Sanders FP Machine

Long-time friend of the blog and occasional guest poster Matt Duss is making waves:

Bernie Sanders is adding some serious firepower to his Washington Senate operation as he heads into a year during which he’s expected to anchor both the liberal resistance to Trump and the fight to re-center the Democratic Party around his brand of economic populism. Sanders’ office has hired liberal activist and talk show host Ari Rabin-Havt, a veteran of Harry Reid’s office and Media Matters, to head up a new leadership outreach operation, and foreign policy wonk Matt Duss, most recently the president of the Foundation on Middle East Peace, as a foreign policy advisor. And joining Sanders’ Budget Committee staff as an investigator is former Wall Street Journal reporter Alicia Mundy, who has written extensively about the pharmaceutical industry, a focus for Sanders.

Foreign policy was something of an afterthought to Sanders’ 2016 effort, but he began to develop some infrastructure as the campaign went on. Indeed, the decision to not develop a strong FP critique of Hillary Clinton, precisely the strategy that had allowed Barack Obama to defeat her in ’08, was what made me think that Sanders had initially conceived of himself as an issue/protest candidate rather than a serious challenger. Looking to the future, however, it will be interesting to see how Sanders develops this infrastructure into a genuinely leftish foreign policy platform. Matt will have a very important role to play in that process.

But then Matt also DJed my wedding, and I’m not even married anymore.  So clearly he has a long track record of failure.