It is startling to think that Barack Obama had -- and may very well still --  have plans to include a person who talks about his "gloablized being" as a key member of his foreign policy team. A New Age priestess who will dwell at Foggy Bottom  

Hat Tip: Anne Lieberman  

I don't know if this will help you - or if you can even bear to read it (she talks about Obama's "globalized being") - but in case you haven't seen it - Samantha Powers interview on HNN"

RL: And you have compared Sergio Vieira de Mello and Sen. Barack Obama.

SP: Sergio and Barack have an unusual combination of empirical and pragmatic rigor, and a deep and abiding compassion for people who are voiceless and invisible and not as empowered in their societies as they should be. I know a lot of people with intellectual and academic and analytic rigor, and I know a lot of compassionate people, but it's the combination of that rigor and that passion that make both of them giants. Sergio because of 34 years of experience in violent places, and Barack because of his globalized being or his intellect, they both have a modern sense of the connectedness of all of us and the importance of standing up and embracing the challenge of what the twenty-first century is yielding.

It's a complex world with a set of problems that we haven't faced before individually or collectively, and that doesn't scare Obama, and Sergio gravitated to it like a moth to the flame. Obama views it as exactly why it's his time to be president. To deal with twenty-first century unconventional challenges you have to have an unconventional way of thinking. You can't be bound to the way Washington has always done things. That's not an advantage. It's a liability. It blinds you to fresh eyes that you need to bring to fresh problems.