Obama Heads to India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan Nov. 5

On Friday, President Obama will depart for a ten-day trip starting in India, followed by Indonesia, South Korea (for the G20 Summit in Seoul) and Japan (for the APEC Summit in Yokohama). Jeff Bader, Senior Director for Asian Affairs, and Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, will be answering your questions about President Obama's travel in a live video chat. The WH

More details on Obama's trip will be part of tomorrow's Tuesday Talks at 1 pm eastern.
Ben Rhodes offers some details:

Ben Rhodes Answers Nuclear Security Questions

Ben Rhodes Speaks on Foreign Policy

Ben Rhodes Reviews Asian Trip

Ben Rhodes Previews China Nov. 15 Video

Aboard Air Force One, Ben Rhodes gives the rundown on Obama's visit to China:

More on Obama's town hall here. Obama arrives in China:

Obama Holds Town Hall in China Nov. 15

See video and transcript of the town hall here.

Obama with APEC leaders in Singapore in local attire

The town hall will be live streamed at WhiteHouse.gov. The town hall will begin at 11:45 pm eastern. From Ben Rhodes:

I think what we expect for the event is that there's an audience of several hundred students, young people, young Chinese. They come from several different universities in the Shanghai area. They were I think largely invited by the departments of those universities, the department heads within those universities. We have also solicited questions through various Internet -- various sources on the Internet, so that the President will be taking questions both from students in the room but he'll also have the opportunity to take -- have questions that came in through the Internet. And we have, again, a number of different ways in which Internet questions have been coming in that the President can then answer. Politico

See a video of China's reaction to Obama's visit here. Full coverage of Obama's visit here.
Obama has arrived in China. From China Daily:

United States President Barack Obama arrived at Shanghai Pudong International Airport and in one step, kicking off his first visit to China.

More importantly, he will begin negotiations with China that will likely take a more cooperative tone than that of his predecessors.
Obama's Air Force One landed in Shanghai at about 11:16 pm in heavy downpour with Chinese Ambassador to the US Zhou Wenzhong greeting him.

His motorcade of black limos then left for Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel at the city's center. The hotel has been sealed off by local police for more than a day.

The 48-year-old is the first US president to visit China within the first year of taking office. He will arrive in Beijing tomorrow afternoon during his four-day visit and meet with President Hu Jintao, top legislator Wu Bangguo and Premier Wen Jiabao on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The China trip is also part of his first trip to Asia as president. In his wide-ranging speech in Japan on Saturday, Obama said he would welcome, not fear, a robust China as a powerful partner on urgent challenges.

Obama popular with younger people:

Amid piles of paperwork in his simple office on the outskirts of Beijing, a 28-year-old public welfare lawyer pauses to say his job is special because he feels a kinship with the most powerful man in the United States.

"I am young, passionate and dedicated to helping the poor of the community with my knowledge," said Li Songchen, who represents migrant workers at the Beijing Zhicheng Law Firm.

"Barack Obama at my age was doing the same thing."

When he was in his twenties, Obama worked for a church-based community organization on Chicago's far South Side and worked on civil rights cases with a small law firm.

The same drive to support the disadvantaged helps Li tackle challenges on the job and in life.

Li lives on a thin salary and deals with legal cases that often last years and offer few opportunities to win.

"Part of the reasons for Obama's popularity comes from his knowledge of ordinary people through his grassroots and community experience," Li said.

"The more you talk to the people at the bottom, the most disadvantaged people, the wider vision you gain, the better communication skills you acquire," Li said.

Li is among the young Chinese who have gained new perspectives about their responsibilities, and about equality and sacrifice through Obama's stories.

As the first African-American president, at age 48, Obama has made himself approachable to young people with his smiles, and through Internet communication tools including Twitter and Facebook.

"Whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical what gives me the most hope is the next generation: the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change has already made history" Obama said in March 2008. China Daily

Ben Rhodes Previews Obama's Trip to Asia

Conversation in Asia will revolve around stopping nukes, economy and energy and climate change, according to Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. Obama makes a stop in Alaska before heading to Asia. At 6:15 pm eastern, Obama will hold a news conference with Japan's Prime Minister Hatoyama in Tokyo. It will be live audio streamed at WhiteHouse.gov.

