Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker on the Foreign Policy Differences Between McCain and Obama

The current issue of the New Yorker, week of October 13, 2008, special election issue, has a nice article,“Worlds Apart,” by Nicholas Lemann on the foreign policy differences between Obama and McCain – including a good discussion of each candidate’s foreign policy advisory team.  The article is worth reading for Lemann’s interviews with each candidate’s leading senior foreign policy people.  He describes the Obama team as something like the Microsoft or Google staffs – cool, assured, relaxed, competent, unflappable, and a complete sense of their own master of the universe-ness – and a complete sense of willingness to (coolly, competently, unflappably, relaxedly) tear the throats out of the opposition.  (I paraphrase, but not so very much.)

There’s a very nice reference to the wonderful Michael McFaul of Stanford (and, note, a Hoover Institution senior fellow), an Obama advisor who helped work out the campaign’s position on Georgia and Russia. 

But I was especially impressed with the description of Kori Schake, a McCain advisor, West Point professor, most recently Principal Deputy Director of the Policy Planning Staff at DOS, and also a Hoover fellow, with a new book out on foreign policy.  Schake, Lemann says, “might be plausibly cast as a heroine in a James Bond movie – the sort of character who speaks several languages and is also an Akido master.”  Absolutely. As someone privileged to know Professor Schake, I can confirm this. 

(The article is not yet online, alas.)