Last year, Professor Mike Green of the School of Foreign Service arrived in a New York airport on his way to meet with the top advisers to presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. Both campaigns were seeking his services as a top foreign policy adviser.
An ardent McCain supporter, Green said that as he walked through the airport with a McCain sticker on his bag, a security guard told him that McCain had come through the same airport yesterday, carrying his own bags.
“I realized he was still fighting,” he said. “So I told the Romney and Giuliani people, ‘Sorry, I’m with McCain.’”
Green, who sat on the National Security Council and served as a special assistant to President George W. Bush, is now one of several Georgetown professors who advise either Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as they vie for the presidency.
Others include SFS Professor Anthony Lake and Professor Arturo Velenzuela, the director of Georgetown’s Center for Latin American Studies.
Velenzuela, who is part of Obama’s Latin American policy team, said his job entails providing information on issues and engaging the Latin American community in the election. When Colombian security forces liberated Ingrid Betancourt in July, Velenzuela was part of the team that helped Obama craft his response.
Despite serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, Velenzuela said he is only an auxiliary adviser to the Obama campaign.
“There’s one person who’s playing a leading role, and that’s Tony Lake,” he said.
Indeed, when Obama announced his run for the presidency, the Illinois Senator asked Lake and Susan Rice of the Brooking Institute to assemble his entire foreign policy team. Lake served as National Security Adviser under President Bill Clinton.
Unlike Lake, who would not give in depth comments about Obama’s foreign policy plan, (“That would be acting too political here,” he said), Green said he enjoys introducing McCain’s views of Asian foreign policy into his lectures.
“Students here are really politically aware,” he said. “I think it’s part of the opportunity of going to Georgetown that we go back and forth over this in class.”
The three professors, who have all held jobs with the federal government, said that they would be hesitant to leave Georgetown if offered positions in their candidates’ administrations.
“I believe in torch passing to the next generation,” Lake said.
Like Green, Lake gives personal as well as professional support to his candidate. So much so, he says, that for the first time he is acting as not just an adviser but as a speaker and even door-to-door canvasser for the Obama campaign as well.
“I’ve been involved in several campaigns, and this is the first time I’ve done that,” Lake said. “Before, I was always just a foreign policy nerd.”
