Politico‘s Ben Smith has one of those “Wow, I can’t believe this” scoops. The only problem is that I actually can believe it. I just don’t want to.
(An anti-gay, anti-Dem mailer from 2004 election that TWN first publicized) My occasional blogging heads partner David Frum may have coined the “Axis of Evil” for George Bush to have an easy way to denigrate Iran, Iraq and North Korea — and thus undermining the possibility of a strategic pivot then in US-Iran relations, but…
Former Washington Post “White House Watch” maven and current DC Huffington Post Bureau Chief Dan Froomkin powerfully deconstructs and pops the Rahm Emanuel bubble that the Washington Post has been puffing up. The first puff came in a widely read Dana Milbank column.
I took this pic on my increasingly useful iPhone on Amelia Island, outside of Jacksonville, Florida. I’m here with a very interesting bunch of folks discussing a framework for policy alternatives and different narratives that could be useful in changing the course of America’s Afghanistan policy. More later.
Greetings folks. I’m departing Doha in a few hours after having spent an interestin day at the Sheraton here watching the Sudan/Darfur peace agreement signing ceremony — as well as participating in a significant conference titled “Political Islam: Options and Priorities” sponsored by the Al Jazeera Center for Studies.
President Obama’s closest handlers — Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs — are under fire from a number of observers, including this one, for deploying the President’s political capital badly, failing to animate and empower the considerable policy and political talent they have appointed to key positions on their team, poorly sequencing…
This is a guest note by Stephen M. Walt. The essay, which TWN encouraged Walt to publish after outlines of it appeared in private correspondence, first appeared on Walt’s Foreign Policy blog. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
This morning in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank challenges Edward Luce, Leslie Gelb, Jane Hamsher and me on our recent pieces explicating the management and policymaking mess among Barack Obama’s core team. (Here is my piece.) Let’s set aside for another post the fact that Milbank’s column seems to channel Rahm directly.
For a five minute clip selected by the New York Times for posting of a bloggingheads exchange I did with David Frum on Iran stuff, click here.
Before I get too far into this post, while I don’t believe that Rahm Emanuel is serving the Obama White House well as Chief of Staff, I do think he’s brilliant and would excel in other roles for the team — but that is not the purpose of this post.