Scholars Who Counsel Candidates Wield Power but Face Risks

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By DAVID GLENN

In late July, the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama hit a rough patch. Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, was attacked for pledging, if elected, to sit down for conversations with Fidel Castro, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other heads of state who are not usually on Washington's guest list.

Another wave of criticism arose when he said he would be prepared to launch air strikes attacking regions of Pakistan where leaders of Al Qaeda are believed to be hiding. During a Republican debate in Iowa, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, said of Senator Obama: "In one week, he went from saying he's going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he's going to bomb our allies. I mean, he's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."

To quell the uproar, the senator's campaign turned to one of its chief foreign-policy advisers. Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote a lengthy public memorandum that clarified — and aggressively defended — those positions. She argued that Senator Obama had wisely defied the prevailing winds in both political parties during the Iraq war debate in 2002, and she said that his comments on diplomacy and Pakistan also represented a break from "bankrupt conventional wisdom."

Ms. Power is just one of dozens of university-based scholars advising the current crop of presidential candidates. In drafting her memo, Ms. Power performed a task often handed to such scholar-advisers: She sent a signal to party elders, donors, and the news media that Senator Obama is serious about foreign policy, however thin his foreign-affairs résumé might appear.

Her own credentials — among many other things, she is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 book 'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide — may help to assuage political elites' doubts about the fledgling candidate.

Other politicians with little or no national experience — think of George W. Bush in 2000, or Rudolph W. Giuliani today — have also worked hard to bring heavyweight foreign-policy scholars into their campaigns.

The role of presidential advisers has changed a great deal since the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was closely identified with a clutch of Ivy League scholars. One of those advisers, the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is credited with writing one of the most famous lines in Kennedy's Inaugural Address: "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate."

Ms. Power and the other scholar-advisers of the 2008 season face challenges that Galbraith's generation never knew. The public is much more skeptical of credentialed expertise than it was during the Kennedy administration. And new technologies make the candidate-adviser relationship more perilous than it once was. In theory a student in one of Ms. Power's Harvard courses might post one of her classroom comments (perhaps wildly out of context) on a blog and create a news-media storm within hours.

"That's the one thing that terrifies me," Ms. Power says. "That I'll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate." She says that in public lectures and interviews, she sometimes fights the urge to make unkind statements about other candidates. "That's just not Obama's style," she says. "Left to my own devices, I'd articulate my frustrations in a much harsher way."

Despite that anxiety, Ms. Power says that her engagement with Mr. Obama's campaign has been one of the most important experiences of her career. In 2005-6, well before Senator Obama's presidential campaign began, Ms. Power took a leave from Harvard and served in an unpaid post in his Senate office, helping to craft his policies on Iraq, Darfur, and other issues. Advising Senator Obama, she says, "is in some ways a more efficient way to spend time than just about anything else that I could do with my life."

Making the Sausage

That prospect of "efficiency" — of directly shaping public policy — is, of course, the great lure of signing up as a campaign adviser. "It's a way for an academic to not only see how the sausage gets made, but to try to influence how the sausage gets made," says William R. Melick, an associate professor of economics at Kenyon College who is advising Sen. John McCain's campaign on international-trade policy. "And that's pretty valuable both for your own education and for the public good."

Jan C. Ting, a law professor at Temple University who is advising Mr. Giuliani's campaign on immigration policy, has strong personal views about the issue: National security, he says, demands much tighter borders. Mr. Ting believes Mr. Giuliani has the best chance of winning the White House, and that is one reason Mr. Ting chose to work with him.

But unless a scholar-adviser knows a candidate well from the outset, such relationships contain an element of risk. Will the candidate use advisers as window dressing during the campaign and then pursue different policies after winning the election? Faced with conflicting opinions, will the candidate dither for months before making a decision?

"It's important to ask yourself, 'Could I be a good adviser for this particular style of leader?'" says Paul A. Kowert, an associate professor of international relations at Florida International University.

In his 2002 book Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn From Their Advisors? (State University of New York Press), Mr. Kowert examined two common maladies of presidencies. He says many of the lessons he drew from his studies of the White House also apply to campaigns.

"Advisers tend to be very conscious of the danger of groupthink," Mr. Kowert says. "They worry about too much conformity within the group, and they want their voices to be heard. But they're not always so conscious of the converse problem, the problem of deadlock. There are some leaders who will wait too long to make decisions."

Timothy J. Muris, a law professor at George Mason University who advised President Bush in 2000 and now advises Senator McCain, says that he tries to test candidates before signing on with them. He recalls attending a dinner party in Texas with Mr. Bush in the mid-1990s, when Mr. Bush was governor.

