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Former Romney adviser on Libya: "They stepped in it"
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign event at Van Dyck Park Sept. 13, 2012, in Fairfax, Va. / AP Photo
This piece originally appeared on The New Republic's website Wednesday.
(The New Republic) The verdict is in on Romney's response to the embassy attacks in Libya and Egypt, and it's not been kind to the former Massachusetts governor.
Romney, in case you somehow missed it, seized on a U.S. embassy statement cautioning against "efforts ... to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims" and pronounced it "disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks ... but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." (He doubled down on the criticism this morning.) The mainstream media promptly proclaimed the response "over the top," while Republican foreign policy hands griped that it was a "Lehman moment" and exposed Team Romney as "not ready for prime time." Peggy Noonan, normally a reliable partisan, told Fox News that "I don't feel that Mr. Romney has been doing himself any favors in the past few hours, say since last night" and that "sometimes when bad things happen... cool words or no words, may be the way to go." Even Romney's allies in Congress seemed to implicitly distance themselves from his comments.
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It's worth stipulating that Team Romney's political instincts weren't entirely off-the-wall. Any time there's a deadly attack on American officials abroad, it's reasonable to ask if the president deserves blame. No one would begrudge Romney for raising the question. But the tone and timing of the criticism were self-defeating in ways large and small. Small because, as the news accounts have pointed out, the U.S. embassy statement came before the start of the protests in Cairo and Libya -- however ham-handed, it was an attempt to preemptively defuse them, an impulse no one can begrudge an embassy official under threat of violence, not an after-the-fact apologia. Meanwhile, the Obama administration had actually disavowed the statement before Romney released his own critique. (Yes, the Romney campaign can legitimately ask why it took 16 hours to walk back the flaccid statement, which did fill the vacuum left by the administration's silence. But, you know, they had a few things on their plate. In any case, it's not clear how a rhetorical escalation would have calmed the situation.)
The larger problem is that there just wasn't any percentage in the move for Romney. If the attacks turn out to expose a major failing on the part of the administration, we'll know about it soon enough, at which point Romney will be free to criticize relentlessly. And if the attacks rally the public behind the president -- already there are suggestions of an Al Qaeda plot in Libya, which could require retaliation -- then Romney will be isolated and exposed.
All of which raises the question: What was Team Romney thinking? I'm not really sure, but I happened to speak this morning to a senior Romney adviser from a previous campaign who offered his own theory. According to this person, Romney may have been feeling defensive over the hazing he took in Charlotte last week -- "my opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy," the president tweaked him -- and was primed to hit back. "They set him up Thursday night at the convention with the smack down on foreign policy," says the former adviser. "They called him naive, Palin-esque. Then he got his back up about it and was waiting for opportunity to show, 'I'm strong, too.'"
The adviser has no direct, inside knowledge of the campaign's thinking on this matter. But he does have a good read on Romney -- a man with a healthy sense of pride, and who's already invested in the idea of Obama as an appeaser. It was the only plausible explanation the adviser could think of for how "they stepped in it," in his words. "I always thought it was a one-two punch [by the Obama campaign]," the adviser continued. "Punch one was Thursday night. Punch two would be in the foreign policy debate. To cast Romney as naif, an empty suit on foreign policy, and tie him to Bush -- as a puppet of the bow-tied hawks of the Bush administration. ... This intervening event was gravy."
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he writes about politics and Obama administration economic policy. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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Obama had to finish up the mess GW left behind in Afghanistan by GW forgetting about bin Laden and invading some other random country. If Bush had just finished the job in Afghanistan, that war would likely have been completely behind us before he left office.
Instead, Obama's having to clean up one of GW's hundreds of messes took far more troops and more effort in Afghanistan than it should have.
Bush put Afghanistan on the back burner so he could stand under a Mission Accomplished sign in Iraq eight years before Obama actually Accomplished the Mission.
BTW, ask Osama bin Laden how 'weak' America's foreign policy is. Ask just about anybody who had a top spot with bin Laden.
Oh, that's right. You CAN'T ask them because, unlike GW Bush, Obama didn't forget about them. He had just about all of them killed.
This has to be the lamest line of political attack against Obama there is.
President Obama has a proven track record of being stronger and smarter in this area than his predecessor. Invading random countries isn't being smart or strong.
Like the 2004 bumper sticker said, "Yee Haw is NOT a Foreign Policy".
Unfortunately, Mitt Romney seems awful eager to use more of our kids as cannon fodder so, like Bush, he can puff himself up.
That Obama is just a goader. Darn guy.
His Clark Griswold overseas Blooper Reel tour was 100% scripted by the Romney campaign, and it was a disaster. I counted ten step-in-its on that trip, and by the end, the tour was on a self-imposed media blackout to the extent that Fox's Greta Van Susteren was complaining about a complete lack of access to the candidate.
While his economic message is somewhere between nonexistent and incoherent, Mr Romney has proven singularly inept in the foreign arena.
The problem with the vitrol stanses posted by the repubs is that if they are correct and the GOP does have all the right answers, what in the world happened under Bush? The super recession started on Bush's watch, the financial system melted down, the housing bubble burst because of greed and fraud, and millions of us lost many thousands of dollars in our 401Ks due to this entire mess created during the Bush years. Now you ask us to go back to the policies that nearly caused a complete failure of our economyand our financial system? I think not! Your positions are very loose with the truth, and extremely bitter at all the wrong people. We who choose to support president Obama do so for many reasons, first among them that he tried to get things done, but guess who was blocking his way, yep, the GOP. When your precious GOP leaders actually come to the table with real solutions and work in a bi-partisan maner, to solve all the problems we have been suffering under for over 4 years, I might, just might, think they are trying to do their jobs. Something they have not been doing since Obama was elected. The congress in each of the last 4 years has been the worst congress in American history, and have not accomplished anything. This is at a time when we need the most effort from everyone in government to recover our economy. The GOP has failed each and every year since Obama was sworn in as President, and you want people to believe that they won't fail us in the future, sorry, but their record preceeds them.
have the film made.