foreign policy

By now I'm sure you heard Joe Biden's upbeat assessment of the first year or so of an Obama-Biden Administration 

 Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?' We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now, I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you're going to have to reinforce us."

"There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision'," Biden continued. "Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made, which I believe you will when they're made, they're not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/10/biden-to-suppor.html

So what to make of Biden's untimely truthfulness?

1. They are going to repeat what was probably the most critical deficiency of the Bush Administration. They are going to presume they are right and simply press on whether they properly gain the public's trust for their foreign policy.

Actually one prominent national leader has already compared Obama's foreign policy deficiencies to that of Bush, but her candor has been placed in a blind trust this autumm. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/25/AR2008022502663.html

Obama will never recover politically from this sort of mistake. He will never have the Right and as it is apparent, will promptly lose the Left. And Senator Biden, I know Dick Cheney and you are no Dick Cheney.

2. They are going to break their campaign promises at a blinding pace. At a minimum, it's hard to reconcile one of the architects of the Iraq War with Move On. org.  Even the most decent politician is going to leave someone in the dust, and I don't these guys in that high regard.  

3. They are probably going to sell out our allies as a consequence of their willingness to do something when  " it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right" http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1017129.html

4. They promise "unpopular decisions". Conservatives should recall that previous international crisis have been used as excuses to implement economic and social measurres inimical to liberty that could never be approved otherwise.  Think rationing, wage/price controls etc.  Watch the same people who attacked FISA and the Patriot Act as violative of the civil liberties of terrorist suspects chill the 1st and 2nd Amendment rights of decent Americans. (Notice, by the way, Obama failed to mention the 2nd Amendment when discussing the Constitution at the debate) 

5. At the end of the day, there is nothing Joe Biden is willing to offer America except blind faith in a man manufacturing his own "cult of personality" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Personality_(song)  America will get into the soup, Obama and Biden will do something that makes no sense, and we will be told to chill out and wait for things to work out..... Eventually..... Because

Maybe Bruce Springsteen oughta reconsider this support for the Obama-Biden ticket

Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.
Bruce Springsteen
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bruce_springsteen.html

Words, even from a Lefty, to live by.

Bottom Line Up Front: The Right needs to rethink and reshape our style, substance, and strategy based on the opportunities and challenges that face us now. Evolve or die.

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama today was one of the three "ouches" Moe Lane pointed out on RedState, the other two being the $150M raised by Obama last month and the 100K strong crowd for Obama in St. Louis.

Nobody should take much stock in endorsements, and this wasn't unexpected. Plus, I think John McCain can do a lot more with the aftermath of Obama's conversation with Joe the Plumber than Obama can do with Powell's endorsement.

But Powell does mention a few things that are worth noting and reacting to.

Last night's debate went ahead as planned, despite McCain saying he would not show up without a financial rescue package being passed. McCain should be glad he showed up too, because he gave one of the strongest debate performances of his career. 

Unfortunately for McCain, Obama really kicked it up a notch in his performance. Obama was able to give declarative, very precise statements, without a lot of stuttering or pausing, something that had seemingly eluded him in the primaries and interviews. 

If you were to seperate the debate into two halves, then you would not be far off. The first forty minutes of the debate were on the economy, and the remaining time was dedicated to the topic of foreign policy. 

McCain really had a chance to take control of the debate on the economy. He could have pointed out how Obama supports a bailout with taxpayer money, and contrast that with his position, which is protecting the taxpayers by giving loans and insurance to the companies. Instead, McCain gave his stump speech, talking about earmark reform and government spending. 

McCain was able to take a very commanding lead in the foreign policy section. McCain really controlled the debate, and twice Obama asked Jim Lehrer if we could just "move on". Obama really held his own in this area though, and that is all he needed to do, to pass the commander in chief test.

Had this debate taken place in 2004, then maybe McCain's performance in the foreign policy half of the debate would have carried him into victory. However considering there has been no terrorist attacks lately, and the economy is front and center, the tied debate goes to Obama. 

Considering McCain's very respectable performance in the debate, Obama will most likely not see a very large bounce out of the debate. By Monday, the rolling poll averages will reflect the results of the debate, expect Obama to be up about six points in the daily tracking polls.

