Drezner’s leading indicator gets results!!

Howard Dean will deliver a major foreign policy address today in Los Angeles (The Boston Globe has a preview). I’ll blog about the speech once it’s delivered [UPDATE: here’s the text]. For now, what’s more interesting is who’s advising Dean on the speech. Back in February, I blogged the following about how to predict the eventual Democratic nominee:

[O]ver the next year (and before the actual primaries), there’s a better harbinger for who will be the eventual nominee — which candidate picks up the elite foreign policy advisors?

From Sunday’s Washington Post story on Howard Dean’s foreign policy positions:

Dean has begun to pull into his campaign a team of senior foreign policy advisers, many of whom served in the Clinton administration. His campaign will announce the members of this “kitchen cabinet” Monday when he makes his speech, which along with a planned economics speech is intended to lay out his major themes before the New Hampshire primary Jan. 27. During the interview, the former governor of Vermont appeared at ease handling questions that hopscotched across global trouble spots. One of his foreign policy aides, Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution, sat at his side as he tackled back-to-back newspaper interviews on foreign policy. Dean and Daalder, a former Clinton aide, huddled for five minutes after The Washington Post interview to review Dean’s comments before beginning the second session…. In addition to Daalder, campaign aides said, Dean’s core foreign policy team includes former national security adviser Anthony Lake; retired Gen. Joseph Hoare, a former chief of U.S. Central Command; retired Gen. Merrill A. “Tony” McPeak, former chief of staff of the Air Force; two former assistant secretaries of defense, Ashton Carter and Frank Kramer; former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice; and political theorist Benjamin R. Barber. Danny E. Sebright, a former Defense Department civil servant who works for the consulting firm headed by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, is Dean’s foreign policy coordinator. Dean has also reached out to leading members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment as he tries to fill in the gaps in his foreign policy approach. “Dean certainly represents continuity with the bipartisan centrist line that has characterized American foreign policy from 1948 until shortly after 9/11,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski reviewed a draft of Dean’s speech but has not endorsed any candidate.

And from Sunday’s New York Times:

His planned speech on Monday is the product of many hands, including former Vice President Al Gore, whose consultations on the text were a prelude to his recent endorsement of the Dean candidacy. (Dr. Dean will not say which parts Mr. Gore edited.) He also plans to announce on Monday that a host of advisers — including W. Anthony Lake, former President Bill Clinton’s first national security adviser; Adm. Stansfield Turner, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Adm. Charles Larson, the former commander of all forces in the Pacific — have signed on to the campaign. Like several of the other Democratic candidates, he also consults Samuel R. Berger, who succeeded Mr. Lake as national security adviser.

Be sure to read the WaPo piece for a priceless quote from Dean about France. Caveat paragraph: Not everyone listed above is a foreign policy heavyweight. Tthere are other heavyweights — Ken Pollack, Richard Holbrooke, Ron Asmus, Michael McFaul — who have not committed to Dean. Furthermore, I have it on good authority that some of the people on Dean’s list have consulted with other campaigns. Still, this is a pretty powerful signal. UPDATE: Dean’s web site now has the list of advisors. Among the names that weren’t mentioned above: Morton H. Halperin, Clyde Prestowitz, and Jeffrey Sachs.