Who is really running us foreign policy?
Could the president's national security adviser have early symptoms of Alzheimer's? That's the nastiest rumour circulating about Jim Jones, the imposingly tall marine general and former Nato supreme commander. He is said to knock off early, and to be out of touch and obsessive-compulsive in his insistence on a clean desk and short briefings. He is also said to be on the way out, with Obama's own national security confidants moving to replace him. It has got so bad that defence secretary Robert Gates, prompted by his generals, has started giving interviews to defend Jones.
The trouble seems to be more about personality clashes than policy, although there are mutterings that Jones is too concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan and missing the big picture about the shift of power to Asia. Jones's defenders blame it all on "the young guard," Obama's foreign policy staffers from his time in the senate. Mark Lippert is nominally number three in the national security council (NSC) and Denis McDonough is nominally the head of the president's strategic communications, but their closeness to Obama is far more important than their titles. Some link them with White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel and top political aide David Axelrod. The Washington Post's David Ignatius has given the foursome the friendly nickname of "the politburo."
There's also another powerful group that is less than impressed with Jones: the deputies committee. Composed of the deputy heads of the state defence departments, the NSC and other relevant agencies as needed, it is chaired by Tom Donilon, who likes to say he was inspired to go into politics after reading Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail as a schoolboy. An intern in the Jimmy Carter White House, he made his name by helping to defeat Ted Kennedy's anti-Carter rebellion in 1980, has worked for Joe Biden and Bill Clinton and knows everybody. And more key still on the deputies committee is the Pentagon's policy queen Michele Flournoy, who is the leading member of a gang—sometimes known as Michele's mafia—of veterans from her Centre for a New American Security (CNAS). A think tank that rose to prominence with dizzying speed after its creation in February 2007, CNAS claimed to be non-partisan but was really intended to save the Democrats from being branded as anti-military peaceniks. Her CNAS veterans are everywhere, and they are all helping her to draft the Pentagon's next quadrennial defence review. It promises to be a revolutionary document. Indeed, it seems designed to catapult Flournoy into Kissinger's old chair at the top of the NSC—unless the whispering campaign forces Jones out too soon.
Don't ask, don't tell
Hell hath no fury like a loyal lobby scorned and the gays are now up in arms over Obama's "betrayal." The Greenwich Village gay rights march on 12th June featured a poster of a two-faced Obama with one side saying "Yes we can," the other, "No we can't." Obama's solicitor-general Elena Kagan had just backed the Pentagon's opposition to ex-soldier James Pietrangelo's effort to bring its "Don't ask, don't tell" policy before the supreme court. (The policy, a vintage Clinton-era fudge, permits gay soldiers to serve in the army but also allows their superiors to fire them if they find out about their sexual orientation.) Pietrangelo told Time magazine that Obama is "a coward, a bigot and a pathological liar," since on the campaign trail he had promised to be "a fierce advocate" for gays. Now activists are planning an 11th October march on Washington, to culminate at the Lincoln Memorial in a deliberate echo of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
Washington's new bench of power
There's a new hot seat at the White House: the bench and picnic table beside the playset Obama installed for his daughters in March. The playset, located just outside the oval office, has four swings, a slide, a fort and a climbing wall, all in cedar and redwood (with a sustainable forestry certificate). Now it's one of Obama's favourite spots whether the girls are there or not, and he uses it for special one-on-ones with Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates or Joe Biden. Inevitably, it has become a status symbol, with senate heavyweights angling for a photo op on the bench. And once they read this, ambassadors will be fighting to get their Merkels, Browns, and Sarkozys invited out to the "Rainbow Castle." Somehow Renegade doubts whether the first lady would quite approve of Berlusconi being called to the bench.
Is Obama a secret puffer?
The good news is that Obama is twice as popular as Tiger Woods or the Pope. The bad news is that a plurality of Americans do not believe that he has really given up smoking and suspect he nips out to the Truman balcony or the rose garden for a quick fag. While 30 per cent say they believe he has quit and 33 per cent had no opinion, 37 per cent think he's a secret puffer. The Opinion Dynamics poll for Fox News also found Obama got 42 per cent of the votes for most popular personality, with the Pope and the Tiger getting 21 and 22 per cent respectively. There must have been a weighty age bias in the sample since Hannah Montana only got 5 per cent. The president's daughters cannot have been polled.