At lunch, I ran an experiment. Every single person at my table had worked on a Presidential campaign. Every single one was saturated in politics. Active -- in their time -- in youth affiliates of their party. These people came from multiple parties

Every single person had a different definition of the Bush Doctrine. One argued that the "Bush Doctrine" emerged from "a series of speeches".

There is no "Bush Doctrine." At best it is a squishy idea. That may be the grounds for a critique in its own right. But not of Sarah Palin.

Clive Crook makes the same point:

I don't go along with the view that her answers on the "Bush doctrine" were a serious misstep, however. True, she did not know what that term meant. The fact is, it means different things to different people. If Gibson had put that question to me, my answer would have been: "It depends what you mean by the Bush doctrine." In effect, that was what she said. And it deserves to be noted (as Jim points out, but with a kindly lack of emphasis, calling it a minor error) that Gibson himself apparently does not know what it means.

GIBSON [impatiently]: The Bush doctrine as I understand it is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree...?

No, Charles. That is not what the Bush doctrine means. The right of anticipatory self-defence is already enshrined in international law. Countries do not have to wait until they are attacked to legitimately defend themselves. The Bush doctrine advances the notion of preventive war: the right to attack not in order to defend yourself against an imminent assault, but to deal with less certain, more distant but still possibly mortal threats.

You knew it was coming.

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.

-Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton

and

Unlike Barack Obama, whom McCain has so emphatically condemned as not-ready, Palin hasn’t run for or served in the Senate. Nor has she run for president, which would have required her to think through and take positions on critical issues from the war in Iraq to the war on terror, from Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the Russian incursion into Georgia, from the emerging power of China to the march of globalization. She hasn’t debated tough opponents a dozen or so times or faced aggressive, often downright hostile reporters on a daily basis. Talk about untested. Her slim record undermines one of McCain’s most effective arguments against Obama.

-Fmr. Clinton WH Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers

Left-leaning observers have noted that with John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, all arguments about Barack Obama's experience are off the table. It is true that Senator McCain's age (72 today) heightens the importance of who he chooses as his vice president. He has acknowledged this point, and while it may be an unfair criticism, it is one that will linger in the minds of many voters.

Last week, Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate led many to believe that this was a governing decision rather than a political one; that voters could take comfort in knowing that the freshman senator from Illinois would have an experienced statesman in the White House guiding his hand on international affairs.

Sarah Palin has run a city and a state, whereas both Democrats on the ticket have run only their Senate offices (unless you also count Obama's presidency of the Harvard Law Review). However, let's assume that Obama and Palin have equally negligible experience, specifically on foreign policy and homeland security. A vote for McCain may mean that Sarah Palin never takes office, but a vote for the similarly fresh Obama puts him directly in the role of commander in chief.

In the event that Palin does need replace John McCain in the role of commander-in-chief, who is to say that she cannot make the same decision as Obama did on the campaign trail and tap a senator or diplomat with years of foreign policy experience as her vice president? If we are to believe that Joe Biden covers Barack Obama's dearth of foreign relations experience, it stands to reason that a newly minted President Palin could pick the likes of Dick Lugar, Condoleezza Rice,  or John Bolton to serve alongside her.

Furthermore, the Republicans cannot afford to undersell the executive experience Sarah Palin brings as one of America's fifty state governors. As Mike Huckabee put it in the January 30th primary debate in Simi Valley, California:

There's something a lot of people don't think about. When you're a governor, you actually manage a microcosm of the federal government. Every agency that you have at the federal level, you have at the state level. You are familiar with the whole game board. You understand what those agencies do, because you interrelate with them as a governor every single day.

-Fmr. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee
 

This is something that Sarah Palin has undoubtedly learned very well, even in her short tenure in Juneau. It is a point she can raise in the upcoming debate against Joe Biden, who has never held state, local, or executive office. And when she does, her base of knowledge might surprise a lot of the people who have made cynical observations about what they perceive as an experience gap.

Update: Looks like the RNC is on it. Morning stories in the WSJ and Politico.

