Topic: presidential debate

Mullah Omar’s Triumphalism

Michael Rubin 10.25.2012 - 7:00 AM

On Wednesday, Mullah Omar, the elusive leader of the Taliban, released a message for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which this year falls on October 26. Omar’s message is well worth reading, especially against the backdrop of Obama administration efforts to negotiate with the Taliban.

As Ahmad Majidyar—probably the most astute Afghanistan analyst in the United States—points out, Mullah Omar used his address to redouble his commitment to a complete military victory. “We will continue to wage Jihad against the invaders who have invaded our country until the occupation ends completely,” he declared. Obama and Governor Romney might both have reaffirmed the 2014 pullout date during their most recent debate, but let us hope that they did so fully cognizant that no amount of spin will convince Afghans and Afghanistan’s neighbors that the withdrawal is anything but a Taliban victory.

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Obama Can’t Escape Share of Responsibility for Sequestration

Max Boot 10.24.2012 - 12:25 PM

One of the most puzzling answers that President Obama gave in the third presidential debate concerned the subject of sequestration—the process that will result in across-the-board cuts to spending of $1.2 trillion starting in January, with half that amount being cut from the defense budget. When the subject came up, Obama said, “First of all, the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”

As it happens, neither part of that short statement is strictly factual. Regarding the president’s claim that he did not propose sequestration—on this score he is flatly contradicted by Bob Woodward who wrote in his recent book, The Price of Politics, that sequestration originated in the White House and was sold to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid by budget director Jack Lew and legislative director Rob Nabors. Woodward now says: “What the president said is not correct. He’s mistaken. And it’s refuted by the people who work for him.”

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Did Obama Leave Wriggle Room on Iran?

Jonathan S. Tobin 10.23.2012 - 4:50 PM

As I wrote last night, President Obama staked out some new ground on Iran in an effort to curry favor with pro-Israel voters by stating clearly that the only deal possible with Iran would preclude the sort of compromises on the nuclear question that the foreign policy establishment and Europe favors:

And we hope that their leadership takes the right decision, but the deal we’ll accept is they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.

But already we’re starting to hear people say that we shouldn’t have believed our ears when he said that. At JTA’s Capital J blog, Daniel Treiman writes that I am taking it all too literally. Apparently, when Obama says “nuclear program” he doesn’t mean the Iranian nuclear program but rather their weapons development program. While I think there’s no way to interpret Obama’s statement in any way but the way one I pointed to, I wonder if that’s what the president’s apologists will be saying if after the election, he begins talks with Iran that will allow their nuclear program to continue.

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The Long-Term Harm of Obama’s Status of Forces Failure

Max Boot 10.23.2012 - 4:30 PM

“What I would not have had done was left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down.” So said President Obama in Tuesday night’s debate. And he was speaking the truth, as readers of Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s fine new book The Endgame can attest, even though Obama was ostensibly committed in 2011 to maintaining a continuing U.S. troop presence in Iraq.

Gordon and Trainor note that Obama steadily whittled down the number of troops he was willing to keep in Iraq. Commanders wanted more than 20,000 initially, but the president eventually was willing to provide fewer than 5,000. And he insisted on such strict conditions in Status of Forces negotiations—the Obama administration demanded that the Iraqi parliament ratify any grant of immunity to U.S. troops even though there was no legal or political requirement to do so—that Iraqi leaders got a clear signal that the U.S. wasn’t committed to their country. That made them less willing to compromise in negotiations. And Obama did not give enough time to those negotiations in any case—they only began in the middle of 2011 even though the last such negotiations, in 2008, had taken nearly a year. Then, when the negotiations ran into obstacles, Obama pulled the plug and trumpeted the return of the troops.

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Repeating Iraq’s Mistakes in Libya

Max Boot 10.23.2012 - 4:10 PM

Seth has already noted one instance where President Obama sounded positively Bushesque in the third debate. Let me note another. It was when he bragged about his intervention in Libya, saying “that we were able to, without putting troops on the ground at the cost of less than what we spent in two weeks in Iraq, liberate a country that had been under the yoke of dictatorship for 40 years. Got rid of a despot who had killed Americans and as a consequence, despite this tragedy, you had tens of thousands of Libyans after the events in Benghazi marching and saying America is our friend. We stand with them.”

Like Bush in Iraq, Obama was emphasizing the liberation of an oppressed Arab country and the resulting ties of friendship with its inhabitants, but–also like Bush–he was not focusing on what came after the dictator. In both Iraq and Libya the result has been chaos. The old security services have been dissolved and nothing has taken their place. In both cases the U.S. government has given little thought—and less commitment—to Phase IV, the post-overthrow part of the operation. The consequences of this failure have been less severe in Libya than in Iraq, but they have been bad enough—witness the attack that destroyed our consulate and killed our ambassador, and the destabilizing role that militias of various stripes continue to play in Libya.

