Poor Ben Rhodes. U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policy message guru inhabits a world filled with group-thinkers and militarists. If only he could reason with them. But the establishment doesn't care for reason. So Rhodes must create an echo chamber, spinning stories to the press and shading the truth to prevent our nation's next disaster.
This is the upshot of a revealing profile in The New York Times Magazine of Rhodes by David Samuels. The Washington foreign policy establishment is broken, so virtuous men like Rhodes must short-circuit the discourse to overcome it.
Rhodes came to this conclusion early in his career. When he was a staff writer on the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group in 2007, Samuels reports, Rhodes concluded most foreign policy decision-makers were "morons." Jon Favreau, another speechwriter who worked closely with him in Obama's 2008 campaign and first term, explained to Samuels that Rhodes doesn't really care what the establishment thinks of him. Rhodes "won't care if he's never again invited to a cocktail party, or asked to appear on 'Morning Joe,' or inducted into the Council on Foreign Relations hall of fame or whatever the hell they do there," Favreau said.