Among progressives I know, the working understanding of Barack Obama's disappointingly centrist "National Security Working Group" is that the campaign needs some broadly respected graybeards in order to protect itself from McCain's attacks and charges of inexperience. That political rationale doesn't actually make sense to me, as I can't imagine Charlie Gibson getting on the evening news and saying, "the McCain campaign said today that Barack Obama lacked the seasoning to be commander-in-chief, clearly forgetting that the Obama campaign has brought Madeleine Albright on in an advisory role." Problems like that are solved by surrogates more than by announced working groups. Working groups are used to signal direction to the sort of people who pay attention to working groups. And the Obama campaign is signaling that there won't be any sharp change in tone. That's well enough, as the arguments over Iraq always made the Obama campaign look like a sharper break with Clinton-era foreign policymaking than it actually was, but insofar as lots of people got excited when Obama said he wanted to "change the mindset" that took us to war, part of that mindset was a reliance on these figures and the credibility their continued involvement supposedly conveys. There's an old line that leadership is "disappointing your members at a rate they can handle," and that's sort of how general campaigns work, too. But I think progressives should be a bit quicker to call BS here, as until now, the campaign's argument on foreign policy politics has been that they don't buy into this sort of thing. One of the big fights, after all, that the Obama campaign won in the eyes of progressives was the battle over negotiations with dictators, which the Obama folks turned into a broader attack on the DC foreign policy establishment. Samantha Power wrote a powerful and much-publicized memo called "Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need." It opened saying, "It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of US foreign policy. The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced, and even naïve." This was important to progressives. Now Power is, at least officially, exiled from the campaign, and we've got a working group that's the veritable definition of "Conventional Washington."