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Why Was Malala Yousafzai Missing from the Debate?

Michael Rubin 10.23.2012 - 3:25 PM

Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban for advocating for girls’ right to education, has done more to de-legitimize Taliban rule and the radical Islamist ideology for which it stands than any Western diplomat or multimillion dollar de-radicalization program. How disappointing it was, then, that in last night’s debate, neither President Obama nor Governor Romney saw fit to pay tribute and provide a shout-out to this bold little girl.

Obama argued that his administration strategy was predicated on fighting radicalism:

Well, keep in mind our strategy wasn’t just going after bin Laden. We created partnerships throughout the region to deal with extremism in Somalia, in Yemen, in Pakistan. And what we’ve also done is engaged these governments in the kind of reforms that are actually going to make a difference in people’s lives day to day, to make sure that their governments aren’t corrupt, to make sure that they’re treating women with the kind of respect and dignity that every nation that succeeds has shown and to make sure that they’ve got a free market system that works.

The words are empty, however, as the Taliban declares itself on the verge of a great victory, and when the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood threatens to send women back centuries. Even in Turkey, whose Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of Obama’s closest friends, has seen the situation of women decline precipitously. To this, Obama appears oblivious.

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Quipster Obama Playing a Losing Hand

Jonathan S. Tobin 10.23.2012 - 2:10 PM

As I wrote last night, President Obama’s attack mode during the Boca Raton debate seemed to suggest that he was the challenger trailing in the race rather than the incumbent nursing an alleged lead. But the president’s nasty streak is also displaying itself on the campaign trail, where he has been trying out one-liners about his rival like a would-be comic at open mic night at a comedy club. Last week’s big yuck was his “Romnesia” crack that alludes to the fact that Romney has changed his positions on some issues. Today, he doubled down on that one by saying Romney had “stage 3 Romnesia” at a rally in Delray Beach, Florida.

One might ask what exactly about cancer, a disease whose progress is generally referred to in stages in that manner, is so funny? But even if we are ready to give him a pass for showing bad taste, one has to question the strategy being employed here. For several months, the entire Democratic campaign seemed predicated on derision and demonization of Romney. But in the first presidential debate the GOP candidate blew that effort out of the water, changing not only the direction of the race but rendering much of the Obama campaign’s material obsolete if not completely irrelevant. Yet despite that, the president keeps playing the same losing hand aimed at denigrating an opponent who strikes most Americans as inherently reasonable. That makes one wonder whether the president’s condescending attitude as well as his sarcasm has a lot more to do with his anger at Romney’s strength and staying power than it does with any tactical political plan. More and more, it’s sounding as if President Obama is just plain mad at Romney because of the growing possibility that he’s going to lose the election.

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McCain: Obama’s Sarcasm “Inappropriate” and “Unpresidential”

Alana Goodman 10.23.2012 - 12:50 PM

Sen. John McCain blasted President Obama’s “horses and bayonets” zinger as “unpresidential” on a conference call this morning, saying it showed a “lack of maturity.”

“I don’t know why the president of the United States feels it’s necessary to denigrate and insult his opponent,” said McCain. “It’s not only bad taste, and, frankly, inappropriate for a president of the United States, but it’s also wrong.”

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The Obama Doctrine of Revenge

Seth Mandel 10.23.2012 - 11:45 AM

It must have been strange for viewers of last night’s presidential debate to be told Mitt Romney is a dangerous warmonger and then hear him open the evening by stressing diplomacy and saying: “we can’t kill our way out of this mess.” But perhaps it was stranger still for the antiwar left–or what is left of it–to hear President Obama essentially respond with his classic campaign slogan, Yes we can. Last night was something of a watershed for the president in one regard. He has always been given the benefit of the doubt on his secretive drone campaigns, so-called “kill list,” and authorizing military intervention in Libya without congressional approval.

The understanding on the left was that Obama inherited an anti-terror infrastructure and two wars. But last night, Obama gave a different answer. When attacking Romney for being cautious on Libya, Obama said:

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Obama Acknowledges Strategy Failed

Alana Goodman 10.23.2012 - 11:25 AM

President Obama has officially been running for reelection for 18 months. His campaign and supporting super PACs have spent $770 million and counting. But now, just two weeks from election day, he’s suddenly decided to start campaigning on his second-term agenda:

Faced with persistent calls for more detail about what a second term would look like, President Barack Obama on Tuesday released a glossy, 20-page repackaging of the plans he has announced on subjects from energy to education.

Obama planned to unveil the booklet, “The New Economic Patriotism: A PLAN FOR JOBS & MIDDLE-CLASS SECURITY,” at an event in Delray Tennis Center in Delray, Fla.

