Kerry becomes Obama's MVP
President relying on senator to take on the difficult jobs at home and abroad
WASHINGTON -- He's not president, a Cabinet member or an ambassador, but Sen. John Kerry has ascended to the unofficial role of President Obama's global adviser on key issues that could reshape the nation's image around the world.
Mediating Afghanistan's 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 it's 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. Obama's speech electrified the party and the convention. It was the first time many Americans had heard of the young Illinois state senator.
"I'm here because of you," Obama wrote Kerry on the January day he was sworn in as the nation's first black president. The note is framed and hangs on Kerry's Senate office wall.
And now, Obama is leaning on Kerry to help shape his foreign policy. Kerry, 65, played a crucial role in persuading President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff vote after a fraud-plagued presidential election.
The meetings with Karzai, Kerry 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's 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.
"I mean, who's your defense minister?" Kerry said. "Do you have a good defense minister who's going to help coordinate the Afghan forces with your troops, or do you have a political appointee who doesn't know anything about what he's doing? These things matter."
Kerry declined to say whether or when Obama should send more troops and said he'd elaborate on that point Friday during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kerry brushed off a question 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, Kerry's 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. He'll lead a delegation to Copenhagen in December for climate talks and sponsored the Senate bill to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. Then there's his hefty role on Obama's top legislative priority -- rewriting the nation's 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.
"It's 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.
If Clinton leaves her position during the Obama administration, Gergen added, Kerry "would be on everyone's short list and probably right at the top of it as a potential successor."
AP