Who has Obama's ear?
Earlier this month, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama was forced to distance himself from the coordinator of his own campaigns working group on Iraq policy. As The New York Sun reported, Colin Kahl, a fellow with the Center for a New American Security, recently wrote a paper for that organization suggesting that anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 American troops should stay in Iraq until the end of 2010.
Such forecasting is starkly at odds with the anti-war rhetoric Obama has been using on the campaign trail. Indeed, Obama promises to remove every last American combat brigade from Iraq within 16 months of taking office, come hell or high water.
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The views of Obamas top Iraq adviser are more significant than the unsought endorsement of a bigoted Nation of Islam preacher, however, at least given the emphasis that the junior senator from Illinois has bestowed upon his judgment to oppose the war in a speech delivered six years ago. Yet the nonchalance with which the Obama campaign handled the Kahl revelation suggests that either the campaigns advisers are of little significance in the candidates decision-making process or that Obama does not really have a well-thought-out position on the subject of extricating us from Iraq.
Negating the words of his advisers has become a frequent task in Obamas campaign and a telling one, at that. In February, Obamas senior economics adviser Austan Goolsbee had a meeting with the Canadian consul in Chicago to reassure the worried diplomat that the likely Democratic presidential nominees promises to renegotiate the 1993 NAFTA trade agreement were insincere.
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Just a few days later, another Obama foreign policy adviser had to be corrected by campaign headquarters. Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on the history of genocide, told the BBC that Obama will, of course, not rely on some plan that hes crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. senator with regard to Iraq strategy. Power was ultimately let go for telling a Scottish interviewer that Hillary Rodham Clinton was a monster, yet it was the former comment that did more substantive harm to the Obama campaign, illustrative as it is of the widening gap between Obamas rhetoric and what he plans to do as president.
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After all, to divine what a candidate thinks about the issues of the day by taking stock of the people who are writing his position papers and whispering in his ear is hardly an unreasonable venture. Obamas followers appear to dispute this notion, arguing that their man is a special case, untouched by the advice or influence of others.
And while many of Giulianis advisers certainly held opinions with which he did not agree, none of them were telling the media or foreign governments that what he was saying on the campaign trail and what he actually planned to do as president were at cross-purposes. It is to be expected that a presidential candidate as well as a president would surround himself with people who disagree with him (and each other) on issues. What is so unusual about Obamas candidacy is that there are repeated instances of his telling the public one thing and his advisers quietly (and not so quietly) reassuring that such promises mean nothing.
Obama is, in his own words, something of a Rorschach test. In his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes, I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. That has been confirmed thus far during this campaign, and come November, Americans will have to decide if they want a Rorschach test for president.
