Steve Clemons, with whom I worked at the New America Foundation in 1999, has some advice for President Obama:
Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.
That seems, ah, problematic. The only two people who could actually be useful here, Daschle and Podesta, already sit in the outer-advice circle. Then you've got some journalists who won't (and can't) get involved in politics, along with a greatest-hits collection of left-wingers and hard-core "realists." I not only ail to see how this would solve Obama's problem, I can't think of any kind of problem that could be solved by assembling this panel.