chicago, law professor Cass Sunstein, 53, joins Tribe and
Ogletree in advising Obama on an ad hoc basis. Sunstein is headed to Harvard later
this year after 27 years at Chicago. Earlier, he worked at the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel and clerked for Supreme Court Justice
Thurgood Marshall.
Sunstein's stint at OLC -- the executive branch's legal advice center -- gave him a
special appreciation of presidential prerogatives that can help his former law
school colleague develop nuanced positions on separation-of-powers issues.
Many Democrats have railed against Bush's use of presidential signing statements,
for example. Like Sunstein, Obama has not rejected the use of signing statements
outright; both argue that as long as the statements don't purport to overturn law,
they can be useful in explaining how a president intends to carry out the will of
Congress. "There's nothing wrong with signing statements as such," Sunstein told
National Journal. He also shares Obama's University of Chicago-honed preference
for incentives rather than mandates. Sunstein and fellow Chicago professor
Richard Thaler have written Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth,
and Happiness, a book published this month that expounds on this theme.