Politics

A Letter to Barack Obama

Tuesday, 23 October 2012 15:33

McGovern writes: "None of this is intended as a criticism of Barack Obama, who had my support when he was a candidate for the United States presidency and who has my support today. I hope that some of the ideas here might help him on the road to greatness. I wish him well on the journey ahead."

US Sen. George McGovern makes a speech at the University of the Pacific at Stockton, Calif., in January 1971. (photo: AP)

A Letter to Barack Obama

By George S. McGovern, Harpers

23 October 12

�

The following article appeared in the September 2011 issue of Harpers Magazine.

�

hen President Franklin Roosevelt came into office in the depth of the Great Depression, he sought to stabilize and empower American society by introducing bold new initiatives: Social Security, the Public Works Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, among many others. These measures were sufficiently successful, as was his leadership during World War II, that he secured four terms in the White House. There was some congressional resistance but not enough to block the support of both political parties.

Like Roosevelt, President Barack Obama has inherited a serious economic crisis, but in his first two years in office he has been met with an even worse problem: the rigid opposition of the rival party leaders to national health care and nearly every other proposal he has made. The Republican House Appropriations Committee has even voted to terminate public funding for NPR and PBS. Neither during my four years in the House of Representatives, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House, nor through eighteen years in the U.S. Senate, under John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, have I witnessed any president thwarted by the kind of narrow partisanship that has beset Obama. He has tried to avoid such divisions by publicly explaining his willingness to compromise, but these gestures have been spurned. Some of his political critics have gone so far as to express the hope that the Obama Administration will fail, even avowing their determination to hasten that failure. What has happened, one is compelled to ask, to the love of nation?

I have learned that it is not easy to succeed either as a senator or as a president if you are pushing for fundamental change. We tend, as lawmakers and as citizens, to drift along with the familiar ways of thinking: If it is good enough for Grandma and Grandpa, it is good enough for us. If it is good enough for the flag-wavers and the boasters, it is good enough for us. Such resistance to change often is strengthened by powerful interests - nowhere more forcefully than in the National Defense bill that Congress considers and passes each year.

When I entered the U.S. Senate in 1963, the defense budget was $51 billion. This was at a time when our military experts felt it necessary to have the means to win a war against the combined powers of Russia and China. Today we have a military budget of over $700 billion, and yet neither Russia nor China threatens us, if indeed they ever did. Nor does any other nation. Furthermore, the terrorist threat we face is not a military matter. The World Trade Center was brought down not by artillery or bombers or battleships but by nineteen young Arabs equipped only with box cutters. The Department of Homeland Security created by the Bush Administration after this attack is a better instrument against terrorism than our military, even though our armed forces are the best in the world.

In my career both in the House and in the Senate, inspired by the words of Eisenhower, my supreme commander in Europe during World War II, I tried hard to curb the powers of what Eisenhower, in his farewell address as president, referred to as the "military-industrial complex." Needless to say, all my efforts to reduce military spending were defeated. With the renaming of the War Department as the Defense Department in 1947, the military part of the government became sacred, virtually untouchable. How could anyone vote to cut defense unless he or she is willing to face political defeat?

We need a new definition of "defense" that takes into account the quality of our education, the health of our people, the preservation of the environment, the strength of our transportation, the development of alternative fuels, the vigor of our democracy. These were the concerns expressed by the people who stood in Cairo's Tahrir Square holding up their signs for more than two weeks this winter. Without guns, knives, or the use of their fists, they brought down the dictator who had exploited them for nearly thirty years.

All Americans want their country to have an adequate military defense. But under pressure from corporate lobbyists and legislators seeking military contracts or bases for their states, we are spending to excess while other sources of national defense, such as health care and education, are shortchanged and the national debt grows ever larger.

Many patriotic Americans have opposed the two wars our gallant young troops have been asked to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobel Prize�winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the direct and indirect costs of the Iraq war will amount to $3 trillion. This represents nearly a quarter of our national debt. I suspect that the war in Afghanistan will eventually cost another $3 trillion and we still will not have achieved our aim. General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, advises that we cannot think of withdrawing our troops before 2014. If we stay on that schedule, our soldiers will have been fighting, bleeding, and dying there for thirteen years - more than three times the length of U.S. involvement in World War II.

I recently conferred with President Obama in his White House office, urging him to withdraw from Afghanistan. I'm pleased that he has since announced the withdrawal of 10,000 troops in 2011 and 23,000 in 2012. I would have been even more pleased if all our 100,000 troops now in Afghanistan, as well as those in Iraq, were on the way home.

The president may be reluctant to follow the advice of a presidential candidate who in 1972 lost forty-nine states to Richard Nixon. I can appreciate that concern. On the other hand, shortly after the 1972 election, two bipartisan investigations - one by the House and one by the Senate - forced the incumbent who beat me to resign his office in disgrace. A question from the New Testament comes to mind: What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world or wins a big election and loses his own soul? The late Sargent Shriver, my running mate in 1972, came to me the day after the election and said, "George, we may have lost fortyine states but we never lost our souls."

With this sentiment in mind, I would like to suggest a few bold steps President Obama might consider for the good of his soul and that of the nation.

We should bring our troops home from Afghanistan this year. No previous foreign power that has tried to work its will in Afghanistan has succeeded - not Alexander the Great, not the Mongols, not the British, and not the Russians, who, after nine years of fighting, had sent some 25,000 of their soldiers home in coffins. The Soviet treasury was emptied and the Soviet Union collapsed. Even if it were desirable for us to stay a decade more, we simply cannot afford to do so.

We should close all U.S. military bases in the Arab world. American troops in the Middle East incite rather than prevent terrorist attacks against us. We would do well to remember that when Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia after fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, he found a large American army in his home country, positioned there to halt a possible Iraqi invasion - a presence that so offended him he denounced the king and his own family for quartering the American "infidels" within the shadow of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He then returned to Afghanistan to organize Al Qaeda and, later, launch the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

We should evaluate whether it is necessary to continue other American troop consignments to Europe, South Korea, and elsewhere. When the U.S. Army was sent to Korea in 1950 the deployment was described as a brief police action, but sixty years later our troops are still there. South Korea is now a wealthier, more populous, and more industrialized nation than North Korea, and is fully capable of defending itself. Similarly, U.S. troops in Europe, now numbering 80,000, have been there for half a century. They should be withdrawn, as were the Soviet forces from Eastern Europe under Mikhail Gorbachev.

President Obama should call on the Pentagon to reduce the current military budget of $700 billion - a figure that accounts for almost half of the world's military expenditures - to $500 billion next year, and then, over the next five years, to $200 billion. In a careful and persuasive study, Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, identifies unneeded and costly programs that could be cut from the Pentagon budget without weakening our security, including the elimination of sophisticated warplanes - all of which, added up, could save a trillion dollars over the next ten years.

The Bush tax cuts for those with higher incomes should be not only repealed but reversed; with an increase in taxes for this bracket, the increased revenues could be used to reduce the national debt. There would, of course, be strong resistance to ending the tax favoritism now enjoyed by the rich, but this bonanza for the few at the top must end.

Savings in military spending could be used to launch valuable public investments, thereby creating jobs and stimulating the entire economy. The administration has expressed support for creating a European-style high-speed rail system in the United States, and indeed we ought to build the fastest, cleanest, and safest passenger- and freight-train system in the world.

The president should also revive the full provisions of the World War II�era G.I. bill, which enabled 7.8 million soldiers to secure a college education at government expense while also receiving a cost-of-living stipend. Having been a bomber pilot during World War II, flying missions over Nazi Germany, I was one of the beneficiaries of the bill, eventually earning a Ph.D. in history at Northwestern University. This program was costly, but the government certainly made its money back, because educated citizens earn more and so pay increased taxes. Now, as we experience a crisis in higher education caused by soaring tuition costs that exclude many working- and middle-class young people, why not offer government-paid higher education and vocational training for all qualified students - both civilian and military?

Another wise public investment would be the expansion of Medicare to all Americans. Some of the recently proposed health-care legislation has been so lengthy and complicated that I am not sure what is contained in it, but we all know what Medicare is. We could reduce the impenetrable legislation to a simple sentence: "Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans." I am at a loss as to why an old codger like me benefits from Medicare while my children and grandchildren do not. To soften the impact of this expansion on the budget, I propose that the program be implemented in steps every two years: the first step including children up to the age of eight; the second, those from nine to eighteen; the third, those from nineteen through thirty; and finally, those from thirty-one through sixty-five. Programs such as Medicare have been in place for years in many advanced countries. My Canadian relatives tell me that any government that tried to do away with their comprehensive medical and hospital care would be promptly expelled from office.

