”L’etat, c’est moi.”
— Louis XIV
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Charles Krauthammer
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“This nation. Me.”
— Barack Obama,
third presidential debate
Okay, okay. I’ll give
you the context. Obama was talking about “when
Tunisians began to protest, this nation, me, my administration, stood with
them.” Still. How many democratic leaders (de Gaulle excluded) would place the
word “me” in such regal proximity to the word “nation”?
Obama would have made
a very good Bourbon. He’s certainly not a very good debater. He showed it again
Monday night.
Obama lost. His tone
was petty and small. Arguing about Iran’s nuclear program, he actually said to
Mitt Romney, “While we were coordinating an international coalition to make
sure these sanctions were effective, you were still invested in a Chinese state
oil company that was doing business with the Iranian oil sector.” You can’t get
smaller than that. You’d expect this in a city council race. But only from the
challenger. The sitting councilman would find such an ad hominem beneath him.
Throughout the
debate, Obama kept it up, slashing, interjecting, interrupting, desperate to
gain the upper hand by insult if necessary. That spirit led Obama into a major
unforced error. When Romney made a perfectly reasonable case to rebuild a
shrinking Navy, Obama condescended: “You mentioned . . . that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well,
Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our
military’s changed.”
Such that naval
vessels are as obsolete as horse cavalry?
Liberal pundits got a
great guffaw out of this, but the underlying argument is quite stupid. As if
the ships being retired are dinghies, skipjacks and three-masted schooners. As
if an entire branch of the armed forces — the principal projector of American
power abroad — is itself some kind of anachronism.
“We have these things
called aircraft carriers,” continued the schoolmaster, “where planes land on
them.”
This is Obama’s case
for fewer vessels? Does he think carriers patrol alone? He doesn’t know that
for every one carrier, 10 times as many ships sail in a phalanx of escorts?
Obama may blithely
dismiss the need for more ships, but the Navy wants at least 310 and
the latest Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel report says that
defending America’s vital interests requires 346 ships (vs. 287 today). Does
anyone doubt that if we continue as we are headed, down to fewer than 230, the
casualty will be entire carrier battle groups, precisely the kind of high-tech
force multipliers that Obama pretends our national security requires?
Romney, for his part,
showed himself to be fluent enough in foreign policy, although I could have
done with a little less Mali (two references) and a lot less “tumult” (five).
But he did have the
moment of the night when he took after Obama’s post-inauguration world apology tour. Obama, falling back on his base,
flailingly countered that “every fact checker and every reporter”says otherwise.
Oh yeah? What about
Obama declaring that America had “dictated” to other nations?
“Mr. President,” said
Romney, “America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations
from dictators.”
Obama, rattled, went
off into a fog, beginning with “if we’re going to talk about trips that we’ve
taken,” followed by a rambling travelogue of a 2008 visit to Israel. As if this is about
trip-taking, rather than about defending — vs. denigrating — the honor of the United
States while on foreign soil. Americans may care little about Syria and nothing
about Mali. But they don’t like presidents going abroad confirming the
calumnies of tin-pot dictators.
The rest of Romney’s
debate performance was far more passive. He refused the obvious chance to
pulverize Obama on Libya. I would’ve taken a baseball bat to Obama’s second-debate claim that no one in his
administration, including him, had misled the country on Benghazi. (The misleading
is beyond dispute. The only question is whether it
was intentional, i.e., deliberate deceit, or unintentional, i.e., scandalous
incompetence.) Romney, however, calculated differently: Act presidential.
Better use the night to assume a reassuring, non-contentious demeanor.
Romney’s entire
strategy in both the second and third debates was to reinforce the status he achieved in debate No. 1 as a plausible alternative
president. He therefore went bipartisan, accommodating, above the fray and,
above all, nonthreatening.
That’s what Reagan
did with Carter in their 1980 debate. If your opponent’s record is dismal and
the country quite prepared to toss him out — but not unless you pass the
threshold test — what do you do?
Romney chose to do a
Reagan: Don’t quarrel. Speak softly. Meet the threshold.
We’ll soon know
whether steady-as-she-goes was the right choice.
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