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Bill Kristol thinks Romney should act like the grown-up in tonight’s debate.
… There’s no need for Mitt Romney to flyspeck Barack Obama’s foreign policy record. Voters are aware of the deficiencies of Obama’s foreign policy.In any case, Obama is not going to win the presidency on the strength of his foreign policy. So Romney doesn’t have to mount a detailed critique of various Obama foreign policies. He has to stipulate that all is not turning out as Obama claimed it would, that all is not well in the state of the world. Then, even more important, Romney has to demonstrate that he can be trusted to steer the American ship of state in a sounder direction and with a steadier hand. This will require setting forth the core principles he will follow—principles of American strength and leadership, of standing by our allies and of standing up to enemies—and then explaining how, in general terms, he will execute a foreign policy based on these principles.
Speaking for America also means speaking -presidentially. It means speaking less as a challenger to the current president, less as a critic and a prosecutor of the current president, and more as . . . the next president. Romney should appear by Election Day to be more presidential than the incumbent.
Mitt Romney is a combative and competitive man. But his worst moments in the debates were when he became too pettily combative. His best were when he briefly stipulated the failures of President Obama’s policies, then pivoted to lay out his own agenda for the nation for the next four years and beyond.
It’s possible that adopting what might be called a -pre-presidential rhetoric would deprive Romney of -various small victories on the campaign trail. But the point isn’t to win small debating skirmishes. The point is to win the presidency. The way to win the presidency is to speak for America.
Jennifer Rubin explores the ways the administration went wrong in Libya.
I suspect, although we will know for sure tomorrow night, that President Obama will claim organizational incompetence in connection with acknowledging that the Libya jihadist operation was, well, a planned jihadist operation.
The Associated Press reports how quickly confirmation came that this was not a spontaneous mob action. The AP tells us that within 24 hours of the attack “the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington that there were eyewitness reports that the attack was carried out by militants.” However, the report continues, “It is unclear who, if anyone, saw the cable outside the CIA at that point and how high up in the agency the information went. The Obama administration maintained publicly for a week that the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was a result of the mobs that staged less-deadly protests across the Muslim world around the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S.”
This has created a series of contradictions and questions about the president’s handling of the matter. (CNN, among other outlets, had an extensive report.)
Coupled with a New York Times report that a key suspect is sipping a ”strawberry frappe”in plain sight unafraid he might be “hunted down” by the United States. The entire episode threatens to drag down the president on the eve of his final debate.
There are at least three variations of what happened. …
… Pick your favorite theory or a combination thereof. Lay blame at the intelligence community or at the feet of national security adviser Tom Donilon, whose job is to make sure all aspect of national security are in sync. But the president, even if not willfully misrepresenting events to the public, has engaged in a great deal of magical thinking ( from refusing to call jihadists “jihadists” to believing he had al-Qaeda on the run to thinking he could engage the mullahs). His executive skills, which lead to havoc and missed opportunities on the domestic side, can prove deadly in matters of war and peace.
Whatever the explanation for the fiasco, it is hard to muster any confidence that this president has the judgment, will or skills to be a successful commander in chief. He hasn’t been one so far.
A WSJ OpEd explores the theoretical underpinnings of Obama’s foreign policy incompetence.
… Thus the way to defeat the terrorists, according to President Obama, isn’t to counter extremist Islamist ideology but to focus on how the United States, through its actions and delinquencies—its supposed excessive support for Israel, for example, and failure to provide more economic aid—is to blame for the hatred that spawns terrorism.
White House senior director for the National Security Council Samantha Power wrote some years ago, while a HarvardUniversity lecturer, that America should adopt a foreign-policy “doctrine of mea culpa.” This is the frame of mind that President Obama brought to his famous June 2009 Cairo speech in which he suggested that tensions between America and the world’s Muslims are largely America’s fault. It was in that speech that President Obama asserted: “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism.”
And so we get to the false insistence for day after day that the murderous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi arose from anger about a YouTube video. Because Mr. Obama misdiagnoses terrorism and extremism, it is not surprising that he failed to recognize their consequences; instead, he reflexively looked in the Benghazi wreckage for a cause that originated in this country.
