New America Foundation

If Barack Obama prevails over Hillary Clinton to become his party’s nominee, it will mark the end of an era for the Clintons. But the agenda of the group that devised their national political identity will be just fine.

At least according to Al From, the founder and CEO of the resolutely centrist—Clintonian, even—Democratic Leadership Council.

“What he has done is he has certainly taken a good part of the strategy we have articulated over the years,” Mr. From said. “Which is to not polarize, but try to unite and build a coalition that understands that a Democratic victory is a coalition.”  read more »

A few minutes ago in a speech before the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and NSC official, attacked Kenneth Pollack, the "thinker" at Saban/Brookings who served up the Iraq war on a silver platter for liberals. Leverett said Pollack had made a "deeply-flawed and flat-out wrong case regarding WMD," which led him to assert in his book The Threatening Storm that invading Iraq was "the conservative option."

The speech was remarkable because Leverett once worked alongside Pollack at Brookings. Sort of like Anatol Lieven, who had to parachute out of Carnegie when they didn't want to hear what he had to say about Israel. "People at the thinktanks have courage somewhere between a seaslug and sheep-guts," Lieven told me earlier this year. What a pleasure to watch the war-party delaminate.

But how amazing is it that Pollack maintains credibility? "Now he's doing it on Iran," Leverett notes, pointing to a Dec. 8 Op-Ed in the Times. And at a CFR event not long ago, Pollack was all-but-praising neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht's burn-down-the-house option for Iran.