Sniping Intensifies On Campaign Advisers

Dems, Republicans duking it out over who has candidate’s ear on Mideast policy.

Former Clinton administration official Robert Malley. getty images

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

In the days leading up to this week’s Democratic primary in Maryland, Jewish voters in Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs of Washington began getting e-mails warning that Sen. Barack Obama is being influenced by “anti-Israel” advisers, and pointing to one in particular: former Clinton administration official Robert Malley.

Some Obama supporters reacted in outrage, arguing that the e-mails were just the latest in a slur campaign targeting their candidate among Jewish voters. But in reality it was part of a much older game.

“Candidates create these panels to look like they have gravitas,” said Democratic pollster and strategist Mark Mellman, who has not endorsed a 2008 contender. “And people get on them because they want to be in a good position to influence policy, if

the candidate wins.”

Just as routinely, he said, political opponents find panel members with controversial views or records and wave them like a red flag before selected voter groups.

Malley — described as an astute and balanced Mideast analyst by left-of-center Jewish groups, and as a hardened anti-Israel ideologue by groups on the right — is in the outer orbit of the Obama campaign, campaign insiders say. Close associates say he is further to the left than most Jewish pro-peace process groups, but remains a strong supporter of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One longtime colleague said he comes closest to reflecting the positions of Israeli dove Yossi Beilin.

Other analysts point out that Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain has a similar foreign policy advisory panel — with similarly controversial figures, including former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who has advocated get-tough positions on Israel.

Still, it is the Obama team that is drawing the most fire, and the slams may be having an impact. On Tuesday, early exit polls showed Sen. Hillary Clinton taking 60 percent of the Jewish vote in Maryland to Obama’s 40 — one of the only bright spots in a dismal night that saw her lose all primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia by big margins, with Obama cutting deeply into her political base.

Some Jewish leaders say the continuing attacks on Obama’s big circle of Mideast advisers is part of a process that is generating Mideast controversy even though all of the major candidates are on the same policy page.

“I don’t understand why our community is making Israel an issue at this point,” said Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman. “None of the candidates has made it an issue; their public statements have all been very good. So why are we shadowboxing and making this an issue?”

This year’s version of the adviser game has focused heavily on Obama — in large part, opponents in both parties say, because he is more of a blank slate on foreign policy issues, in part because Republicans sense that his liberal political base, his race and continuing — and unfounded — rumors about his Muslim connections make him particularly vulnerable.

“It is legitimate to ask who Obama is beholden to and who he listens to, since he doesn’t have a record you can point to,” said lobbyist and pro-Israel political fundraiser Morris Amitay, who generally backs Republicans in presidential contests.

Several Jewish supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, while not singling out any Obama advisers, seem to agree.

“When you get a young, not-so-experienced candidate, he really needs that help,” said a prominent Jewish Clinton supporter. “I don’t think anybody believes Obama came to the idea of running for president with a detailed approach to the Middle East. It’s legitimate to ask who is helping him develop it now.”

But like most such teams, the Obama foreign policy panel defies easy characterization, although — like that of his chief Democratic rival — it is top heavy with former officials of the Bill Clinton administration.

Included in that group are Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official; Bruce Riedel, a onetime CIA officer and National Security Council staffer; and Richard Clarke, a top counterterrorism official with the Clinton and Bush administrations.

The names that have generated the most controversy in pro-Israel circles are Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser and now a Center for Strategic and International Studies counselor; and Malley, a major figure in Bill Clinton’s Mideast peace efforts and especially his 11th-hour efforts to wrest an agreement at Camp David in 2000.

In several long pieces that have been widely circulated via e-mail in the Jewish community, Ed Lasky, editor of The American Thinker, a neoconservative Internet publication, accuses Malley of “representing the Palestinian point of view” and presenting a “revisionist history” of the Camp David negotiations.

Lasky has also cited Malley’s Syrian-born father who, he said, “loathed Israel, and anti-Israel activism became a crusade for him.”

