Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air:
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.
The Russians want to reset the reset, neither the Chinese nor anyone else can figure out what, if anything, the “pivot to Asia” really means, and Latin America and Africa continue to be mostly ignored, along with global issues such as climate change. Meanwhile, the administration’s expanding drone campaign suggests a counterterrorism strategy that has completely lost its bearings – we no longer seem very clear on who we need to kill or why.
Could Obama have done better?
In foreign policy as in life, stuff happens — including bad stuff no one could have predicted. Nonetheless, to a significant extent, President Obama is the author of his own lackluster foreign policy. He was a visionary candidate, but as president, he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture — one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized, and though senior White House officials are good at making policy announcements, mechanisms to actually implement policies are sadly inadequate.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If Obama wants to fix his broken foreign policy machine, he can do it — but conversations with numerous insiders, as well as my own government experiences, suggest that he needs to focus on strategy, structure, process, management, and personnel as much as on new policy initiatives.
Not sexy, I know. But just as a start-up company needs more than an entrepreneurial founder with a couple of good ideas and a nifty PowerPoint presentation, the United States needs more than speeches and high-minded aspirations.
Brooks offers a devastating set of suggestions to improve the situation, each one an indictment of Obama’s foreign-policy management over the last four years:
- Get a strategy.
- Get some decent managers.
- Get people who actually know something.
- Get out of the bubble.
- Get a backbone.
Er … shouldn’t those have been Day One tasks? If a President still has these five tasks on his to-do list on foreign policy almost four years into his term, it’s safe to say that he’s not interested — or competent — enough to accomplish them.
The Detroit News (or Detroit Free Press; I forget which) ran a survey of voters in the last couple of days and asked some interesting questions: (1) Who do you think had the more impressive season? Justin Verlander in 2011 (when he won both Cy Young and MVP awards) or Miguel Cabrera in 2012 (when he became baseball’s first Triple Crown winner since 1968)? (2) Should Manager Jim Leland be re-hired for next season?
Now, what’s interesting is this. Both Republicans and Democrats pretty much agreed with each other. Verlander’s season was more impressive and Leland should be re-hired. But substantial numbers of Independent voters were “unsure.”
Some people make out political independents as some sort of elite intelligentsia, who think for themselves and don’t follow the herd.
But those are the same people who hold up the lines at Starbucks and McDonald’s, trying to decide what they want to order. They are the people who start to pull out into traffic from a shopping center parking lot, only to suddenly slam on their brakes and trigger a rear-end collision. They are the people who are responsible for 90% of returned merchandise, which raises the ultimate price for everyone else. And so on.
In short, independent voters aren’t really independent. What they are is indecisive.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
@openid.aol.com/runnswim:
Let me see if I understand you correctly: you think that indies are those simpletons who simply cannot make up their minds about political choices much like someone who doesn’t have a Baskin and Robbins favorite and are indecisive? Really? And that is proven by a stupid poll about sports personalities that there is no possibility the indies have never heard of or don’t follow sports enough to care?
And independent is NOT someone who has no opinion, or can’t make a decision about political issues. They are simply those voters who are not aligned with either party. No need for you to degrade them. Responsible for 90% of returned merchandise? On what do you base that opinion? Your vast retail experience? And on what do you base that the items returned were for the reason of indecision and not, perhaps, poor quality? Stick with medicine, Larry; retail doesn’t seem to be your area of expertise.
Hi Retire:
Lighten up.
It was meant as a light hearted joke. My wife is a registered independent, for goodness sake. She gets the joke.
@openid.aol.com/runnswim:
You lighten up, Larry, meanwhile I will continue to worry as our nation is going down the drain due to this administration’s failed policies. You see, I do think that we should bequeath to our children, and grandchildren, a nation that is safer, more secure and more posperous than it was when we took over.
Hi retire:
A rare moment of agreement. Unfortunately, we Baby Boomers have too often been asleep on our watch, and it’s not simply the past 3 3/4 years.
