Obama’s Dream Team: Vision, Strategy, and Tactics
Remember this infamous McCainism?
“I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.”
Uh, yes he does.
If Obama’s vision, as he presented it in his campaign, is to restore ethics and the rule of law in American domestic policy and to repair the damage done to American moral credibility, on a global level, by the Bush administration’s assault on the most basic American ideals and values, then his strategy is the national security team he officially presented to the public yesterday.
I know that Obama’s picks make some progressive observers uneasy. And the usual clueless wonders on the far right are of course painting choices like Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State and the retention of Robert Gates at Defense as evidence that the president-elect is “a secret centrist.” Fred! Wake up! Obama has always been a centrist. It’s not a secret, except to those on the right who, like Barnes, thought Obama was a “socialist” or those on the left who maybe took the hype a bit too seriously.
Obama more than anything else is pragmatic. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe what he says he believes in. But believing in and getting it done are two different things. Obama has put together the team that he thinks can get it done. And if you do a bit of reading and thinking, it’s not really as counterintuitive as it might seem.
New York Magazine’s Daily Intel asks, “Is Obama’s National Security Team Liberal Change in Moderate Hawk’s Clothing?” and then rounds up a bunch of bloggers and journalists who mostly seem to think it is. One in particular, David Sanger of the New York Times, points out that although the president-elect’s national security choices “[include] two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish” than Obama’s, “all three of his choices … have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.”
There is good logic here. Everyone knows that Republicans with hawkish reps can end wars, negotiate with enemies, push for restraint in military spending, and so on, and never, ever be accused of “coddling terrorists” or being “anti-military” or “soft on defense” as most Democrats and liberals are when they advocate such policies.
So “cheer up,” Peter Beinart advises glum liberal bloggers:
… It’s precisely because Obama intends to pursue a genuinely progressive foreign policy that he’s surrounding himself with people who can guard his right flank at home. When George W. Bush wanted to sell the Iraq war, he trotted out Colin Powell–because Powell was nobody’s idea of a hawk. Now Obama may be preparing to do the reverse. To give himself cover for a withdrawal from Iraq and a diplomatic push with Iran, he’s surrounding himself with people like Gates, Clinton and Jones, who can’t be lampooned as doves.
If you need another reason to feel optimistic, here it is: Susan Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen his foreign policy adviser, Susan E. Rice, to be ambassador to the United Nations, picking an advocate of “dramatic action” against genocide as he rounds out his national security team, Democrats close to the transition said Sunday.
The choice of Ms. Rice to represent the United States before the United Nations will make her one of the most visible faces of the Obama administration to the outside world aside from Mrs. Clinton. It will also send to the world organization a prominent and forceful advocate of stronger action, including military force if necessary, to stop mass killings like those in the Darfur region of Sudan in recent years.
Not only that, but the ambassador to the U.N. position is being elevated to Cabinet status. Re-elevated, really, because it was a Cabinet-level post in the Clinton administration — Pres. Bush removed that status to signal the priority his administration placed on human rights and multilateralism. Returning the position to Cabinet status sends the exactly the same signal, but in the correct direction this time.
The message this particular appointment sends, on multiple levels, cannot be overstated. The president-elect is doing more here than simply indicating that he intends to respond forcefully to genocide or threats of genocide. He is also telling his longtime campaign supporters and Sen. Clinton herself not to get the wrong idea about his policy priorities:
… Mr Obama may have wanted to do this for Ms Rice from the get-go, but the Hillary Clinton nomination forced his hand. As we’ve noted, Mr Obama lured Mrs Clinton to her post by giving her the right to appoint her old foreign policy hands to State Department posts. That was a bitter pill for Mr Obama’s own allies, who endorsed him over Mrs Clinton at great risk to their careers and out of the conviction that Mrs Clinton’s brain trust was wrong about the big stuff.
The elevation of Ms Rice sends those people a message. It also allows Mr Obama to carve out some extra space in his own cabinet. Give a message to Mrs Clinton, and wonder if it will get caught in a filter. Give a message to Ms Rice, and be sure that you’ll reach the president. It’s a bit of realpolitik not altogether different from what President Bush did when he made Condoleezza Rice his national security adviser. Mr Obama’s selection of Samantha Power for the State Department transition team—months after she called Mrs Clinton a “monster”—was also a signal, not a fluke.
That last part, about Samantha Power, is especially striking to me. I had wondered why Obama would pull Power back out of her self-inflicted obscurity seemingly out of thin air, but this makes so much sense. Power is one of the world’s foremost experts on human rights. I’ve read her 2003 book, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide — it definitely is worthy of the Pulitzer it won. So putting Power on the transition team that’s getting the State Department ready for Hillary Clinton adds yet another layer of subtext that is not hard to figure out.
And it’s a great tactic for Obama to have chosen in service of the strategy — to make his administration a “Team of Rivals” — which he has devised to realize his vision of change we can believe in.
Memeorandum is the source for most of the links in this post.
Tags: genocide, Human Rights, National Security, Samantha Power, State Department, Susan Rice
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