The president, Vice President Joe Biden and other campaign surrogates plan to hold up the booklet at rallies as they barnstorm swing states in the final two weeks before Election Day on Nov. 6.

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On National Defense, Quantity Matters Too

Max Boot 10.23.2012 - 10:40 AM

No doubt, President Obama had the line of the night in the third presidential debate when he tried to dismiss Mitt Romney’s concerns about our incredible shrinking armed forces by saying:

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works.

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and 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. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Like a lot of clever debate lines, however, it grows less and less persuasive the more it is examined. Jonathan has already raised some sound objections. My own view is that while Obama is technically right–no question naval vessels today are a lot more potent than they were in 1916–he is wrong in the larger sense, if he is suggesting that quality can endlessly substitute for quantity.

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Romney’s Clear Win

Alana Goodman 10.23.2012 - 10:20 AM

The snap polls may show a tie or a small victory for President Obama, but Mitt Romney emerged the real winner from last night’s debate. He struck the exact tone he needed to: measured, competent, presidential.

The result was that Romney often looked like the incumbent on stage, and Obama often like the challenger. While Obama tried to draw blood with small jabs (the bayonets line, the nit-picking about Romney’s investments), these made the president seem petty and contemptuous. Romney stayed above the fray.

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How Worried is Obama About the Jewish Vote? Very Worried

Jonathan S. Tobin 10.23.2012 - 2:10 AM

The overall tone of the foreign policy debate portrayed President Obama’s insecurity about the race as he swung away at Mitt Romney as if he was the challenger rather than the incumbent. But if there was any particular element of the electorate about which he seemed concerned, it has to be the Jewish vote. President Obama’s all-out effort to portray himself as Israel’s best friend and Iran’s most ardent foe showed just how desperate he is about the possibility that he will lose Jewish votes as a result of spending the first three years of his administration constantly picking fights with the state of Israel and attempting to establish daylight between its positions and those of the United States.

That the president would so emphasize Israel in the debate spoke volumes about Democrat fears about his vulnerability. Even more interestingly, he found himself staking out a position on Iran’s nuclear program that had to alarm those advocating a compromise on the issue as well as his European negotiating partners in the P5+1 process. The president didn’t endorse Israel’s calls for “red lines” about Iran’s nuclear capability as did Romney, but he did say that the only solution to the standoff involved a stand that would make the sort of compromise that realists and foreign policy establishment types approve impossible:

And we hope that their leadership takes the right decision, but the deal we’ll accept is they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.

The deal that the compromisers want and which seems to be in the cards if the direct talks between the U.S. and Iran that the New York Times reported over the weekend would commence after the elections would involve an agreement that would leave the Iranian nuclear program in place but have their enriched fuel shipped abroad.

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About Those Horses And Ships

Jonathan S. Tobin 10.23.2012 - 1:10 AM

At the foreign policy debate, President Obama thought he was putting something over on Mitt Romney when he acted as if the Republican was an imbecile for suggesting that the rapid decline in U.S. Naval strength was anything but a good idea:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and 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. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

That was quite a zinger. In one fell swoop, he portrayed the Republican as ignorant about defense issues and established himself as the competent commander-in-chief. Except for the fact that he was dead wrong and did himself far more political damage than good.

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What Worried the White House About Iran Negotiation Leaks?

Seth Mandel 10.22.2012 - 9:30 AM

As Jonathan wrote, the New York Times caused a stir over the weekend with its report that the Obama administration agreed to one-on-one talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The story has been interpreted (and reinterpreted) with respect to its utility to the president before tonight’s foreign policy debate depending on the perceived nature of the leaks. So when the story first broke, it was assumed the Obama administration thought this would be politically beneficial on the eve of the debate. When the vigorous denials came—convincing enough to get the Times to change its story without alerting its readers—the public seemed to reconsider.

It is now, therefore, seen as a negative story for the administration—unhelpful, as Obama officials might say. But why? What is it about face-to-face negotiations with the Iranians that the White House might consider damaging? Certainly, as Jonathan suggested, the story has echoes of President Obama’s hot-mic moment with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in which Obama promised the Russians more “flexibility” if he is reelected. Did he make such promises to the Iranians, but try harder to keep them under wraps? That is one possibility. Another is that the president may not want such a stark reminder of one of the most famous moments of the 2007 Democratic primary debates, when Obama said he would grant the enemies of America their own presidential-level summits. Obama said:

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American Crossroads Hits Obama on “Acts of Terror” Claim

Alana Goodman 10.18.2012 - 11:45 AM

If President Obama’s position from the beginning has been that the Benghazi assault was a terrorist attack, why did his administration appear to claim otherwise for two weeks? American Crossroads asks the question, in an ad that tries to spin Romney’s biggest second debate blunder into a strength (h/t RightScoop):