None of this is intended as a criticism of Barack Obama, who had my support when he was a candidate for the United States presidency and who has my support today. I hope that some of the ideas here might help him on the road to greatness. I wish him well on the journey ahead.

15 comments

King of the Hill

Tuesday, 23 October 2012 15:28

Maher: "All the time now, I'm starting to hear, 'The president had complete control of Congress for two years, and did everything he wanted.' This is such bullshit."

Real Time host Bill Maher points out that the Democrats did not have 60 votes in the Senate for very long. (photo: HBO)

King of the Hill

By Bill Maher, Real Time

23 October 12

�

ll the time now, I�m starting to hear, "The president had complete control of Congress for two years, and did everything he wanted." This is such bullshit. First of all, no president has that much control over senators. You really think Ben Nelson, whose state deplores Obama, really feels that much pressure to be loyal to him?

But the bigger issue is, it�s just factually wrong. Democrats had a "filibuster proof" majority in the senate for a very short period. It took Al Franken seven months to get seated because of the recount dispute, and by the time he was, Ted Kennedy was dying. So Democrats really only had 60 senators from September 24, 2009, when Kennedy�s replacement was named, until February 4th, 2010, when Republican Scott Brown won the special election there. The senate was in session for just 72 days over that period, so that�s how long Obama had a real Democratic Congress -- 72 days, not two years.

Or, if you like charts:

One of the things that sucks is that Obama has never figured out a way to blame Congress for blocking things, presumably out of fear that it will make him appear weak. But how is he not running more against a Congress with a serial killer approval rating? He�s literally three or four times more popular than they are.

26 comments

Obama Unlikely to Get Big Debate Bounce, but a Small One Could Matter

Tuesday, 23 October 2012 15:25

Silver writes: "Voters have more information about the candidates than they did before the first debate, which means that their additional impressions of the candidates could make less difference at the margin. Still, with the contest being so tight, any potential gain for Mr. Obama could matter."

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama walks past each other on stage at the end of their last debate at Lynn University. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Obama Unlikely to Get Big Debate Bounce, but a Small One Could Matter

By Nate Silver, Five Thirty Eight Blog

23 October 12

�

nstant-reaction polls following Monday night's debate in Boca Raton, Fla., judged President Obama to be the winner.

A CBS News poll of undecided voters who watched the debate found 53 percent giving it to Mr. Obama, 23 percent to Mitt Romney and 24 percent declaring it a tie.

Mr. Obama's margin of victory in the poll was slightly wider than Mr. Romney's following the first presidential debate in Denver, which a similar CBS News poll gave to Mr. Romney at 46 percent to 22 percent.

Other polls, conducted among a broader group of voters rather than just undecided ones, suggested a smaller margin for the president.

A Public Policy Polling survey of voters in 11 swing states who watched the debate found them giving it to Mr. Obama, 53 percent to 42 percent.

A CNN poll of registered voters who watched the debate put Mr. Obama ahead, 48 percent to 40 percent. That was similar to Mr. Obama's 46-39 margin in a CNN poll of the second debate, and much smaller than Mr. Romney's 67-25 advantage in the first one.

An online poll by Google Consumer Surveys had Mr. Obama winning, 45.1 percent to 35.3 percent. His roughly 10-percentage-point margin in the poll is smaller than in a Google poll after the second debate, which gave it to Mr. Obama by 17 percentage points, or Mr. Romney's after the first, which he won by 22 points.

There is, obviously, some disagreement on the magnitude of Mr. Obama's advantage - the polls surveyed different types of voters and applied different methods to do so.

But averaging the results from the CBS News, CNN and Google polls, which conducted surveys after all three presidential debates along with the one between the vice-presidential candidates, puts Mr. Obama's margin at 16 percentage points.

That compares favorably to Mr. Obama's average 10-percentage-point margin after the second debate, and Vice President Joseph R. Biden's 6-point margin against Representative Paul Ryan, but is smaller than Mr. Romney's average 29-point win in Denver.