I’ll tell you the one thing that Romney said in the debates so far, which caused me to reflect and consider. He said that he (Romney) would do a better job of working with Democrats to get things done than Obama has worked with Republicans to get things done.
I actually believe that this is true — not because I think that it was all (or mostly) Obama’s fault — it’s tough to work with people who’s avowed goal is to defeat you in the next election. But I believe that the Democrats have much less visceral hate for Romney than the Republicans had for Obama. I also believe that Romney is more like the guy who tried to run to the Left of Kennedy in 1992 than the guy who tried to run to the Right of Gingrich and Santorum in 2012. He’s already shaken the Etch-a-sketch, and he’ll shake it more, after the election, if he wins.
Romney had a perfect excuse for pivoting to the center, following the GOP convention. He was losing the election. So he’s getting away with things in October that would have buried him last February. He’ll have a similar excuse to pivot even more to the center after the election. The fiscal cliff. Once he’s in office, he’ll be home free. He will be in no danger of not being renominated in 2016. So — finally — Romney can be Romney, which is basically to be like George Romney, who was a very decent moderate Republican. And, I think, the Dems will more than meet him half-way.
I love it that Romney (and the GOP) will take ownership of health care, just as Obama was forced to take ownership of the economy. In the last several years, there have been 11 new drugs approved for cancer treatment. The cheapest is $60,000 per treatment course. The rest are above $80,000 and a number are above $100,000, with several being in the range of $120,000. Can you see “rationing” on the horizon? Well, it’s already happening, and it’s got nothing to do with government, which explicitly forbids considering cost-effectiveness, when it comes to approving treatments in general or for individual patients in particular. One sixth of the economy is on course to explode – like a trick cigar (with the aging of the Baby Boomers who’ve caused all these problems).
Baby Boomers, the gift that keeps on giving.
Anyway, someone is going to have to come up with a solution, and vouchers are not the answer. Trashing ObamaCare isn’t the answer (ObamaCare was a very decent first step in the direction of a solution). It’ll be a huge problem, but it will be Romney’s problem. Based on what he did in Massachusetts and what he’s now saying, I predict that the rumored death of ObamaCare is quite premature, no matter how the election turns out.
I do think that the economy is poised for nice recovery, no matter who wins in November. I worry that this will take the heat off of the next POTUS and tempt him to kick the can down the road, for another 4 years. But perhaps not.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
Question? Who decides the questions to be asked during the debates? Must be Democrats? The last debate will focus on national security. Sounds suspect. The candidates should be debating on what at least 70% of the voters say is the main issue — the economy!
What clown decided that at a time when so many people are out of work, and Obama has neither fixed the economy nor created a significant number of jobs, we need to talk about national security more than the horrible increasing price of gas and foreclosures and jobs? Not.
IS THERE ANY WAY TO OBJECT TO THE DEBATE AGENDA OF IGNORING THE ECONOMY?
The reason the economy is FAILING is because of high gas prices, (and ask business people) uncertainty, high taxes, health care costs going up — more uncertainty.
IT DOES INDEED MATTER WHO GETS ELECTED. PREFERABLY ROMNEY AND RYAN. OBAMA HAS WASTED AWAY HIS CONGRESSIONAL MAJORITY AND 4 YEARS.
OBAMA HAS DONE NOTHING TO IMPROVE OUR ECONOMY; HE HAS FAILED! WE NEED TO ELECT ROMNEY TO REGAIN OUR ECONOMIC STRENGTH, CERTAINTY, AND ABOVE ALL TRUST IS THE LEADERSHIP OF AMERICA — WHICH OBAMA HAS CURSED.
I think I’m going to start making more calls and get even more and more people to wake up, see what’s happening and vote for Romney/Ryan; there’s nothing wrong with everybody voting for the white guys, a telling majority of us are white.
