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The 300.

Barack Obama has 300 foreign policy advisors.

So is this a step up from Clintonesque government by polling? A more expert, elite poll?

It's "a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters."

Now, are we supposed to be less concerned?

By contrast, McCain has only 75 foreign policy advisors and "none are organized into teams."

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....

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.

The President must use other people to do part of his thinking for him. Some kind of structure must exist, and the choice of structure tells us something about the man we are asked to trust to make the final call.

Full post as published by Althouse on July 18, 2008 (boomark / email).