Kerry Becomes All-around Adviser to Obama
Mediating Afghanistans presidential election vaulted Kerry from the already prominent chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the most exclusive circle around a new president who is juggling but has not resolved a variety of domestic and foreign policy matters. Beyond policy, Kerry knows how Washington works.
Kerry and Obama also share a political pedigree. Both were mentored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who died in August.
“Obviously, Sen. Kerry is somebody who has a broad range of experience and an in-depth knowledge of issues, ranging form energy and climate change to health care to foreign policy,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “I think its that experience and insight that (Obama) certainly greatly values.”
That cannot be overstated. Obama made his debut on the national stage at the 2004 presidential convention at which Democrats nominated Kerry to challenge George W. Bushs bid for a second term. Obamas speech electrified the party and the convention. It was the first time many Americans had heard of the young Illinois state senator.
“Im here because of you,” Obama wrote Kerry on the January day he was sworn in as the nations first black president. The note is framed and hangs on Kerrys Senate office wall.
And now, Obama is leaning on Kerry to help shape his foreign policy. The two men met at the White House on Wednesday just hours after Kerry returned from Afghanistan, where he played a crucial role in persuading President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff vote after a fraud-plagued presidential election.
“I really tried to be the utility, you know, hitter or fielder at the time,” the 65-year-old senator, his voice hoarse and hip sore after an overnight flight home, said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press in his Senate office.
The meetings with Karzai, he said, were intensely emotional and played out over “a lot of days, a lot of evenings, a lot of meals, a lot of tea.”
Karzai, Kerry said, felt deeply that he had won the election and that he was being insulted for trying to have a democratic process. Kerry could relate.
“Do I understand the day after an election where you think youve won, or you have votes that werent counted or something? Been there, done that,” Kerry said. He talked to Karzai about his own loss to George W. Bush in 2004 and about the 2000 election, in which the Supreme Court called the contested election for Bush.
“It helped him see that … every countrys gone through its difficult races,” Kerry said.
Kerrys plane touched down at home around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. By lunchtime, he was advising Obama at the White House. Kerry says he advised the president to know the outcome of the Afghan elections before sending more troops there.
Kerry declined to say whether or when Obama should send more troops and said hed elaborate on that point Friday during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kerry brushed off a questions about how it felt to be the de facto secretary of state, saying he and the woman who holds that position worked together as a team the whole time. Hillary Rodham Clinton talked to Karzai by phone while Kerry spent face time with him.
Still, observers said, Kerrys role as a presidential adviser on so many major domestic and foreign policy issues is unusual. Earlier this year, for example, Kerry helped reopen talks with Syria in a meeting in Damascus for President Basher Assad. Hell lead a delegation to Copenhagen in December for climate talks and sponsored the Senate bill to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. Then theres his hefty role on Obamas top legislative priority – rewriting the nations health care policy.
David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, said traditionally the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “stays at home and goes quietly on fact-finding missions.
“Its extremely rare that any president calls on an individual outside the executive branch to do as much representative work and diplomacy as Sen. Kerry,” said Gergen, who served as an adviser to four presidents.