Tag Archives: David Ignatius

Obama pivots to newer faces in foreign policy

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From Politico:

Goodbye David Brooks, hello Peter Beinart.

Shortly after announcing his newfound support for the legalization of gay marriage yesterday, President Barack Obama walked into an off-the-record foreign policy meeting with nine editors and columnists to discuss Afghanistan, Israel, NATO and the forthcoming G8 Summit at Camp David, sources present at the meeting tell me.

The nine: The New Yorker’s David Remnick and Jane Mayer, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, Newsweek’s Peter Beinart, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, The New York Times’s Carla Robbins, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, The Los Angeles Times’s Doyle McManus, and David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

While some of these writers — most notably Ignatius, one of the most respected and influential columnists in Washington’s foreign policy circles today — are familiar faces at the White House, the group as a whole marks a notable shift away from the Tom Friedmans and the David Brooks toward younger voices and fresh perspectives.

Notable here are the number of people who’ve faced pretty severe criticism of their own critical statements on Israel: Remnick, Beinart, and Klein, for example. This meeting probably doesn’t signal anything overly substantive, but the inclusion of Beinart is especially intriguing in light of the firestorm his excellent book, The Crisis of Zionism (which I just finished reading several weeks ago), spawned in the media.

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