@openid.aol.com/runnswim:
Perhaps, as a Boomer, you have been asleep at the wheel, but please, don’t lump all Boomers in with yourself. It is just flat out wrong to do so. Many Boomers understood the direction this nation was going, and were ringing the alarm bell, but no one wanted to listen to them. It seems to be a nasty habit of yours to catagorize people, i.e. your recent comments about Independents. I can chaulk that up to the progressive in you, for that is what the Democrat Party does, but I don’t have to accept it.
As to Romney doing a better job working across the aisle, we’ll see. If Harry Reid, a most dispicable man, remains in charge of the Senate, it won’t matter how much Romney wants to work with Democrats, he will get the same disgusting stonewalling Reid has given the Republican controlled Congress.
“It’s tough to work with people whose avowed goal is to defeat you in the next election” Well, since I have had that opinion for 3 years, 11 months and 29 days, I find no fault in it. Any rational thinking person knew before the election in Nov., 2008, that Obama was not fit for office. Hell, considering his past associations, he couldn’t get a security clearance at the CIA. Yet, here he is, the fan of Marxist ideology, now POTUS. And I am sure you were right up their in front voting for him, considering your own exhibited ideology.
“I believe the Democrats have much less viseral hatred for Romney than the Republicans had for Obama.” You want to talk about “viseral hatred” being on the left as you are? Really? Have you totally forgotten the vile, vitriol that was directed at George Bush? Show me the protesters marching with placards of a beheaded Obama like they did with Bush. Show me where the Republicans simply shut down and refused to even try to work with Obama like the Democrats did with Bush. And have you forgotten that your side of the aisle has called Mitt Romney a tax cheat, a felon, and a murderer? You really do live in the land of Denial, don’t you?
And let’s talk about the thrill you get up you leg thinking Romney will be responsible for the adverse effects of Obamacare. Yeah, remind me again how “middle of the road” you are, Larry. Obama was held responsible for the economy? By whom? Certainly not Obama, himself. Of course, then you throw in the cost of new medicinal treatments for cancer. Do you really think that Medicare is going to pick up the tab for those quicker than a private insurace company will when Medicare is already denying CAT scans to my 87 year old step-mother because there is no indication that (according to Medicare) she needed one, which would have if not prevented, at least given off a warning bell, to the stroke she had a month later. Want to talk about transplants? Or do you subscribe to Cass Sunstein and Dr. Emanuel’s philosophy of not granting transplants to those according to their position on the waiting list, but rather how much life the patient has left and what their “contribution” to society will be? Or do you think that medical care should cost what it did 50 years ago? I wish that practice applied to vehicles. Oh, wait, we pay more for vehicles because of a) the technology involved in them and b) to bail out the Democrat’s union buddies.
I know you support Obamacare ( I can only surmise it is due to the fact you think you will come out better monotarily because I am sure you are not willing to take a severe cut in pay) but the rest of the nation, oddly, doesn’t agree with you. It is still an unpopular legislation and with any luck at all, it will be trashed. There are a number of things that can be done to drive down the cost of medical care, Obamacare doesn’t deal with that in any way. It simply creates new rules and regulations that are oppressive and does NOTHING to drive down the cost of medical care. NOTHING. But what it does do is impose a tax on you if you should, in your Boomber years, decide to downsize your home and sell your existing home for more than you purchased it for 30 years ago.
I am not a fan of Mitt Romney’s. Never have been. He is not conservative enough for me and I am tired of you progressives running this nation into the ground. Your own [failing] state of California is a prime example that progressivism doesn’t work. Soon, Jerry Brown will be on his knees in D.C. asking for a bailout. People like you have been supporting the “progressive” view for over 100 years. It didn’t work for Wilson, FDR or Carter and it won’t work ever. The only reason that Clinton was somewhat successful is because he moved to the middle, but as long as you continue to elect idiots like Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi, we will have an uphill battle.
