MSNBC’S Andrea Mitchell claimed President Barack Obama’s new cabal of foreign policy advisers “looks like a review of our guest list” on the liberal cable news network, with the AP’s Julie Pace explaining that the White House is trying to bring the commentators “into the fold.”
Mitchell spoke Tuesday with Pace about Obama’s Monday night dinner with the DC foreign policy intelligentsia, presumably designed to help craft a strategy to contain an aggressive Russia and defeat ISIS in the Middle East.
But as the MSNBC host ticked off the guests — including former Clinton aide Sandy Berger, longtime Democratic adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman — she couldn’t help but notice a trend.
“It looks like a review of our guest list here at ‘Andrea Mitchell Reports,'” she said. “Julie, why did the president finally reach out and bring in all of these different voices on foreign policy?”
“It was a pretty unusual thing for the president to do,” Pace explained. “Not only does he not usually reach out to folks like this, he actually has criticized was he calls ‘the Washington chattering class,’ people who tend to comment from the outside.”
“So this was a real attempt by the president to bring those people into the fold, let them hear directly from him,” she continued. “And also hear from them, get some advice. A lot of these people on the list — who as you said, are great guests on your show — are people who have been through a lot. And they might actually have some advice that he could learn from.”