People who like Global Dashboard also tend to like proposals to streamline foreign ministries and sort out national security systems. Most probably rather like Barack Obama too. But is Barack a streamlining sort of guy? Maybe not, judging by a piece on his 300-strong corps of foreign policy advisers in today’s New York Times:
“It is unwieldy, no question,” said Denis McDonough, 38, Mr. Obama’s top foreign policy aide, speaking of an infrastructure that has been divided into 20 teams based on regions and issues, and that has recently absorbed, with some tensions, the top foreign policy advisers from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. “But an administration is unwieldy, too. We also know that it’s messier when you don’t get as much information as you can.”
That sounds like commendable fatalism to me: administrations are tangled and clunky machines, and Obama’s probably won’t be any different. Sorry.
It’s worth remembering that the candidate is a product of perhaps the single greatest hub of machine politics ever: the city of Chicago. That’s the theme of the main article in the edition of the New Yorker that has got into so much trouble with its satirical “Terrorist Obama” cover. The cover is a frippery and, I suspect, a non-event. “Making It” by Ryan Lizza, which charts Obama’s rise through Chicago politics is by contrast a magnificent piece of political writing – a reminder that, as Gideon Rachman recently pointed out in the FT, top-flight American journalism is still as good as it gets anywhere. Lizza’s piece is too involved for me to excerpt it here. You have to read the whole thing. Do so this weekend.
