The Politics of National Security

The President is hitting Mitt Romney hard on national security:

It's got everyone rankled - from John McCain to Arianna Huffington (but really, a woman who's site regularly distorts news in order to gain hits by sensationalizing headlines doesn't have much space to point fingers, in my book). And the Romney campaign is none too happy either, but I think Michelle Cottle has this exactly right:

Obama has made an attack ad. A tough one. One that suggests Governor Romney doesn’t have the right stuff to cope with the very dangerous world we live in. An attack that arguably—gasp!—politicizes national security.

Oh my God. The nerve. You know who this puts Obama on par with? Every fricking Republican who has run for office since 2001. Oh, yeah, and Hillary Clinton, whose infamous 3 a.m. phone-call ad from 2008 is being revisited in the wake of Obama’s new one.

Let us take a brief stroll down memory lane to the 2004 Republican Convention. The not-so-subtle theme: vote for John Kerry and al Qaeda will invade your homes and eat your children. This is only a slight exaggeration. Dick Cheney hasn’t uttered a word in the past decade that didn’t raise the specter of terrorists at the door. And Rudy Giuliani? Joe Biden said it best when he noted that for a long stretch, every sentence that came out of Hizzoner’s mouth consisted of “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Going even further back, who can forget President Bush’s much-ridiculed, flight-suity “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003, from the deck of the USSAbraham Lincoln? But you know one of the main reasons that photo op was so widely ridiculed? It was bollocks. The “mission” in Iraq was anything but “accomplished.” Bush was touting an achievement he had not yet even achieved.

Osama bin Laden, by contrast, is very, very dead.

Exactly. Look, I'm not happy about a political discourse wherein Mitt Romney can't just say "the President deserves credit for taking down Osama bin Laden and I applaud him for it, but we have very different views in a number of other areas that I think make me better suited for the job".  I want to live in a world where Mitt Romney and his surrogates go out with that message. I yearn for it. I think most Americans do too. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world that thinks politics and it's policy outcomes are a zero-sum game and thus no credit can ever be given to anyone in elective office ever.  It's amazingly stupid, but until it's magically whisked away, I'd rather see both sides fighting fire with fire. As Andrew Sullivan puts it:

I can see no problem with the ad run by Obama on his extraordinarily ballsy decision to choose the riskiest path to get bin Laden and all the intelligence his compound contained. It is the kind of ad that would be a no-brainer for any Republican president, seeking re-election. If Bush had done it, he would have jumped out of a helicopter in a jump-suit with fireworks. And it is simply true that both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney downplayed the importance of finding and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. 

Jon Meacham thinks the Republicans are giving themselves away:

Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is “politicizing” an important national event. In this sense, “politicizing” might be best translated as “beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.” The ad itself raises intriguing, substantive, legitimate questions — and the ferocious, sputtering Republican reaction is proof positive that they know it, or at least suspect it.

And Michael Tomasky agrees:

It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are “the 9/11 party.” And more than that—and this is the real story here—it’s the fact that the Democrats don’t appear to be afraid of the Republicans anymore. That, to Republicans, is what’s truly unacceptable. 

Andrew concludes:

 I think the Obamaites need to be more aggressive in foreign policy arguments. Obama ended one war in Iraq, dispatched Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi without a single US casualty, re-set relations with Russia, brought unprecedentedly united international pressure against Iran's nuclear bomb potential, wiped out much of al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and presided over democratic revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain. He restored this country's moral credibility after the dark period of Nazi-style interrogation under Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld.

A-men.