Hopefully only debate post, national security edition

Greg Sargent transcribes an annoying exchange at today's debate:

MODERATOR: Senator Obama, you have Bill Clinton's former National Security Adviser, State Department policy director and maybe secretary among others, advising you. With relatively little foreign policy experience of your own, how will you rely on so many Clinton advisers, and still deliver the kind of break from the past that you're promising voters?
(Laughter)

Obama: You know I am --

Hillary: (Laughing) I want to hear that.

Obama: Well, Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well. (Laughter)

Cute little repartee. And, indeed, I like the repartee! But the question wasn't designed to elicit clever jokes from the candidates. It wasn't even designed exactly as a Russert-style gotcha question. It was designed to mislead viewers about the way campaigns work and the way Washington works and on and on.

Bill Clinton, you may recall, was a Democratic president. And he had a huge pool of advisers and staff that was drawn from a community of thinkers in Washington D.C. Not all of them were good, and not all of them agreed about everything. Some of them even had views radically at odds with what became the policies of the Clinton administration. When that administration ended, most of them returned to the D.C. wonk-and-consultant community and have been there ever since. Now, the Democratic presidential candidates are drawing from that same pool.

There's plenty to criticize about that system, but it has hardly anything to do with Barack Obama's national security advisory choices. The fact that Obama has chosen, among many others, Tony Lake, Richard Danzig, and Gregory Craig as counselors actually speaks fairly well of him. And one can surmise that the things they are whispering in his ear sound fairly different from the things Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrooke--once much closer advisers to Bill Clinton--are whispering in Hillary's ear.

One oughtn't infer that having "Clinton administration" on one's resume means one is robotically programmed to approve of everything the Clinton administration did. Obviously, one ought to treat those individuals as individuals and look at what the record shows about their substantive views. "Mr. Obama, you've drawn from the less hawkish end of Bill Clinton's advisory pool. What does this say about the differences between you and Hillary Clinton?"

Unless, of course, one gets paid by a cable news network to confuse people on purpose. Then all bets are off.