Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Policy, Pragmatism, and Obama

From TNR a report on the Obama policy team:
And, yet, it's not just the details of Obama's policies that suggest a behavioral approach. In some respects, the sensibility behind the behaviorist critique of economics is one shared by all the Obama wonks, whether they're domestic policy nerds or grizzled foreign policy hands. Despite Obama's reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren't radicals--far from it. They're pragmatists--people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.
Similar nice things to be said about the foreign policy side of the shop:
In economics, it's the academics who are first-rate engineers and the nonacademics who are either dreamers or technicians. In foreign policy, it's often the practitioners whose engineering prowess stands out. And so it's no surprise that Obama would attract the latter. Obama's most influential foreign policy advisers--former Clinton officials like Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, and National Security Advisor Tony Lake--all cut their teeth in the policy world.

Of course, that's also true of just about every top-tier Democratic candidate in recent memory. The real difference between the Obama campaign and, say, Hillary Clinton's, is twofold. First, while many of the Obamanauts had previously served in the Clinton administration, they tended to be younger or less influential than the officials who signed on with Hillary. Clinton advisers like former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke tend to be "more invested in justifying or glorifying" the Clinton record, says one Obama foreign policy hand, whereas the Obamanauts don't have the same "permanent need to fight for the legacy of your time in government."

The second difference is that the Obama hands tend to feel less hemmed in by establishment opinion. As one Obama adviser puts it, "Democrats want to be just a little bit different from Republicans, but not so different that they get attacked for being weak." Like Hamilton, the Obamanauts generally reject this calculus--not because they favor some radical alternative, but because clinging to received foreign policy wisdom can preclude highly practical courses of action.

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