One other thing; you are a smart, well educated man. Yet you cling to the concept that you can legislate an ideal society with government programs. You can’t. The ideals of the left are a failure: FDR thought he could bring us out of a depression with more and more spending. In 1938, we were almost as bad off as we were when he took office. We didn’t really exit the Great Depression until around 1954 and only then because the U.S. was basically the only western nation that still had manufacturering capabilities after the war in Europe. Social Security, FDR’s signature legislation? What is the unfunded liability for that Ponzi scheme? How will we ever meet the promises that the government made to millions of workers? LBJ, with his Great Society, was going to abolish poverty. He failed. Poverty rates now are greater than they have ever been, and we have managed to break the will of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to go through the struggle and bring themselves up by their own bootstraps. And in the process, we have destroyed the black family. Want proof of that? Read Thomas Sowell. Carter? His foreign policy, much like Obama’s foreign policy, was a disaster and gave us modern day Iran and awakened the sleeping giant that had been Islam since 1684. Carter did the same thing Obama has done; turn his back on an ally who Carter didn’t think was suitable, all in the name of “humanitarianism.” Clinton? Well, Clinton gave us Chinese goods and offshoring in order to try to compete with the Chinese. I know. I was in retail when all that went down. Every product I made was made from U.S. made fabric by American workers. By the time I sold my business, it was impossible to buy any cotton yard goods made in the U.S. Those South Caroline mill workers lost their jobs, and the Chinese gained them.
And now you support Obamacare which will eventually totally bankrupt this nation while making the U.S. a third world nation when it comes to health care.
Your ways don’t work. It is time to start fresh and understand that this nation was not built on what government could provide you, that “safety net” that the left so loves to talk about. It was built on people who understood that only they were responsible for themselves and didn’t believe that if you didn’t have what your neighbor has, then the government should provide it for you.
I expect that all of those who voted for Obama in 2008 thought that a community organizer would have a great foreign policy. The difficulty with all of the issues Obama is failing is very similar to this. He appointed the wrong people to the job. They were all concerned with what was best for the party and forgot they represented all of the people in the US. SO, they squandered the stimulus on companies that had no chance to suceed. They made sure their buds got pay back for bundling votes. He made sure that all the foreigners who contributed to the Obama compaign were reqarded. If he had done his job instead of relying on Chicago politics, he would not be sweating bullets right now!
As if when we withdraw no one else will step in.
@Randy:
If you think for one minute that Obama had any choice in who got picked for what job, you are only fooling yourself. You think Obama is in charge? He’s not. He is Howdy Doody to Valerie Jarrett’s Buffalo Bob. She pulls the strings, and has since day one. Little Mr. Axelrod, with his Communist unbringing, finally managed to get someone elected to office that the Chicago machine could control. He sold the nation a blank slate on which people could project their own “hope and change” onto. But a few things had to be accomplished to put the student of Saul Alinsky into the Oval Office; hide Obama’s past relationships, create campaign speeches that did two things, bash Bush and not give any particulars about what Obama would really do, knowing what Obama did say he would never be held to by the left.
It was all so neat and clean. Jarrett was the owner of the puppet, Axelrod was the booking agent. Then you get some brain dead liberals to push the race card, accusing anyone who was against Obama of being a racist. They, the puppet masters, counted on white guilt from the left, and they got it. And the press, finally realizing their Marxist dream of the American Che, promoted Obama like a $50 million movie. And in November, 2008, over half the nation finally proved they had become nothing more than useful idiots.
