In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama"… [D]rill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you're bound to hit Obama supporters.
And it's important to recall that this hawk/dove split and the elite/rank-and-file split have some causal interaction. Back in 2002, the Democratic establishment found itself trapped in this vicious cycle. Most rank-and-file members of congress were ready to oppose the war. But the leadership in the House and the Senate was backing it. And the campaign committees were advising challengers and vulnerable members to back it. And the conventional wisdom said that anyone who wanted to be elected president had to back it. And so were most of the media celebrities focusing on foreign policy - Holbrooke and Albright and Pollack and O'Hanlon.
My current hypothesis is as follows: for the rank and file of professional, progressive foreign policy types who were opposed to the Iraq war from the start, the Obama campaign is the equivalent of the 2002 Nancy Pelosi leadership, 2003 Howard Dean presidential, and 2006 Ned Lamont Senate campaigns were for much of the activist rank and file. However, while this rebellion is analogous to those earlier rebellions of an anti-war rank and file against a pro-leadership, the cultural gap between wonks and hacks, between insiders and outsiders, and between professionals and the grassroots have prevented it from gaining the same traction as those earlier campaigns.
I try to flesh out this hypothesis in the extended entry.
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