![]() That old-line Obamaite wing's influence has grown over the years as its members have gained experience and shifted into more prominent roles. Obama's national security team has always exhibited a split personality between a group of outsider insurgents - Rhodes, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough - who backed him in 2007 and a group of figures with longstanding institutional ties to the national security establishment that long predate Obama's term in office. This is often discussed in terms of a "mind meld" between Obama and Rhodes, but it's actually easier to understand in institutional terms. That, in turn, was an unusually important role because Obama put foreign policy at the center of his primary campaign and John McCain put foreign policy at the center of his general election campaign against Obama.īut more than any specific job, Rhodes stands out for his relationship to the president. As Samuels's profile details, Rhodes slid into that role after working on Obama's presidential campaign as his main speechwriter on foreign policy issues. ![]() ![]() Rhodes's job title is deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, which means informally that he oversees communications related to American foreign policy. The key thesis of the story is wrong, but separate from that core contention, Rhodes gives Samuels plenty of rope to hang himself with - quotes that alienate would-be allies while offering plenty of fodder for critics of the Obama administration's approach to foreign policy.īut read correctly it offers an intriguing window into the mentality of a group that is very influential right now but whose power is going to vanish in the near future - the coterie of dovish national security hands who embraced Obama early in his campaign against Hillary Clinton and who continue to chafe against the influence of the foreign policy establishment even from inside the White House. Instead it simply offers an "admiring" portrayal of Rhodes's skill at shaping the narrative that's so clumsy that a range of readers, including Carlos Lozada and Joshua Foust, mistook it for a puff piece that accidentally makes its subject look bad. Samuels is a veteran proponent of bombing Iran and an opponent of the Obama administration's nuclear diplomacy, but his profile does not state either of those facts plainly. While formally structured as a profile of Rhodes, his unusual career path, and his thoughts on the intersection of postmodern literary theory and the politics of foreign policy, the article in fact advances a polemical argument - that the American public was duped into accepting a nuclear deal with Iran by Rhodes's manipulation of the press. About a week ago, David Samuels published a profile in the New York Times magazine of Ben Rhodes, a second-tier but highly influential member of President Obama's national security team, that's set Washington ablaze.Ĭonservative media has enthusiastically embraced a handful of sensational lines as proof of Obama's duplicity, while stories in the Atlantic, Mother Jones, Politico, New York magazine, and Slate have sliced and diced it as riddled with errors.
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