Could the president's national security adviser have early symptoms of Alzheimer's? That's the nastiest rumour circulating about Jim Jones, the imposingly tall marine general and former Nato supreme commander. He is said to knock off early, and to be out of touch and obsessive-compulsive in his insistence on a clean desk and short briefings. He is also said to be on the way out, with Obama's own national security confidants moving to replace him. It has got so bad that defence secretary Robert Gates, prompted by his generals, has started giving interviews to defend Jones.
The trouble seems to be more about personality clashes than policy, although there are mutterings that Jones is too concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan and missing the big picture about the shift of power to Asia. Jones's defenders blame it all on "the young guard," Obama's foreign policy staffers from his time in the senate. Mark Lippert is nominally number three in the national security council (NSC) and Denis McDonough is nominally the head of the president's strategic communications, but their closeness to Obama is far more important than their titles. Some link them with White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel and top political aide David Axelrod. The Washington Post's David Ignatius has given the foursome the friendly nickname of "the politburo."
There's also another powerful group that is less than impressed with Jones: the deputies committee. Composed of the deputy heads of the state defence departments, the NSC and other relevant agencies as needed, it is chaired by Tom Donilon, who likes to say he was inspired to go into politics after reading Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail as a schoolboy. An intern in the Jimmy Carter White House, he made his name by helping to defeat Ted Kennedy's anti-Carter rebellion in 1980, has worked for Joe Biden and Bill Clinton and knows everybody. And more key still on the deputies committee is the Pentagon's policy queen Michele Flournoy, who is the leading member of a gang—sometimes known as Michele's mafia—of veterans from her Centre for a New American Security (CNAS). A think tank that rose to prominence with dizzying speed after its creation in February 2007, CNAS claimed to be non-partisan but was really intended to save the Democrats from being branded as anti-military peaceniks. Her CNAS veterans are everywhere, and they are all helping her to draft the Pentagon's next quadrennial defence review. It promises to be a revolutionary document. Indeed, it seems designed to catapult Flournoy into Kissinger's old chair at the top of the NSC—unless the whispering campaign forces Jones out too soon.
Don't ask, don't tell
Hell hath no fury like a loyal lobby scorned and the gays are now up in arms over Obama's "betrayal." The Greenwich Village gay rights march on 12th June featured a poster of a two-faced Obama with one side saying "Yes we can," the other, "No we can't." Obama's solicitor-general Elena Kagan had just backed the Pentagon's opposition to ex-soldier James Pietrangelo's effort to bring its "Don't ask, don't tell" policy before the supreme court. (The policy, a vintage Clinton-era fudge, permits gay soldiers to serve in the army but also allows their superiors to fire them if they find out about their sexual orientation.) Pietrangelo told Time magazine that Obama is "a coward, a bigot and a pathological liar," since on the campaign trail he had promised to be "a fierce advocate" for gays. Now activists are planning an 11th October march on Washington, to culminate at the Lincoln Memorial in a deliberate echo of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
Washington's new bench of power
There's a new hot seat at the White House: the bench and picnic table beside the playset Obama installed for his daughters in March. The playset, located just outside the oval office, has four swings, a slide, a fort and a climbing wall, all in cedar and redwood (with a sustainable forestry certificate). Now it's one of Obama's favourite spots whether the girls are there or not, and he uses it for special one-on-ones with Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates or Joe Biden. Inevitably, it has become a status symbol, with senate heavyweights angling for a photo op on the bench. And once they read this, ambassadors will be fighting to get their Merkels, Browns, and Sarkozys invited out to the "Rainbow Castle." Somehow Renegade doubts whether the first lady would quite approve of Berlusconi being called to the bench.
Is Obama a secret puffer?
The good news is that Obama is twice as popular as Tiger Woods or the Pope. The bad news is that a plurality of Americans do not believe that he has really given up smoking and suspect he nips out to the Truman balcony or the rose garden for a quick fag. While 30 per cent say they believe he has quit and 33 per cent had no opinion, 37 per cent think he's a secret puffer. The Opinion Dynamics poll for Fox News also found Obama got 42 per cent of the votes for most popular personality, with the Pope and the Tiger getting 21 and 22 per cent respectively. There must have been a weighty age bias in the sample since Hannah Montana only got 5 per cent. The president's daughters cannot have been polled.
