Savvy politicians know that it’s usually a good sign when a political advertisement provokes cries of outrage from the opposition. The picture gets murkier, though, when that same advertisement prompts high-minded expressions of disappointment from the politician’s own supporters. Sometimes that’s a signal that the ad in question has overreached and risks a backlash. But sometimes it’s just a sign that those high-minded supporters don’t recognize the weakness that the ad is trying to exploit, or just don’t have the stomach for a necessary fight.
This is the dilemma the Obama re-election campaign faces with the ad it released recently suggesting that Mitt Romney might not have given the order to send Navy SEALS to kill Osama Bin Laden. The attack clearly touched a nerve with Republicans, but it also earned the White House a rebuke from several liberals, including no less a left-wing eminence than Arianna Huffington.
On the Early Show on CBS, Huffington called the ad “despicable,” suggested that questioning an opponent’s ability to serve as commander-in-chief is “not the way to run campaigns on either side,” and compared the attack to the “3 A.M. phone call” ad Hillary Clinton’s campaign released in 2008, which made a similar case against then-candidate Obama’s ability to make the toughest national security decisions.
When even Huffington thinks a Democratic attack goes too far, it usually has. And yet a moment’s scrutiny reveals that her argument doesn’t make much sense. Why do we have election seasons, after all, if not to argue about which candidate would be better-suited to making decisions that put Americans in harm’s way overseas? How can we not politicize national security, given how central it is to the work of the modern presidency, and how unconstrained the executive branch’s national security powers have become no matter which party holds the White House?
These are the arguments that Hillary Clinton partisans mounted in defense of that “3 A.M. ad,” and that George W. Bush’s partisans mounted in defense of his 9/11-centric 2004 re-election campaign. And those arguments were right! It’s one thing to say that candidates shouldn’t impugn one another’s patriotism. But impugning a rival’s judgment, as the Obama camp’s Bin Laden advertisement just did, is precisely what a presidential campaign is for.
Strategically, too, the White House has every reason to press these kind of arguments to the hilt. As I’ve noted in this space before, most of President Obama’s record is unpopular – sometimes deeply so – with the voting public. But the big exception is national security, where polls often show that Obama has built up a fair amount of credibility with voters. Foreign policy thus offers the White House its best (and perhaps only) opportunity to draw contrasts with Romney by highlighting the president’s actual accomplishments.
Whereas on domestic issues the Romney camp can answer almost every Obama attack by changing the subject to the unemployment rate, on foreign policy the Republican message is much more muddled and uncertain. In the usual order of things, Romney would be simply try to out-hawk the president, but this is not a hawkish moment in American politics. Outside of the most Republican portions of the electorate, the Iraq War is still widely regarded as a bad blunder, and even conservatives are increasingly supportive of a speedy exit from Afghanistan. Public opinion on Iran is unsettled, but there is next to no support for the kind of stepped-up American intervention in Syria that some Republicans have championed.
Meanwhile, by keeping much of the Bush-era anti-terror architecture in place and stepping up covert warfare from Waziristan to the Horn of Africa, the president has effectively undercut the soft-on-terror arguments that Republicans used so effectively against John Kerry in 2004. Indeed, the most compelling criticisms of this White House have come from libertarians and anti-interventionists on both the left and right, on issues ranging from the dubiously-legal “kinetic military action” in Libya to the White House’s willingness to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad.
Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto AgencySenator Marco Rubio spoke at a conference at the Brookings Institute in Washington on April 25.This explains why the Republican Party’s foreign policy rhetoric can seem so opportunistic and confused. The Rand Paul-led, anti-interventionist wing of the party arguably has a more coherent case against the president than the more hawkish wing, which often finds itself emphasizing what it has in common with the president – as Florida Senator Marco Rubio did in a widely-touted foreign policy address defending interventionism last week. (Tellingly, the word “Iraq” did not appear in his remarks.) Yet the hawkish line of attack is still the Republican default, and Mitt Romney’s case — to date, at least — against the president has generally circled back to its tropes and premises.
The result is an incoherence that James Poulos described well in a recent column in Forbes:
With Obama, the GOP has become like Woody Allen’s neurotic diner: the food is horrible, and such small portions! The president is condemned for leading and for leading from behind; for relying too much on talk and too much on drones; for slavishly kowtowing to foreign leaders and for arrogantly refusing to stroke foreign leaders. Obama’s foreign policy has paralyzed the GOP by laying bare just how much Republicans collectively refuse to fully commit to one grand, unifying possibility in international affairs — including the possibility of stepping away from sweeping principles and playing it by ear for a while.
Arianna Huffington’s qualms notwithstanding, it would be political malpractice for the president not to exploit this kind of confusion with national security attacks on his opponent. Indeed, Republicans who care about these issues should welcome them. Advertisements like the Bin Laden spot and political stunts like last night’s almost-victory speech in Afghanistan present a challenge to the right, but also an opportunity.
The rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign affords conservatives their best chance yet to come to terms with the Bush era in foreign policy and its aftermath — to figure out what they think about the recent past, where they stand at present and where they would have the country go from here.
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