See Obama's travel schedule here.

Ben Rhodes on Crafting Obama's U.N. Speech

Rhodes on the left and Denis McDonough, an adviser on the right.

Ben Rhodes Working on Obama's Egypt Speech

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy speechwriter, is working on Obama's speech that he will give in Egypt June 4. Here's some insight into that process:

The process for the Cairo address will begin this week in the same way it has for other foreign policy speeches Rhodes has written since the Inauguration: Obama will summon Axelrod; Rhodes; Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser; and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to the Oval Office.

The president will talk off the cuff for a half-hour or so about what he wants to say in the speech. Rhodes calls it the “download.”

Obama will go back to the speech, almost always by hand, three or four times before he’s satisfied.

“His criticism is more, ‘No, what I really wanted to say is this, and you didn’t quite capture that here,’” Rhodes said. “Generally, if he’s not happy with it, he knows why he’s not, so he gives you a pretty clear sense the first time he talks to you.”

The one thing that gets Obama annoyed, Rhodes said, is “wishy-washy language.”
.....

“He was making changes up to the last minute, which is not unusual, and so I literally had to do those in the back of the motorcade to this site and then find a zip drive that could plug into the teleprompter,” Rhodes recalled in an interview. “He likes to work on things until the end because he likes to get them just the way he wants them. So sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s you in the back of a van with a laptop on your knee hoping your battery doesn’t die.”

Said senior adviser David Axelrod: “Everybody here sort of lives with the reality that the president is the best speechwriter in the group.” Read more at Politico

Obama's Foreign Policy Brain Trust

american prospect: What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate's roster of advisers. (If the press had paid better attention, the country would have seen through Bush's pitch about a humble foreign policy and realized that many of his advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were conspiracy-minded warmongers.) Obama's foreign-policy advisers come from diverse backgrounds. They are former aides to Democratic mandarins like Tom Daschle and Lee Hamilton (Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, respectively); veterans of the Clinton administration's left flank (Tony Lake and Susan Rice); a human-rights advocate who helped write the Army's and Marine Corps' much-lauded counterinsurgency field manual (Sarah Sewall); a retired general who helped run the air war during the invasion of Iraq (Scott Gration); and a former journalist who revolutionized the study of U.S. foreign policy (Samantha Power). Yet they form a committed, intellectually coherent, and surprisingly united foreign-affairs team. (Shortly before this piece went to press, Power resigned from the campaign after making an intemperate remark to a reporter.)

They also share a formative experience with each other and with Obama. Each opposed the Iraq War at a time when doing so was derided by their colleagues, by journalists, and by the foreign-policy establishment. Each did so because they understood that the invasion and occupation ran counter to the goal of destroying al-Qaeda. And each bore the frustration of endless lectures on their lack of so-called seriousness from those who suffered from strategic myopia.

"There is a popular notion that Democrats have to try to appear like Republicans to pass some test on national security. The fact that that's still the case after Iraq is absurd," says one of Obama's closest advisers. "So you break from that orthodoxy and say 'I don't care if the Republicans attack me because I'm willing to meet with the leadership in Iran. We haven't for 25 years, and it's not gotten us anywhere.'"
Most of the members of Obama's foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left and the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. "No one [of Obama's critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take," recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama's foreign-policy speeches. "And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, 'No, I'm right about this!'"

Instead of backing down, Obama asked his foreign-policy team to double down. Rhodes wrote a speech that Obama delivered at DePaul University on Oct. 2, which criticized the boundaries of acceptable discourse set by the same establishment that backed the war. "This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it's about moving beyond it. And we're not going to be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq," Obama said. One of his advisers, recalling the fallout from Obama's comments about pursuing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, says, "He takes policy positions that are a break from both rigid orthodoxy and the Bush administration. And everyone says it's a gaffe! That just encapsulates everything that's wrong about the foreign-policy debate in Washington and in Democratic politics."

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.
the story is really good.