The first presidential debate produced roughly a 4-percentage-point bounce in head-to-head polls toward Mr. Romney, while the second presidential debate brought no appreciable bounce toward Mr. Obama.

It is tempting to split the difference, and assume that Mr. Obama might get a 1- or 2-point bounce in the polls, but there are some mitigating factors. The pace of the debate was slow, and it was competing against professional baseball and football games, which may have kept viewership down.

Voters have more information about the candidates than they did before the first debate, which means that their additional impressions of the candidates could make less difference at the margin. Historically, the bounces following the third presidential debate, in the years when one was held, were smaller than after the first two.

Finally, the subject of the debate, foreign policy, is not as important to most voters as economic policy, although some voters may have judged the candidates on style regardless of the substance of the conversation, which did end up including a fair amount of domestic policy as well.

Still, with the contest being so tight, any potential gain for Mr. Obama could matter.

Mr. Obama was roughly a 70 percent Electoral College favorite in the FiveThirtyEight forecast in advance of the debate, largely because he has remained slightly ahead in polls of the most important swing states.

If Mr. Obama's head-to-head polling were 2 percentage points higher right now, he would be a considerably clearer favorite in the forecast, about 85 percent. A 1-point bounce would bring him to 80 percent, and even a half-point bounce would advance his position to being a 75 percent favorite in the forecast.

Still, Mr. Obama should not take even that for granted. There have been some past debates when the instant-reaction polls judged one candidate to be the winner, but the head-to-head polls eventually moved in the opposite direction.

3 comments

FOCUS | The Liar Willard Romney

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>

Tuesday, 23 October 2012 11:20

Excerpt: "The rough consensus on foreign policy, to which Willard Romney spent most of the evening appealing, is a truncated, dismal thing, a grim march through a universe of bad options and worse choices."

As the president forcefully defended all the policies he'd put in place that Romney, on this evening at least, so enthusiastically supported, it became clearer that there is no nation in its right mind that would put its foreign policy in the hands of the Willard Romney who showed up to the debate. (photo: Marc Serota/Getty Images)

The Liar Willard Romney

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

23 October 12

�

t was early in the proceedings here on Monday night when I was struck with a horrible vision. It may have been right about that moment in the final presidential debate when Willard Romney - who, for most of the past two years, has been the most bellicose Mormon since they disbanded the Nauvoo Legion - looked deeply into the camera's eye and, inches from actual sincerity, said, "We can't kill our way out of this mess." Or, perhaps, it was when, in a discussion of his newfound dedication to comprehensive solutions to complex problems, he announced his devotion to "a peaceful planet," or when he cited a group of Arab scholars in support of loosening the grip of theocratic tyranny in the Middle East.

It was the horrible vision of John Bolton in four-point restraints.

You have to give Romney and his campaign credit. They said they were going to do it. They telegraphed the punch five months ago. They told the entire nation that there would come a day in which everything Willard Romney had said about anything in his entire seven-year quest to be president would be rendered, in the memorable word of Nixon White House flack Ron Ziegler, "inoperative." They told us quite honestly that their entire campaign was going to be based on an ongoing argument between the Willard Romney who ran for the Republican nomination and the Willard Romney who thereupon would run for president. They told us he would renege on his previous positions, and he has. They told us he would reverse his field over and over again, and he has. They told us that the only real principle to which the man will ever hold firm is that he will be utterly unprincipled.

They told us that, sooner or later, everybody who supported him through the primaries because he was the only Republican candidate who didn't sound like he belonged in a padded chapel would find themselves under the bus. And nowhere in his campaign was Romney firmer in his resolve than he was to a modernized version of the neoconservative agenda that so thrilled the world under the leadership of C-Plus Augustus. A full 17 of his 25 primary foreign-policy advisers had been deckhands on that particular plague ship, Sailing Master Bolton chief among them. And, at the end of the day, they all just turned out to be the last people to go sliding under the wheels. For the full 90 minutes of the foreign-policy debate at Lynn University here on Monday night, whether it was the president speaking or Romney, neoconservatism's breath barely clouded the mirror.

"I notice," Delaware attorney general Beau Biden told me in the spin room afterword, "that none of those people are out here talking right now."