@openid.aol.com/runnswim: Well said Larry. As an early baby boomer (born in 49) and in college in the late 60’s I remember all to well the poor choices many of my generation made. What I also remembered was that each individual sadly had to make a distinct choice between for or against the opposite of these choices. The idea of middle ground eroded from this point and has continued to this day. How to get a level of cooperation to the point of progress will be a difficult difficult proposition for any Presidential nominee as we have seen for the past few election cycles. Without some moderation by our leadership there will be no cooperation and no progress. America needs to put the labels away and seek common ground or all our goose’s are cooked. Hope all is well with you and the family in the OC. Mike
America has two distinct philophies of governing to select in this next election. Very similar to the past few cycles. One believes that government should be the provider and solve all problems for all citizens without the need of personal responsilility being a factor. In order to achieve this goal government MUST recruit massive amounts of money and resources at the expense of it’s citizens. That is why we are now faced with mounting debt and a failed President. This philosophy is destined to fail.
The other option it to recognized that government can NOT be the provider of all things and therefore should focus on the critical and minimal requirments of true need and provisions for it’s citizens. Personal responsibility MUST play a role relevant to this approach. With respect to business, less regulation, tax, and hinderances to the captialistic approach will yield a better economy and more jobs.
Our current President came from the government with NO private busienss experience and therefore is poorly equiped to understand the principals of business and how to create jobs and stimulate the economy. I say this based upon he and his parties failed strategy in this area. He promised to reduce our national debt to half of what it was when he took office and also committed to have unemployment at or below 6% by this time. He and his philosophy has failed.
Mitt Romney comes from the private sector and understands business and the requirements needed to create jobs and grow our economy. This belief is founded in his past performance metrics. He has also demonstrated an ability to bring both sides of a viewpoint towards a solution. This is what America needs going forward.
It’s time for real change in America and Obama and his record has demostrated that his approach has failed.
@openid.aol.com/runnswim:
First, I laughed at the Verlander post.
On day three of his presidency, Obama said this to Eric Cantor:
If George Bush had said this at the beginning of his presidency to congressional leaders, what do you think the democrat leaders reactions would have been. Even after working with dem leaders from day one, Dubya was vilified by congressional democrats.
Then, don’t miss the Romney Presidential Debate Monday night at 6PM PT.
FYI:
“On 29 May 2012, the New York Times published a remarkable 6,000-word story on its front page about what it termed President Obama’s “kill list”. It detailed the president’s personal role in deciding which individuals will end up being targeted for assassination by the CIA based on Obama’s secret, unchecked decree that they are “terrorists” and deserve to die.
Based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers”, the Times’ Jo Becker and Scott Shane provided extraordinary detail about Obama’s actions, including how he “por[es] over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards'” and how he “insist[s] on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list'”. At a weekly White House meeting dubbed “Terror Tuesdays”, Obama then decides who will die without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight. It was this process that resulted in the death of US citizen Anwar Awlaki in Yemen, and then two weeks later, the killing of his 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, by drone.”
Read the entire story here:
Title:
The remarkable, unfathomable ignorance of Debbie Wasserman Schultz
The Chair of the Democratic National Committee is completely unaware of one of the biggest stories of the Obama years
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/20/wasserman-schultz-kill-list
More on Obama’s killings:
“The dead friend was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, the third American killed in as many weeks by suspected CIA drone strikes in Yemen.”
Abdulrahman, his teenage cousin and six others died in the attack as well. A U.S. official said the young man “was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and that the U.S. was trying to kill a legitimate terrorist — al-Qaeda leader Ibrahim al-Banna, who also died — in the strike that apparently killed the American teenager.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2097899,00.html#ixzz29sq0wPfU
Obama out of control. Elect Romney/Ryan — morality and superior leadership for America.
i do believe death has no affect on this current potus………….a cold cold person
AdrianS #14 Don’t forget YOUR “Elect The White Guys”
Larry Agree with you that Romney, if elected, will be more like his dad and the guy “who ran to the left of Kennedy in 92” His faux Conservatism that beat back the likes of Gingrich and Perry and will stay to the background of his Presidency. I’m O.K. with that.
If Conserv. Common Sense and Lib. Larry can reach agreement there is hope.
Best to both of my S.Cal friends.
Go Tigers Irish 7-0 will need Divine Intervention to win in Norman next Sat.