A cast of 300 advises Obama on foreign policy

Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has a far smaller and looser foreign policy advisory operation, about 75 people in all, and none are organized into teams. In 2004, the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry , had a foreign policy structure similar in scale to Mr. Obama’s, but it had limited influence on the candidate, who had spent 20 years in the Senate, former advisers said. Mr. Obama is not yet receiving the government intelligence briefing that is typically made available to a presidential candidate upon becoming his party’s nominee.

Mr. Obama’s infrastructure funnels hundreds of e-mail messages and reams of position papers and talking points each day to members of the core group, who in turn seek advice or make requests for more information to team members down the line. Dennis Ross , the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton and the first President Bush and a member of the Obama campaign’s Middle East team, is frequently asked by Ms. Rice, Mr. Lake or Mr. McDonough for help on framing Mr. Obama’s comments on Iran’s nuclear program and its potential threat to Israel.

“They’ve asked for substantive help: ‘Can I take a look at language on Iran?’ ” Mr. Ross said. “Or sometimes I’ve been asked questions to explain the administration’s approach on Iran.” Mr. Ross participated in a conference call last week with Mr. Obama and other advisers to prepare for the senator’s foreign trip, and he will travel with Mr. Obama in Israel and the West Bank city of Ramallah and at other stops. Mr. Ross described Mr. Obama in the conference call as focused on “drilling down” into the issues on the trip.

Another person who has contributed outside advice is former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell , whom Mr. Obama has been wooing. Mr. Powell, a Republican, has a friendship of decades with Mr. McCain, but friends say he has felt excluded from Mr. McCain’s foreign policy operation and was impressed when Mr. Obama called on him in June. Mr. Powell also met around the same time with Mr. McCain.

From day to day, the main point of contact with Mr. Obama and his foreign policy team is Mr. McDonough, who is soon to be joined in Chicago by Mr. Lippert. “If there’s something big in the morning, we will either e-mail or call Obama,” said Mr. Lippert, who performed a similar job, although on a smaller scale, when he was Mr. Obama’s foreign policy adviser in the Senate. “So instead of having 20 people at your fingertips, you have 300. The pressure is there, the time is much shorter, but the principle is the same — lining up the calls, briefing the candidate, e-mails, op-eds, statements.”

Out in the netherworld of the 300, advisers often say they are unclear about what happens to all the policy paragraphs they churn out on request. “It’s all mysterious what we send him and what gets to him,” said Michael A. McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford University who leads the Russia and Eurasia team for the Obama campaign.

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Other team leaders include Ivo H. Daalder , a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has organized his 40-member nuclear nonproliferation team into eight working groups, and Philip H. Gordon, another scholar at the institution, who is in charge of Mr. Obama’s Europe team.

Although Mr. Obama’s team has yet to show any public evidence of deep policy divisions, it has its share of personal tensions, not least those born of integrating Mrs. Clinton’s former advisers into the effort. In that process, the old Clinton administration hierarchy has been turned upside down.

One person who is not a team leader — and who was not included in a 13-member “senior working group” that the Obama campaign announced last month — is Richard Holbrooke , a United Nations ambassador under Mr. Clinton who was mentioned as a potential secretary of state if Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency. Mr. Holbrooke has long had a rivalry with Mr. Lake, who was widely criticized in Washington for his performance as national security adviser in the Clinton White House.

The Obama campaign has since said that Mr. Holbrooke, who mediated an end to the war in Bosnia in 1995, is on the team. But Mr. Holbrooke, who declined to comment, has found himself in the position of a general from a defeated army who must now seek peace.

This article, A cast of 300 advises Obama on foreign policy, first appeared in The New York Times.

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