Such thinking infects many streams of Obama administration foreign policy. If the president were clear-eyed about Islamist extremism, he wouldn’t have cold-shouldered the antiregime demonstrators in Iran in June 2009. He wouldn’t have cut funds for promoting democracy and human rights abroad. He wouldn’t have made a diplomatic representative of Salam al-Marayati, who calls for Hezbollah’s removal from the U.S. terrorist list and has said that “Israel should be put on the suspect list” for the 9/11 attack. And the president wouldn’t have spent more energy denouncing foolish American bigots than condemning organized, anti-American terrorism.
Krauthammer with more on the Benghazi aftermath
On Friday night’s broadcast of “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, host Sean Hannity asked Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer why the White House waited so long to acknowledge that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi was a pre-planned terrorist strike.
According to Krauthammer, the Obama administration delayed announcing the news primarily to protect the president’s image on foreign policy.
“They had two reasons to lie,” Krauthammer said. “The first reason was the fact that the Sept. 11 attack occurred a week after they just spent four days in Charlotte dancing on the grave of bin Laden. Remember, this is their single foreign policy achievement. There is none other. Look at Iran Look at Russia. Look at Israel. Look at Syria. Look at the Arab spring. It’s all in collapse. They got one thing to argue, and they sure argued it, where they made the point again and again and again with that ridiculous slogan from Vice President [Biden], ‘bin laden dead, GM alive,’ because what Libya said, what it was proclaiming to the world and the reason the attack was launched in the first place was to say, ‘bin Laden dead, al-Qaida alive.’ That is what has happened as a result of leading from behind in Libya.”
Krauthammer said the problems stemming from the president’s foreign policy extend beyond Libya. …
Ed Morrissey has more on the Rosa Brooks piece in Foreign Policy.
With the last of the three presidential debates taking place in just three days, and with Barack Obama on his heels in polling after the first two, one would expect Obama allies to come out of the woodwork to sing his praises on foreign policy, the topic of Monday night’s forum. After all, Democrats — including Obama himself — bragged six weeks ago at the Democratic convention that Obama would bury Mitt Romney in this arena.
Instead, former Obama administration Defense undersecretary and State Department adviser Rosa Brooks writes at Foreign Policy that her former boss’ team on foreign policy desperately needs an intervention, and that Obama needs to finally get involved by doing more than giving a few speeches:
“Despite some successes large and small, Obama’s foreign policy has disappointed many who initially supported him. The Middle East initiatives heralded in his 2009 Cairo speech fizzled or never got started at all, and the Middle East today is more volatile than ever. The administration’s response to the escalating violence in Syria has consisted mostly of anxious thumb-twiddling. The Israelis and the Palestinians are both furious at us. In Afghanistan, Obama lost faith in his own strategy: he never fought to fully resource it, and now we’re searching for a way to leave without condemning the Afghans to endless civil war. In Pakistan, years of throwing money in the military’s direction have bought little cooperation and less love.”
Power Line posts on Candy Crowley’s efforts to make sure the slow talking Obama got out the same number of words.
If authentic, CNN’s memo explaining why Candy Crowley permitted President Obama to speak four minutes more than Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s presidential debate is devastating to that network:
On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly. We’re going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time.
One of Crowley’s main jobs as moderator was to enforce the rules that were established for the debate. The rules established time limits, not word limits.
When I debated in high school and college, we had to stop speaking when our time ran out. It didn’t matter how many words we had gotten in (I wish it did when I debated John in practice rounds). When, as I lawyer, I argued cases before Courts of Appeals, I had to sit down when my time was up. It didn’t matter whether my opponent had uttered more words in his or her alloted time.
CNN’s explanation of “why Obama got more time speak” is an admission that Crowley intentionally gave Obama extra time because she thought he hadn’t said enough. It’s also an admission that it doesn’t know whether, objectively, Romney said more than Obama in the same amount of time. CNN hadn’t done a word count when it made the claim, and Crowley certainly hadn’t performed one when she gave Obama more time than Romney.
Crowley was, however, watching the time, as she told the candidates several times. As the CNN memo confirms, she wanted to give Obama more time than Romney.
This is just one reason why Crowley should not be permitted to moderate another high-stakes debate. Indeed, assuming the authenticity of the CNN memo, no one from that outfit should be permitted to do so.