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CNN Internal Email Contradicts Crowley’s “Fact-Check”

Alana Goodman 10.18.2012 - 10:45 AM

TMZ obtained an internal CNN “talking points” email sent by Managing Editor Mark Whitaker, defending Candy Crowley amid criticism of her performance at Tuesday’s debate. But not only does Whitaker misrepresent Crowley’s “fact-check” to make it sound more accurate, he also acknowledges that there is disagreement over whether President Obama referred to Benghazi as an “act of terror” in his Rose Garden speech (h/t Powerline):

“Let’s start with a big round of applause for Candy Crowley for a superb job under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. She and her team had to select and sequence questions in a matter of hours, and then she had to deal with the tricky format, the nervous questioners, the aggressive debaters, all while shutting out the pre-debate attempts to spin and intimidate her. She pulled it off masterfully.

The reviews on Candy’s performance have been overwhelmingly positive but Romney supporters are going after her on two points, no doubt because their man did not have as good a night as he had in Denver. On the legitimacy of Candy fact-checking Romney on Obama’s Rose Garden statement, it should be stressed that she was just stating a point of fact: Obama did talk about an act (or acts) of terror, no matter what you think he meant by that at the time. On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly. We’re going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time.“

Nobody disputes that Obama “talk[ed] about an act (or acts) of terror” in the Rose Garden speech. But that’s not what Candy Crowley alleged during her impromptu “fact-check.” She claimed Obama specifically called Benghazi an act of terror, which is not clear from the speech. Here’s the exchange from the debate:

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Newsflash: “Binders Full of Women” is a Good Thing

Bethany Mandel 10.18.2012 - 9:40 AM

After the first presidential debate, liberals clung to Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff comments on Big Bird. Immediately, the statement was mocked and meme-ified. Romney’s larger point about wasteful government spending was lost to those who saw nothing worth praising in President Obama’s performance, and thus wanted to bring Romney’s down by any means necessary, no matter how trivial.

Tuesday night’s debate was no different, and the meme of the night quickly became “Binders Full of Women.” A Tumblr page was instantly created and a Facebook group had over 300,000 members by 2 p.m. Wednesday. Liberals scoffed at Romney’s phraseology while, again, missing his overall message. Romney’s actual statement was this:

We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, can you help us find folks? And I brought us whole binders full of — of women. I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my cabinet and my senior staff that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

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Romney Campaign Presses Obama on Benghazi

Alana Goodman 10.17.2012 - 6:00 PM

While the Obama campaign spent the day giggling over “binders full of women,” Paul Ryan made the rounds on the news networks, questioning the White House’s handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi last month:

“It was a passing comment about acts of terror in general, it was not a claim that this was a result of a terrorist attack,” Ryan said on ABC’s “Good Morning America. “Nobody believed at that Rose Garden speech that the president was suggesting that particular attack was an act of terror.” …

Ryan doubled down in three separate appearances on broadcast morning shows, saying, “What’s troubling about this Benghazi attack is that it took two weeks for the administration to get their story straight.”

Ryan went over the timeline distributed by the Romney campaign that documents statements by the White House and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for two weeks following the incident, where it was called spontaneous and the violence was blamed on an anti-Islam YouTube video.

The administration has since acknowledged it was a terrorist attack.

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Were Those Questioners Really Undecided?

Jonathan S. Tobin 10.17.2012 - 5:05 PM

Fox News analyst Brit Hume spoke for many Americans last night when he predicted that the Hofstra University smackdown between President Obama and Mitt Romney would be the last presidential debate to use the town hall format. Let’s hope he’s right. Though some observers, like George Will, thought it was the best debate ever because it was a “good fight” that elicited a lot of discussion of the issues, the spectacle of the two candidates circling each other like a pair of animals in a fighting pit did little to enhance either’s credibility. It also led to a series of nasty and often confusing exchanges that didn’t do much for either man’s image or shed much light on the issues.

The format, which is an attempt to inject the voices of ordinary voters into the process, was, as it always is, something of a fake. Most of the supposedly undecided voters rounded up by the Gallup organization didn’t sound all that undecided. Even worse, the town hall format gives even more power to the moderator to not only choose the questions but to intervene in a contest that is, by its nature, more likely to veer out of control than a normal podium debate. That’s exactly what happened, as CNN’s Candy Crowley tilted the playing field in the president’s direction not only by backing up Obama on the Libya incident, as Alana noted earlier, but also by choosing more questions that were geared to favor the Democrat. If that doesn’t motivate Republican debate negotiators in 2016 to refuse to go along with another one of these circuses, then they won’t be doing their jobs.

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