This book gives us the story of the new Democratic foreign policy elite, mostly obscure Washingtonians raised up by President Obama to be his loyalists, along with a few luminaries to protect him politically. The people at the inner core need to be more widely known because they will hover for decades to tutor future Democratic leaders and hound Republicans. The most trusted of them occupy key slots on the National Security Council staff, while the next tier fill top positions in the Defense and State Departments. They are centrists, not ideologues like the neoconservative Republicans who preceded them. Strikingly, however, they do not cling religiously to the middle ground come what may. Rather, they regard the center as a jumping-off point for complicated and often contradictory positions. In "The Obamians," James Mann tells us who they are, what they think and how they use power. David Scull for The New York Times Mark Lippert, right, was foreign policy adviser to Senator Barack Obama, here in 2007. The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power By James Mann Viking. $26.95. They could not have a better chronicler than Mann, a longtime journalist at The Los Angeles Times who has written a similar book called "Rise of the Vulcans" about the conservatives and neoconservatives who surrounded President George W. Bush. Like the best reporters, Mann lets his subjects speak for themselves, then checks their fancies against the facts. He has given us a very good first cut at history. In this account, Obama's national security orchestra sorts into three sections. First is the innermost circle, "the relatively youthful, politically attuned side of Barack Obama's foreign policy." Mostly lacking executive branch experience, they are tied almost entirely to the president. The important figures here are Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, and Ben Rhodes, the chief foreign policy speechwriter. Another is Mark Lippert, who, like McDonough, helped Obama in the last presidential campaign and was recently confirmed in a top Pentagon post. Unlike many foreign policy specialists, the most potent of Obama's inner circle had not made their reputations with shelves of articles and books on strategy. Exceptions are Samantha Power, the human rights heroine, and Michael McFaul, now the American ambassador to Russia, who have written plenty. Mann calls the second group, made up largely of former Clintonians, the Trout Fishers, because of fishing outings they made while attending the prestigious annual meetings of the Aspen Strategy Group in Colorado. Prime among this more seasoned group are Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; the assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell; the former deputy secretary of state James B. Steinberg; and Antony J. Blinken, a top adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Their ranks also include officials like Michèle Flournoy and Derek Chollet, who fill vital second- and third-level positions in the bureaucracy. During the eight years of George W. Bush's administration, they were, Mann writes, "foreign policy mandarins without an emperor." Notably missing are figures from the old Clinton team like Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Samuel Berger and Strobe Talbott. The recently deceased Richard Holbrooke, the hero of the Dayton accords, was named by Obama to be special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he was allowed to play only at the margins. Finally, Obama coaxed a team of rivals into the cabinet as protectors of his political flanks. To quash potential Democratic uprisings in the Senate, he tapped Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state. To dampen inevitable Republican attacks, he recruited James Jones, a retired Marine general, as his first national security adviser and retained the Republican Robert Gates as secretary of defense. These three, it was thought, would protect Obama against accusations of being weak, the typical Republican charge against Democrats. To Obama's credit, he kept this group loyal. The creator and commander of this diverse team is, of course, Obama himself. And I would go further than Mann and argue that he oversees one of the most centralized foreign policy operations in history - based principally on his brain power and intellectual self-confidence, not on knowledge or experience. Indeed, Obama was much more of a foreign policy tabula rasa than any of his subordinates. Sure, he briefly sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But essentially he has learned what he knows in the Oval Office. Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, was formerly a New York Times columnist and editor, and an assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration.