February 6, 2008

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Behind the Candidates

Having seen the name of Obama’s chief economics adviser Austan Goolsbee appear on a few blogs recently, I’ve become curious about who else is on the teams of the two lead candidates. Here’s what I’ve found:

The Chicago Tribune wrote a nifty round-up of Obama’s team of advisers. In fact, it seems they wrote two.

Meanwhile, here’s a brief Telegraph piece on Team Hillary. Here’s a wonderful Washington Post write-up of the Clinton squad, “Hillaryland.” An additional WaPo rundown. The articles themselves give you such an interesting picture of the candidates’ leadership styles and expertise. And from these articles, here are some links on some of the big names (I’m likely to refine this list as I get time to look into it):

Team Hillary:

• Mark Penn: chief pollster and strategist
• Harold Wolfson: senior communications director (no Wikipedia link, using a NYTimes story)
• Patti Solis Doyle: campaign manager
• Mandy Grunwald: chief media consultant
• Leecia Eve: chief policy adviser
• Ann Lewis: senior adviser
• Terry McAuliffe: campaign chairman

Team Obama:

• Foreign policy/national security:
  • Anthony Lake
  • Susan Rice
  • Samantha Power
  • Gregory Craig
  • Richard Danzig
  • Scott Gration
  • Merrill McPeak
• Domestic policy:
  • Austan Goolsbee
  • Michael Froman
  • David Cutler
  • David Blumenthal (PBS interview, may be better)
  • Jeffrey Liebman
  • Dan Tarullo
  • Eric Holder
  • Cass Sunstein
  • Laurence Tribe
  • Cassandra Butts
• Staff:
  • Mark Alexander: former campaign policy director
  • Heather Higginbottom: campaign senior policy strategist (couldn’t find much on her, but was kind of amazed to find that this Snarkmarket post was already among the results!)
  • Karen Kornbluh: Senate policy director

Conveniently, Foreign Policy in Focus just wrote up a handy little evaluation of the candidates’ teams:

Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors tend to be veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration, most notably former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Her most influential advisor - and her likely choice for Secretary of State - is Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke served in a number of key roles in her husband’s administration, including U.S. ambassador to the UN and member of the cabinet, special emissary to the Balkans, assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, and U.S. ambassador to Germany. He also served as President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia in propping up Marcos in the Philippines, supporting Suharto’s repression in East Timor, and backing the generals behind the Kwangju massacre in South Korea.

Senator Barack Obama’s 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 liberal 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.