More on l'affaire Power

Dan Drezner responds to Jacob Heilbrun's claim that the Samantha Power affair highlights "the adversarial style of a new generation of Democratic foreign-policy mavens who have more in common with the raucous world of bloggers than the somber, oak-lined environs of the Council on Foreign Relations."

No doubt there are netrootsy types -- Spencer Ackerman, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias, for example -- who blog about foreign policy with a fierceness that matches Power's rhetoric. None of these guys are "Democratic foreign-policy mavens," however. On the other side of the ledger, the foreign policy mavens who populate either the Center for American Progress or Democracy Arsenal aren't terribly bellicose.

Seriously, I'd like Heilbrunn or others to name names here. Is there a generation of bellicose mavens who slipped under my radar?

My guess is that Samantha Power was sui generis -- a crusading journalist who made the leap to policy advisor (the only other person I can think of who made a similar leap was Strobe Talbott.... minus the crusading). It's a pretty rare crossover.

I have to say, I think that the main problem was that Samantha Power was talking to the journalist from the Scotsman the way that journalists talk to other journalists. But of course, she isn't a journalist any more; she was the foreign policy advisor to a guy who wants us to make him the leader of the free world.