"We were in a big group," Mr. Muris says, "and I disagreed with him when I found something to disagree on. Because, you know, you want to see how they're going to react. If they're not willing to listen, then in my opinion, they're not worth working for."

Mr. Bush passed that particular test. "He had one of his aides call me after the meeting to say that he appreciated someone who was willing to disagree with him." (Senator McCain is similarly open, Mr. Muris adds: "He doesn't think he has any monopoly on wisdom.")

Ms. Power, for her part, praises Senator Obama for his ability to make policy decisions and to stick with them. During her tenure in his Washington office, she says, "he would bring very different people into the office with very different perspectives. He would watch them argue with one another, and he would play devil's advocate and push back. But then he'd make a decision. A lot of people are willing to hear different perspectives, but then they have trouble making decisions. Obama is very decisive."

Tower or Power?

After joining a campaign, scholars sometimes find themselves worrying about the balance between their partisan political work and academic norms.

"I'm very conscious of a dualism in my life," Ms. Power says. "I've just started writing a column for Time magazine. I'm a teacher. I write books. What little reputation I have is based on telling the truth."

With most politicians, she says, she would be anxious about "eroding my integrity or being asked to spin something that I personally would find objectionable. But in fact, I don't have that issue at all. There's no daylight between us on any of the major foreign-policy issues."

Mr. Muris, who has worked in several high-level government jobs, sounds a touch more jaded. Campaign advisers, he says, should always be prepared to have their advice ignored. "I'm not going to give you examples," he says. "But every president, like every boss anybody has ever had, will say things that surprise the people that work for them. Political campaigns are certainly no exception."

John J. DiIulio Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who advised both the Bush and Gore campaigns on civil society and volunteerism in 2000, says that hypocrisy is the great danger of political work.

His first piece of advice to scholar-advisers, he says, is "Do not lie. Don't lie to the candidate, don't lie to the other advisers, and certainly don't lie to friends and colleagues back home. That's probably the biggest mistake people make. They start shading the truth a little bit in order to continue to be a part of a campaign. Don't do it."

On a practical level, Mr. Ting, who also ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware last year, says he finds it reasonably easy to balance politics and academe: "At law schools, the expectation is that faculty members will have an impact on the system, either through their scholarly writings or by advising people in government."

But politics can intrude into the classroom in seemingly mundane ways, When students evaluated her last year, Ms. Power says, a few of them objected to her use of Senator Obama's name in a role-playing exercise. While she meant the example whimsically, "some students took it much more seriously than I'd intended," she says. "I would never use the pulpit to sell a candidate."

Circles of Influence

In this presidential cycle, the Obama and Giuliani campaigns have been far more aggressive than others in cultivating and publicizing relationships with scholarly advisers. (See the table on Page A15.) Mr. Kowert suggests that that behavior suggests a certain sort of "open" leadership style, which he says has both virtues and drawbacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, by contrast, "seems to rely on a group of trusted associates who have been with her for a long time. She seems to be open to information and to have a good grasp of policy details, but for other reasons, having to do with her history with the news media, she seems to have somewhat constrained avenues of access."

Senator Obama, meanwhile, "seems to be all about hearing a variety of opinions," Mr. Kowert says. "And the way this has played out is what one would expect. He's been criticized for not having been quite well enough managed on certain issues that have hurt him.

"But that's the failing that you would expect from someone who has the virtue of hearing a variety of opinions."

Perhaps the most famous scholar-adviser of modern times was the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who served in the White House under Kennedy and briefly under Lyndon B. Johnson.

Schlesinger, whose journals have just been published by Penguin Press, was sometimes accused of hero worship and sycophancy. In his journal in 1966, he leveled a similar accusation against Walt W. Rostow, an MIT professor of economic history who served in several Washington posts during the 1960s. (Rostow supported the Vietnam War long after Schlesinger had rejected it.)

Rostow, Schlesinger wrote, "has suddenly emerged from a long eclipse and is now established as the Pangloss of the White House, telling the president with great authoritativeness all the things the president wants to hear. … I can see him when the bombs begin to fall on Washington, assuring LBJ that the deep-running historical tendencies are on our side."

Maybe someday Barack Obama will win the White House, and his current coterie of advisers will suffer their own bitter ruptures with each other over foreign policy. But for now, Ms. Power says that she could not be happier with the candidate and his team.

"If I was living in mortal fear that somehow I was going to be asked to defend something objectionable," she says, "I would quit tomorrow. But that's not an issue. … I just agree with him."