(Of course, it is entirely possible that the Romney people have glowing internal poll numbers that indicate that, as long as he didn't show up on Monday night looking like Mr. Natural threatening to turn NATO into a cannabis society, he'd be okay. They then could have accepted with equanimity the several moments in which Romney plainly didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. Syria is Iran's "route to the sea"? Did Bain provide the financing behind the project that paved over the Persian Gulf when the rest of us weren't looking?)

Romney was for bilateral diplomatic solutions. Romney was for comprehensive reform packages for the entire Middle East. Romney likes what the president did in Libya (at first), in Syria, in Egypt, and what the president is doing with his flying killer robots in a dozen places. In fact, the president drew clearer foreign-policy differences between himself and Beau Biden's father than Romney did between himself in the president. The most spectacular reversal came on Afghanistan, when Romney appeared to commit himself to the same 2014 withdrawal date over which he has been belaboring the president in practically every speech since he left for Iowa a year ago.

It was purely surreal, and it was not made any less so by the fact that Romney was clearly uncomfortable with his new moderate foreign-policy programming. (That was plain early on, when he completely took a pass on the opening question, which concerned the events in Benghazi.) Romney was sweating and stumbling through enough passages to reinforce the fact that he and his running mate, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, are going to have to leave anything that happens overseas to their coterie of advisers - if, of course, any of them are still speaking to Romney after he sold them out so egregiously just now.

That is what history always has told us about the career of Willard Romney: sooner or later, he will sell your ass out to the highest bidder and walk away whistling in the general direction of anything to which he feels entitled. In this case, that would be the leadership of the Free World.

Otherwise, it was a dispiriting evening on a great many levels. Clearly, the president had a superior command of the issues under discussion. He finally and thoroughly eviscerated the idiotic talking point about how the Navy is smaller than it's been since 1917. (You may have noticed that rejoinder because it was when the phrase "horses and bayonets" started trending.) He easily parried the hoariest Romney attack of all - that the president embarked on "an apology tour" upon taking office - by shooting back that he'd gone to Israel "without bringing any fundraisers," and talking about his visit to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem. He forcefully defended all the policies he'd put in place that Romney, on this evening at least, so enthusiastically supported. He made clear from his words and his manner that he has had to make decisions over the past four years that he never dreamed he'd have to make when he was running in 2008 and John McCain was ripping him for his lack of experience, and that those decisions have marked him, whether he wins this election or not, for the rest of his life. On the substance of what came under discussion on Monday night, this was no contest at all. It was an obvious and preposterous mismatch.

My god, Romney actually said that America doesn't install dictators, ignoring the fact that we've had these problems with Iran for 60 years precisely because we overthrew an elected president and installed a friendly dictator whose rule was so bloodthirsty that religious fanatics ran him out, imprisoned our embassy officials, and gave Ben Affleck a chance 30 years later to direct a cool movie. Do we honestly have to count them all off? Somoza? Rios Montt? Pinochet? And, yes, Saddam Hussein. Romney sounded like he was taking history at one of those Jesus-on-a-dinosaur middle schools that "Bobby" Jindal has opened in Louisiana. And yet, this abysmal ignorance may not come to matter a damn.

A discussion of foreign policy that did not mention climate change. (Four debates and nary a mention. Somebody else is going to have to tell the polar bears.) A discussion of foreign policy that mentioned teacher's unions exactly as many times - once - as it mentioned the Palestinians, and I am not making that statistic up. A discussion of foreign policy that did not mention hunger, or thirst, or epidemic disease, but spent better than ten minutes on The Fking Deficit. (Here Romney cited in defense of his position that noted political economist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.) A discussion of foreign policy that was all about threats, real and imagined, and wars, real or speculative, and weapons, and how many of them we should build in order to feel safe in this dangerous world. (Romney actually argued that we should go back to the "two-war" strategy that we followed throughout the Cold War. Against whom in god's name does he think we'll be fighting the second war?)

The rough consensus on foreign policy, to which Willard Romney spent most of the evening appealing, is a truncated, dismal thing, a grim march through a universe of bad options and worse choices. "Harvey Cox said once that not to decide is to decide," former senator Bob Graham said after it was over. "The only option not worth taking is the one where we do nothing."

Unfortunately for Graham's theory, there is no "we" in these questions. There was no "we" in the final presidential debate this year. In no area have we as a self-governing nation so abandoned our obligations as we have on foreign policy. In no area are we so intellectually subservient to expertise, and to the Great Man Theory of how things should be run. In no area are we so clearly governed, rather than governing ourselves. The president, at least, occasionally seems to be aware not only that this is true, but also that it puts the whole experiment of self-government in mortal peril, just as the Founders knew it would when they lodged the war powers in the Congress, which has spent the last 225 years giving them back, in one way or another, to the Executive, which is presided over, always, by One Great Man. He at least seems self-aware enough to appear troubled by the power he nonetheless wields.

There is no nation in its right mind that would put its foreign policy in the hands of the Willard Romney who showed up on stage here in Boca Raton on Monday night, particularly since he had so clearly abandoned everything else he believed on the subject for the purpose of fronting himself as a moderate in order to run out the clock over the next three weeks. He knew nothing and said less. But the debate will be scored as no better than a tie because, well, all the options are too miserable to contemplate. I think if Romney had called for drone strikes on the headquarters of the National Education Association, he might take 47 states. Especially if he couched the raid as a deficit-reduction scheme or an attempt at education "reform."

46 comments

Commander-in-Chief v. Dithering Bully

Tuesday, 23 October 2012 09:08

Intro: "I thought the third and last presidential debate was a clear win for the President."

Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)

Commander-in-Chief v. Dithering Bully

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

23 October 12

�

thought the third and last presidential debate was a clear win for the President. He displayed the authority of the nation's Commander-in-Chief - calm, dignified, and confident. He was assertive without being shrill, clear without being condescending. He explained to a clueless Mitt Romney the way the world actually works.

Romney seemed out of his depth. His arguments were more a series of bromides than positions - "we have to make sure arms don't get into the wrong hands," "we want a peaceful planet," "we need to stand by our principles," "we need strong allies," "we need a comprehensive strategy to move the world away from terrorism," and other banalities.

This has been Romney's problem all along, of course, but in the first debate he managed to disguise his vacuousness with a surprisingly combative, well-rehearsed performance. By the second debate, the disguise was wearing thin.

In tonight's debate, Romney seemed to wither - and wander. He often had difficulty distinguishing his approach from the President's, except to say, repeatedly, "America needs strong leadership."

On the few occasions when Romney managed to criticize the President, he called for a more assertive foreign policy - but he never specified exactly what that assertiveness would entail. He wanted "tougher economic sanctions on Iran," for example, or "stronger support for Israel" - the details of which were never revealed.

Obama's most targeted criticism of Romney, on the other hand, went to Romney's core weakness - that Romney's positions have been inconsistent, superficial, and often wrong: "Every time you've offered an opinion," said Obama, "you've been wrong."

Nonetheless, I kept wishing Obama would take more credit for one of the most successful foreign policies of any administration in decades: not only finding and killing Osama bin Laden but also ridding the world of Libya's Gaddafi without getting drawn into a war, imposing extraordinary economic hardship on Iran, isolating Syria, and navigating the treacherous waters of Arab Spring.

Obama pointed to these achievements, but I thought he could have knitted them together into an overall approach to world affairs that has been in sharp contrast to the swaggering, bombastic foreign policies of his predecessor.

Like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney has a pronounced tendency to rush to judgment - to assert America's military power too quickly, and to assume that we'll be viewed as weak if we use diplomacy and seek the cooperation of other nations (including Russia and China) before making our moves.

President Obama won tonight's debate not only because he knows more about foreign policy than does Mitt Romney, but because Obama understands how to wield the soft as well as the hard power of America. He came off as more subtle and convincing than Romney - more authoritative - because, in reality, he is.

Although tonight's topic was foreign policy, I hope Americans understand it was also about every other major challenge we face. Mitt Romney is not only a cold warrior; he's also a class warrior. And the two are closely related. Romney tries to disguise both within an amenable demeanor. But in both capacities, he's a bully.

101 comments

More Articles...

<< Start < Prev 3231 3232 3233 3234 3235 3236 3237 3238 3239 3240 Next > End >>

Page 3231 of 3432

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

Name:	*
Username:	*
E-mail:	*
Password:	*
Confirm password:	*
Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.