Elections are decided by economics. Voters respond to pocketbook issues and are swayed by the huge sums that candidates lavish on advertising. Foreign policy issues, by contrast, are what the British call “noises off,” those sounds from off-stage that you hear occasionally to punctuate the main actions, sounds like exploding bombs and the distant cries of suffering people. According to recent polling, global issues barely register at all with Americans right now. Far below the economy, jobs, health care, the budget deficit, and gas prices, you’ll find Afghanistan at 6 percent (CNN), terrorism at 1 percent (Bloomberg), and, most distressingly, no global issue at all (CBS/New York Times).
President Obama, according to conventional wisdom, has effectively removed foreign policy as a campaign issue by knocking off Osama bin Laden, drawing down the war in Iraq, escalating drone attacks in Pakistan and elsewhere, talking tough with Iran, executing a Pacific pivot, winning a Nobel Peace Prize, pushing the reset button with Russia, and so on. Progressives have much to complain about – and I’ve criticized Obama’s foreign policy ad nauseum – but it’s not a record that the Republicans can easily challenge.
Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie beg to differ. Rove, of course, is the Republican hatchet man and former deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration. He has an outsized role in politics these days through his American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS PACs, which spent nearly $40 million in the 2010 mid-term elections and expect to spend as much as $240 million in this election cycle. Ed Gillespie is a former head of the Republican National Committee. Neither of them has any particular insight into foreign affairs, not to mention experience or knowledge. But since when does the lack of these qualifications stand between pundits and their soapbox?
In Foreign Policy magazine, Rove and Gillespie argue that the Republicans can beat Obama on foreign policy. Their case boils down to the following: Obama is weak, traitorous, and aloof. At the same time, they write, “Obama has left his Republican predecessor’s policies largely intact.” They don’t quite explain how the president can be both praised and criticized for policies that simultaneously represent a reassuring continuity with and a disastrous departure from George W. Bush’s reign. But Rove and Gillespie don’t care about logic. They care only about vulnerability. They are take-down artists. READ MORE
