Irony of ironies: the very quality that Hillary Clinton raised fundamental doubts about in 2008--Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief-- is now going to be a key element of his re-election campaign. And why not? After all, Obama really can't run on the economy....
From the opening to my cover story this week:
You can almost read the script back to them before they say it.
(It’s a hackneyed script, after all.) Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich slam
President Obama for his weakness on foreign policy. Democrats are, we know,
always weenies. Republicans are always tough guys. National security is our
issue: GOP, sole proprietor. The lines come naturally: “If we reelect Barack
Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me … Iran will not,” Romney
declared at one of the early debates. He has called Obama an appeaser who
apologizes for America, saying that it’s wrong for the president to negotiate
with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He denounced Obama’s decision to withdraw all
U.S. troops from Iraq as “a naked political calculation or simply sheer
ineptitude in negotiations.” Gingrich, meanwhile, has declared that Obama is “so
weak that he makes Jimmy Carter look strong.” The former House speaker has
castigated the president for postponing military exercises with the Israelis
(even though it was the Israelis who asked for the delay). And, deploying his
usual apocalyptic rhetoric, he regularly calls Obama “the most dangerous
president in our lifetime.”
No one expects foreign policy to be a major issue in a campaign
that hinges mainly on the fate of America’s beleaguered economy (unless
something really big, like a war with Iran, happens between now and November).
Nonetheless, in an election expected to be very close, the public’s perception
of who makes a better commander in chief could be the difference. The “3 a.m.”
test—that emergency phone call—helps voters decide whom they want to depend on
in a crisis. (Ironically, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who raised this question
as a criticism of Obama in 2008.) That’s especially true considering what
Republicans have said they’ll do overseas if elected: confront Iran even more
aggressively, refuse to leave Afghanistan, return to Iraq. Romney even suggested
that the United States should attack Iran to destroy a captured drone; Rick
Santorum has called outright for war against that Islamic republic.
Accordingly, the Obama camp spies a big electoral
opportunity. With only a middling case that the president’s economic record
qualifies him for a second term, the White House and Obama’s Chicago-based
campaign staff are preparing a careful effort to cast him as the most impressive
Democratic president on national security in decades, National
Journal has learned. They are eager to restore Democrats to a time before
the Vietnam War, when Americans viewed the party as relatively strong on foreign
policy and national security. And more, harking back to Lyndon Johnson’s
effective 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater as a warmonger, they will try to
use the extreme GOP rhetoric to remind the electorate of another Republican whom
the GOP would prefer to forget: George W. Bush.
Despite the GOP candidates’ derision, many Republican
foreign-policy professionals—some of whom worked for Bush 43—agree that the 44th
president has been impressive on these issues overall. They say that he should
get credit in areas that go well beyond the takedown of Osama bin Laden (and
most of his top lieutenants). They cite Obama’s effort to squeeze Iran in the
last year. And the way the president has refocused diplomatic and military
resources to constrain—but not “contain,” which sounds a beat too
aggressive—China. And the dexterous way he has used force to fight terrorism.
And the way he helped oust Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi without a single American
casualty. (With cover from NATO and the Arab League, it might have been the
least costly and most internationally supported policy of regime change in U.S.
history.) “I would regard this as the most capable and purposeful Democratic
administration in foreign policy since John F. Kennedy’s,” says Philip Zelikow,
a senior counselor to Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of State.
That’s a telling comparison. Kennedy looms larger in myth than
in actual achievement, but he gets credit for standing down Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, and he was assassinated before he
could make a decision on whether to ramp up in Vietnam. Most important, however,
he was the last Democratic president before his party’s reputation in foreign
policy suffered a long-term blow in Vietnam. That quagmire helped persuade
President Johnson not to run for reelection in 1968. President Carter also
suffered from a fatal perception of weakness that culminated in the Iran hostage
crisis and the disastrous Desert One rescue mission. President Clinton fares
better in posterity, and he grew more comfortable with using power toward the
end of his second term, especially after his early misfire in Somalia, where 18
Army Rangers were killed in another failed rescue attempt. But Republicans saw
Clinton’s cautious air attacks on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as squeamish and
criticized his reluctance to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security
adviser, told National Journal that the administration
will seek to portray the president as a dependable and confidence-inspiring
commander in chief. “In so far as character is an issue, many ways in which he’s
excelled speak to this issue: the ability to make tough decisions; to show grace
under pressure,” Rhodes said.
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