Obama Employs New Tactic, Puts Advisers on Display

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Senator Obama is employing a novel tactic in response to the perception that his relative lack of experience makes him a foreign policy lightweight: He is putting his team of defense and foreign policy advisers on display for New Hampshire voters.

While it's not unheard of for a political candidate to campaign with major endorsers or policy experts, Mr. Obama's three-session summit, "The Judgment to Lead: Obama Foreign Policy Forum," represented something new. In an event that fused elements of a political rally with an academic conference that one might find at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, earnest New Hampshire activists filed into the Portsmouth Sheraton at 8:30 a.m. to listen to and question Mr. Obama's advisers. They included, among others, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Susan Rice, a professor at the Kennedy School, Samantha Power, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Richard Danzig, and a professor at Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service, Anthony Lake.

The overall theme of the event was the change that Mr. Obama, as a fresh voice unfettered by having supported the Iraq war, would bring to American relations with the rest of the world. "He really is about change," Mr. Lake said. "Simply by electing him, we would present a wonderful new face to the world."

While decrying "saber-rattling at Iran" and vowing to provide "openness" in foreign policy, Mr. Obama also talked tough to a degree. "There may be … 40,000 hard-core jihadists with whom we can't negotiate," Mr. Obama said. "Our job is incapacitate them, to kill them … I am absolutely committed to doing that as commander in chief."

Mr. Obama also went so far as to criticize the United Nations, when asked about the international body by a potter, Kit Cornell, who flies its blue flag outside her Exeter home. "The U.N. has its flaws, and it's important for those of us who believe in international cooperation to acknowledge those flaws," Mr. Obama said. He cited the example of the Human Rights Commission. "The Human Rights Commission has become a farce," he said. "A country like Zimbabwe becoming spokesman for that agency ... That is untenable."

On a day that marked the start of an international conference aimed at addressing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, discussion of that aspect of foreign policy was sparse and limited to advisers responding to audience questions. "I don't think we should be criticizing an administration when it's now starting to do things all of us have been calling on it to do," Mr. Lake said.

Ms. Power spoke of the need to "parse" the differences between violent and anti-American groups. "This administration and many … in this presidential race act as though Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and Hamas and Iran and all those belong together," Ms. Power said. "We have got to parse. We have got to discern."

Another advisor, the dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center, John Hutson, said of America, "We're not a leader. ... We're an outlier." For her part, Senator Clinton's campaign circulated a statement reiterating its criticism of Mr. Obama's lack of experience. "Senator Obama, who served in the Illinois State Senate just three years ago … would have less experience than any president since World War II," the statement read.