The conventional wisdom of Barack Obama's Joe Biden pick is that he will be an attack dog, especially on foreign policy, where he has the most credibility. But there's a problem. In April, I wrote a litlte about Joe Biden:

Over the last couple of years, he has resisted the far-left at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by refusing to demagogue the Iraq issue. He has generally pushed for responsible changes and a little bit more detail. A National Security Council staffer (translation: Bush White House staffer) has described Biden's interventions to me as "generally helpful."

It would certainly be far from the truth that Biden was a cheerleader for the Bush administration, but I got the sense in 2003-2004, when I was working on foreign policy on the Hill for a Republican that Joe Biden was our ally. He wanted us to succeed in Iraq. He said so on a regular basis. He regularly articulated a hawkish and sophisticated position on a range of issues. It wasn't just his vote on Iraq, for which the left attacks him.

If I were the McCain campaign or the RNC, I would be digging through old C-SPAN, Senate Foreign Relations videos, and the transcripts. He has said lots of things that will give rhetorical cover to McCain and contrast with the attacks that he is going to make for the next two months.

When Biden lays into McCain, all the RNC has to do and turn out his old words on the issues, if not McCain. These will make it hard to continue a spirited attack on McCain.

The irony is that before Joe Biden ran for Vice President, he was probably closer to McCain on foreign policy than Obama.

So Sen. Joe Biden has been tapped as Sen. Barack Obama’s running mate.  Biden is a smart guy but a rather loquacious fellow, which has gotten him in trouble several times.  Clearly, the Obama campaign felt the need to offset Sen. Obama's gross lack of experience on national security and believed that Sen. Biden would do just that.  Sen. Biden is currently the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Obama is out of his league on matters of national security, as Sen. Clinton's outstanding 3AM ad highlighted.

The American people want a commander-in-chief they can trust and Sen. McCain is that man.  Sen. Obama's decision was certainly driven by his newfound understanding that he will have to talk about foreign policy over the next two months.     

Hope is Not A Foreign Policy

The Russian government’s incompetent attack against John McCain has handed him a great weapon against Obama.  The attack makes clear that the Kremlin wants Obama to win the election but the open support of a nation busy doing this is hardly going help a candidate who’s already fighting a reputation for dictator-coddling.  John McCain’s statement on the crisis was excellent, but there’s a lot more his campaign can do.

The McCain campaign and the RNC should directly tie Obama to the Russians.  The message: “Russia wants Obama to win because they know he’ll be a weak President.”  

McCain couldn’t have said this without the Russian attacks against him, but their on the record implicit endorsement of Obama gives him full license to seize the message.  The McCain campaign has been starting to tiptoe around this already, but they should hit Obama at full force for standing by while an American ally is invaded.

Gary Hart, former presidential candidate and Democrat senator from Colorado, penned a thought-provoking op-ed in the NYT today on the subject of the political pendulum swinging and a shift towards a "cycle of reform." He observes that "the character of the next Republican Party will result from an intraparty debate that has yet to begin and might occupy a decade or more." Fortunately, this blog is starting that debate, and I'm hopeful it won't be a decade before we execute a vision.

He also correctly observes that the Democrats "have yet to produce a coherent ideological framework." He tells Barack Obama to include three things within a new framework:

"National security requires a new, expanded, post-cold-war definition. America must transition from a consumer economy to a producing one. And the moral obligations of our stewardship of the planet must become paramount."

Guess what? John McCain, the new standard-bearer of the Republican Party, not only embodies those principles. He has a history of fighting for these principles. Unlike Obama, McCain understands that we are in a war where borders don't exist and our enemies don't carry the flag of a country. Unlike Obama's onerous tax increase proposals and protectionist policies, McCain's economic policies increase productivity and opportunity at home while opening our country to the world. Unlike Obama, McCain has a long history of fighting for environmental protection and conservation, balanced with responsible development.

BOTTOM LINE: Hart ends by saying that "the next cycle of American history is as yet unframed." The Democrats' lack of a new framework gives Republicans a great opportunity to have John McCain execute a "cycle of reform" in the right direction. Will we get it together in the next four months? Thoughts?

Obama's campaign keeps on givin':

Obama's 'Key' Foreign Policy Adviser:  “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.

Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.

 

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWViNzMxZTBhYzg4Y2NlZDc3MGI4NzUyYWMxNmY4MGU