Historically, the political world doesn’t pay too much attention to who presidential campaigns bring on as policy advisors, but it’s hard to deny the significance of these staffers. For one thing, they help shape a candidate’s worldview, especially when a presidential hopeful lacks ideas and principles of his own. For another, should the candidate actually win, the advisors will probably end up with powerful jobs in the new administration.
And who has Mitt Romney’s ear? On foreign policy, one of the top members of his team is Dan Senor.
Dan Senor is less known to the general public, but familiar to those who’ve followed the Iraq debacle closely. From 2003 to 2004, Senor served as a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman under Paul Bremer. After that smashing success, Senor returned to Washington, where, among other things, in September 2004 he helped write speeches for Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s U.S. visit, and then apparently went on television to praise those speeches as evidence of Bush’s accomplishments in Iraq.
It was Senor, a leading neoconservative, who boasted in October 2003, “The good news is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi people have embraced the liberation and are grateful for all we are doing to reconstruct their country.”
He wasn’t kidding.
When Team Romney needs a credible GOP voice to attack the Obama administration’s foreign policy and advice the inexperienced former governor on international affairs, it turns to this guy. Remember, the Republican National Committee believes the party’s agenda in 2013 will simply be a warmed over version of Bush’s policies. Romney surrounding himself with officials from the Bush/Cheney administration helps drive the point home.
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