The Rush on Washington: Candidates and the Foreign Policy Establishment
Since the inception of their candidacies, both Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates have tried to recruit their party’s foreign policy elite. The candidates took a land-grab approach, seeking top foreign policy scholars and elite names to tout on the campaign trail, all because advisors matter, at least in optics if not in substance.
Among the leading Democrats, however, support from the foreign policy establishment is absolutely about substance. The Democratic foreign policy elite have split advisers between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, largely based upon of the one international issue that significantly divides the candidates: their history on the war in Iraq. As the rhetoric goes, Hillary Clinton voted in the Senate to permit George W. Bush to invade Iraq, while Obama “voted against the war”. Many specialists who were hawkish in 2003 have sided with Clinton; those opposed, with Obama, no matter whether they worked for President Bill Clinton in the 90s. Names like Brzezinkski, Daalder, Anthony Lake, and Susan Rice have taken to Obama. Clinton advisors include Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Gen. Wesley Clark, Richard Holbrooke, and Leslie Gelb. Clinton welcomed many veterans of her husband’s Administration, who ere towards the moderate, established wing of the party.
There is another element that divides the advisors to Obama and Clinton, and it is less evident in the candidates’ policy decisions than in their birth certificates. A generational gap exists between many advisors to Obama and Clinton. The younger Obama, 46, has attracted support from some of the younger generation of policy specialists. Samantha Power, for example, is a 38-year old Harvard Professor best known for her advocacy on Darfur. Also of her generation and an Obama supporter is Sarah Sewall, now a Professor at Harvard after having worked in the Defense Department and as a specialist on counterinsurgency and terrorism. While perhaps not the majority of his supporters, Obama claims a new generation of foreign policy experts to his side, many of whom are part of a post-Baby Boomer era.
On the Republican side, the struggle is of ideology and experience. McCain and Giuliani claim relevant foreign policy experience themselves, but have courted members of the Republican foreign policy elite regardless. Rudolph Giuliani has lined up support from a long list of Reagan and Bush-era experts, including Charles Hill and Kim Holmes. Notable among them is Norman Podhoretz, the established neoconservative commentator.
McCain’s line-up is impressive. It includes five former Secretaries of State such as Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Alexander Haig (see NPR). Richard Armitage, Niall Ferguson, Max Boot, a number of retired and former military leaders, and the notable William Kristol are among the others.
Endorsements can work wonders for the Presidential candidate, and no one knows this better than John McCain. In 2000, when McCain lost the nomination to George W. Bush, Bush’s campaign knew of the dramatic lift experienced policy personnel could grant a candidate. The campaign selected Colin Powell as Bush’s Secretary of State in-waiting and other advisors with extensive experience in national security, reassuring voters who were weary of the then-Governor’s limited foreign policy experience.
Each endorsement helps to shape the public’s view of the candidate. Madeleine Albright stood by President and Hillary Clinton’s sides as Hillary conceded after the Iowa caucus; she was nowhere to be seen after Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire. Just today Senator Patrick Leahy endorsed Obama, saying the candidate reminded him of Robert Kennedy, surely an image to which the campaign cannot object. Perhaps next on the calendar: the now-less busy Senators Dodd and Biden and Governor Bill Richardson, each of whom hold favorable foreign policy credentials, who have yet to voice support in favor of one of the top candidates.
Note: The Washington Post has compiled a nearly full listing of advisers to the candidates with brief biographies, which can be found here.