But Malley is only one of several dozen members of the Obama foreign policy team — a group that also includes former U.S. Mideast envoy Dennis Ross, who has disputed Malley’s account of the Camp David summit — and who is widely expected to get a major policy role in any new Democratic administration.

The overall foreign policy group has only met twice, according to campaign insiders, and Malley himself has not met with the senator.

Analysts note that Malley’s strong pro-peace process views are conspicuously absent from Obama’s public statements on the Middle East.

In an interview with Jewish reporters two weeks ago, the candidate firmly rejected talking to Hamas until it abandoned violence and accepted Israel’s right to exist, and expressed pessimism that new peace talks can move forward until the Palestinian Authority exerts real control over the territory it controls.

In fact, his recent positions have generated a minor backlash on the Jewish left.

In his influential Tikkun Olam blog, peace activist Richard Silverstein lashed out at Obama for a letter to the American United Nations ambassador urging opposition to any resolution on Israel’s handling of the Gaza crisis “that does not fully condemn the rocket assault Hamas has been conducting on civilians in southern Israel.”

“This letter is a perfect example of how election campaigns prostitute legitimate policy objectives,” Silverstein wrote, calling it an effort by Obama to “pander to the right-wing portion of the Jewish electorate.”

Jewish Democrats point out that even if Malley is a hard-core dove, he is one of two dozen advisory team members — and that John McCain’s group, too, has high-profile members who have crossed swords with pro-Israel groups.

At the top of that list: Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, who is widely seen as a driving force behind the first Bush administration’s confrontations with the Israeli government in the 1990s and, more recently, as a leading advocate of “linkage” between a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a way out of the current Iraq war.

Indeed, in 2005 political fundraiser Amitay wrote that “the two most notable proponents recently of a get-tough approach with Israel have been Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. ... This duo has been appearing together to publicly put the onus on Israel not only for being insufficiently forthcoming, but for dragging us into the war in Iraq.”

Yet little has been said about Scowcroft’s role in the McCain campaign. And, in fact, campaign insiders say Scowcroft, like Malley, is not a central player in the candidate’s foreign policy.

“Mostly, the concept of this kind of advisory team as a team is a fiction,” said Colby College political scientist L. Sandy Maisel. “Most of these candidates do, in fact, draw from some individual members of the team for advice on certain subjects. The real key is whether the ‘advisers’ have real access to the candidates.”

In the case of Obama, the Mideast advisers with the most access are Dan Shapiro, a former National Security Council official during the Clinton administration and an ex-staffer on Capitol Hill; Eric Lynn, a senior aide to former Rep. Peter Deutsch; former Clinton National Security Council adviser Anthony Lake; and Susan Rice, a Clinton administration Africa expert.

Also a key player: Denis McDonough, a former senior foreign policy adviser for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.

For McCain, the most important Mideast voices are Randy Scheunemann, a longtime Capitol Hill aid to former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and Trent Lott and Richard Fontaine, the senior foreign policy staffer in his Senate office.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, too, has assembled a big group of nominal foreign policy advisers, but the real insiders are former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and — laboring in relative obscurity — Andrew Shapiro, a top foreign policy aide in her Senate office.

Baruch College political scientist Douglas Muzzio said the advisory teams can play a role in helping candidates by “providing advice, insight and analysis that the candidate and his or her staff absorb and use to create policy.”

Including a range of perspectives is important because “a wise decision maker gets as much information, and as broad a range of information, as possible,” he said.

But Muzzio added that such panels are also notable because they provide ammunition for political opponents.

“You can always find one or two members who will create controversy,” he said. “If you’ve written or said something that reflects a view that, for instance, is seen as not wholly supportive of Israel and its policies, there are elements that will react.

“The fact that these people are part of an advisory committee does not mean they are making policy, but this is the under-the-radar politics that will help determine the outcome of this election: on-the ground information, misinformation and disinformation is all in play here.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization