http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/monday/chi-obama_mon_nusep17,0,3844054.storyWASHINGTON - Barack Obama's presidential bid may have a well-cultivated insurgent feel, as the candidate both benefits and suffers politically from a relatively thin record of experience in Washington.
But the swelling team of policy advisers who have joined his campaign shows a politician grounded in his party's intellectual mainstream and well-connected within the capital's Democratic establishment.
As Obama rapidly transitioned from a senator with less than three years in office to a presidential candidate who has delivered detailed policy speeches, he has assembled a personal think tank that easily outsizes any of the established Washington policy institutes that provide intellectual fodder for the political war of ideas.
On foreign policy alone, some 200 experts are providing the Obama campaign with assistance of some sort, arranged into 20 subgroups. On the domestic front, more than 500 policy experts are contributing ideas, campaign aides said. Veterans of previous election campaigns say the scale of the policy operation resembles the full-blown effort candidates typically undertake for a general election campaign rather than the more stripped-down versions common for the primary season.
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Obama built relationships with high-powered policy experts even before he was elected to the Senate.
Goolsbee first met Obama, then a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, in the faculty social world. University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, two of the nation's leading liberal legal scholars, have relationships with Obama respectively dating back to the University of Chicago faculty lounges and Obama's days at Harvard Law School. Lake began giving Obama informal foreign policy advice even before Obama won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.Once elected to the U.S. Senate, Obama set up an ambitious policy operation for a newcomer. Froman, a former fellow editor of the Harvard Law Review, helped make connections in Washington's policy establishment. So did Cassandra Butts, another law school classmate and former senior policy adviser to then-House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt. She continues to assist with Obama's policy operation.