Redstate

By Josh Painter Posted in 2008 — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If Barak Obama becomes the next president, what will his administration look like? What sort of political animals will be Obamanominated to serve in his cabinet? While this is just pure speculation on my part, I do have some clues.

First, Obama isn't just liberal, he's very liberal. The left wing interest group Americans for Democratic Action scores him at 95 to 100%, while conservative group American Conservative Union grades him in the single digits. Expect such a liberal candidate to have an equally liberal agenda for governing, and Obama will be surrounding himself with other liberals and a few moderates to carry it out.

Also, while candidates don't always choose the same people to help them govern that they picked to help win elective office, they do reward many from their campaigns with choice administrative jobs. So let's take a look at the Senator's inner circle.

Obama's senior foreign policy advisor, Anthony Lake, received his education at Harvard, Cambridge and Princeton. A member of the foreign service since 1962, Lake resigned from Henry Kissinger's team during the Vietnam War in protest over the Nixon Administration's decision to bomb Cambodia. Lake returned to the State Department during the Carter Administration. Rather than serve President Reagan, Lake again left government service to became a college professor. Lake, who had worked with Bill Clinton on the McGovern presidential campaign, became a Clinton foreign policy advisor in 1992. Lake favors a strong United Nations as a vehicle for solving international problems. I wouldn't be at all suprised to see Lake become Obama's choice for Secretary of State.

Another key Obama foreign policy advisor is Susan Rice, a protege of former Clinton secretary of State Madeline Albright. Rice was a foreign policy adviser to John Kerry during that Senator's campaign for the White House in 2004.

Like many on Obama's team, policy development advisor Cassandra Butts worked in Tom Daschle's Senate office. One of Obama's Harvard Law School classmates, Butts worked for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Expect her to exert considerable influence on Obama's choices for key judical appointments.

Mark C. Alexander (not to be confused with federalist and Patriot Post founder Mark M. Alexander!), is Obama's national policy director and another team member who would advise on judicial nominations. Professor Alexander served as issues director for Bill Bradley's presidential run and held a similar post in the 1988 re-election effort for Ted Kennedy. Alexander was a legislative assistant to the late Sen. Howard Metzenbaum. Alexander has declared President Bush unfit for the job of President of the United States and has criticized his nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Yale-trained lawyer, Rhodes scholar, and secretary of the Navy under President Clinton, Richard Danzig is one of Senator Obama's chief advisers on military affairs. Danzig also worked in the Pentagon during the Carter Administration. Curiously for one who has held such posts associated with the military, Danzig is an expert on Mohandas Gandhi, the pacifist being the subject of Danzig's doctoral dissertation at Oxford University.

Robert Malley, Obama's Middle East advisor, is about as pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli as an American can get. Malley lays the blame for the failure of Camp David squarely at the feet of Israel, not the intransigent Yassar Arafat.

Michael Froman is one of Obama's key economic advisors. A former executive with Citigroup, Froman was chief of staff to Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Most members of Obama's team are hardly what would be considered outsiders, most having worked in Washington for the Clinton administration and for other well-known Democrats. So when Obama talks about change, it's likely the changes he has in mind are just a return to the Clintonian way of doing things.

For those of you who remember, that means cutting the U.S. military down so that the resulting "peace dividend" can be spent on social programs. It means broadcasting to the rest of the world that we are weak and should be attacked. It means sitting down to diplomatic negotiations with those who wish us ill and allowing them to take avery advantage of our country. It means the wholesale exportation of America's techology. It means Supreme Court appointments on the order of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. It means no domestic exploration or production of oil and no expansion of our severely limited refining capacity, putting us even more at the mercy of OPEC states. It means that global warming will become our country's leading religion. It means that cultural Marxism, known polularly as political correctness, will continue to run amok.

In short, an Obama administration would look a lot like the Clinton administration, except that Obama would be even less willing to stand up to the Democrat Party's left wing than was Bill Clinton. Considering that even after seven years of a Republican in the White House, the nation still has not fully recovered from the ill effects of the Clinton years, conservatives should think long and hard about the prospects of even just one term for a President Obama.

- JP